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Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scaleblocks.manifold3d.ch
If you are only interested in 1m scale, maybe. Even the open satellite imagery goes to 20x that resolution, though, and of course there are small features that can't be resolved even at 5cm resolution, like survey marks. And even at the 1m scale, they've done a bad job transforming the source data to Minecraft, there's tons of errors if you look and most of detailed features (like road centrelines) are faked.
almost want to download this just so that i can put furniture into the apartment i live in :D nice project.
I assure you will be better served with SweetHome3d
BTW, claude can output sh3d for you if you feed it with pdf containing floor plan, half of struggle removed, fun part (re)designing the house layout easily kicked-off!
sh3d seems like an actual CAD-like tool to actually plan your furniture. what i find fun about this minecraft map is to make my actual home my base in the game, try to make it looo like my home and then just play minecraft while exploring the surroundings i know already.
then again, every building is white and basic, so not that nice for sightseeing.
then again, i could blow up my annoying neighbors house with a couple of TNT blocks (in minecraft!)
Funky stuff, nice use of government data.
It would be fascinating to see how my house and town is rendered in-game. Unfortunately, the full map costs 15 CHF o_O
>For legal reasons I sell all of Switzerland only to people who live in Switzerland.
Why tho? Something about the data itself, or because you don't want to bother with international purchases?
>Unfortunately, the full map costs 15 CHF o_O
Yeah, that’s a travesty. To be authentically Swiss it should cost at least 150 CHF.
Perhaps the description of its file format is 150 CHF
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for...
No, you download it then get an invoice in the mail with the bill, 30 days to pay.
It's not the most pleasant that you get the constructed buildings embedded into the map as crappy voxel approximations. Would be sweeter to have the terrain only. Also, total LLM goop.
That's the actual data it contains houses and structures
I wonder how much electricity just gets flushed down the toilet making this stuff.
I never got being bothered too much by this.
Renewables and grid investments come from increased demand and money flowing into the industry..
The big problem I have is what's seeming to shape up in Texas; massive off-grid and on-site generation using fossil fuels. This pollutes and bypasses grid and renewable investment.
Is it in a different category than the electricity (or broadly speaking, any increase in entropy) flushed down the toilet making reality TV shows, or nonsense Tik Tok videos, or a mission to overthrow a government that doesn't bend the knee, or giving a 95 year old dialysis, or eating foods transported from far away?
Missing context: in Minecraft.
See https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/height-model-swissalti3d, which is an excellent resource.
They also have an execellent iOS app that I use whenever I'm hiking.
Nice ! I have a fun survival challenge: the swiss Via Alpina hike in Minecraft !
Quickly did the math. The real trail is ~390 km long, with 23,500 m of elevation gain and 14 Alpine passes. I found that Minecraft walking speed is 4.317 m/s (1 block = 1 m), so that's ~25 hours of continuous walking, or ~33 hours assuming 75% movement efficiency for terrain. That's one Alpine pass every ~2.4 hours, and a new hiking-stage destination every ~1h40!
Denmark did this in 2014 and didn't need a pile of LLM puffery to do it:
https://geoboxers.com/denmark-in-minecraft/
>‘Denmark in Minecraft’ was released in April 2014 by the Danish Geodata Agency. The project was conceived, developed and operated by Simon Lyngby Kokkendorff, Thorbjørn Kjærshøj Nielsen and Nynne Sole Dalå, the founders of GeoBoxers.
>The work was funded and carried out by the Danish Geodata Agency as an initiative following the 2013 “basic data programme”, where a significant amount of public Danish data were made available for free. The purpose was to make geographical and topographical data available through Minecraft, and help disseminate the free data to a broader audience and specifically reach children.
>Denmark in Minecraft was released with an invitation to teachers and schools to use the data in geography, math, science and history lessons, and within the first few months Minecraft-data were downloaded 300.000 times from the Geodata Agency, and around 37.000 unique users logged in to the agency’s Minecraft-servers.
>January 1st, 2016 the Danish Geodata Agency changed into the Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency, and links in English regarding “Denmark in Minecraft” were removed. Since 2020 Denmark in Minecraft can no longer be downloaded.
It's interesting to me how people say "someone did this before it was cheap!" as if it's a slight. I mean, yes, it's much more impressive when it was expensive, but it's good that things are cheaper.
Denmark did it 10 years ago with existing open source tools and open data.
This reuses the same open source tools, the same open data, and has the gall to put up a slop website and ask for 15CHF (or worse, 48) to pay for a Claude subscription that's doing it all behind.
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Yeah but that's different from "LLM puffery".
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The LLM puffery referring to the website and the texts on it, i guess
I think the point that might've been lost here is that Art (and this is Art) is not supposed to be about the destination but about the journey.
The whole magic of someone doing this is someone doing this.
No one did this.
And there is no utility in it either. No one needs a 1:1 scale Minecraft map of Switzerland for anything.
So the whole thing is just an empty husk of an idea implemented in a way that shows lack of understanding why this niche of content existed in the first place.
Doing something and charging money for it is how a lot of things that cost money got started.
Interestingly enough the “before it was cheap” version was distributed for free when this one is for sale for half the price of the game this is supposed to run on.
I'm sure if they had a bunch of LLM puffery back in 2014 they would have used it.
Most giant Minecraft map projects are automated as much as possible. It would be a real labor of love on the spectrum otherwise, and who can maintain that?
That feels so weird. Isn't the whole premisce of these things "this is a game where each block must be placed with purpose", and so using anything automated literally takes out most of that sentence and it just becomes "this is a game". I don't get the appeal or the expectation of triumph.
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Don't overcomplicate it. There is no one true way, for Minecraft or for anything.
I don't get itBecause it looks cool to see the real world in blocks. And if it looks cool, it is cool, as they say.
You're actually allowed to play video games the way you want to.
"this is a game where each block must be placed with purpose"
You lack the hacker mindset if you think you "must" do anything the way it was designed.
The puffery is the webpage copy, not the automation to produce the map.
To be fair, Denmark is very flat and could probably be represented by a single block :)
Anyway, if "LLM puffery" makes this easier, why is that bad? And given that your quote indicates that the Danish equivalent got pulled, maybe LLMs can easily bring it back. Wouldn't that be a good thing?
How would you feel if someone described your work as LLM puffery?
The world changing - no need to be rude about it.
This AI-written page seems to be typical of LLM: Sentences are 4 to 5 words long, and the reader have to fill in the details.
Did someone make 1x1x1 wooden cubes and remade Switzerland? Oh no, the tiny tiny text above the gigantic title says "Minecraft".
"Exactly as tall and as steep". How is a mountain that exists in a video game exactly as tall and steep as the real one?
Then there's an embedded map that is an attempt to convey information that I still can't figure out what.
How to run it? Aha, download Prism Launcher (not a clickable link), import the zip... and oh, you need to have purchased Minecraft too!
What an exercise in convolution...
>"Exactly as tall and as steep". How is a mountain that exists in a video game exactly as tall and steep as the real one?
A mountain irl is, for instance 783 meters tall (sea level). A block in minecraft is always 1x1x1meters (according to the game engine def). Thus you make a mountain 783 blocks tall. You can also easily raise the sky limit if it becomes a problem.
The point is that this kind of prose is typical of LLMs. It’s like describing a driving game with “each car has four wheels and a suspension just like the real one”.
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LLMs still struggle with deciding what parts of a document or concept are more important. So documentation often trashes wildly around specificity, like "In this driving game the car moves forward and the glove compartment can be used to save the game". I think it's a big part of why reading unredacted and unedited LLM slop feel so much more tiring than reading human-written text.
The exactly for something with a scale and rounding hurts to read
Oh it's Minecraft! I didn't realize what is this about for the longest time. I thought it's their own game named "blocks".
I’ve actually been building the same thing except with the whole world.
Sounds worth posting your own ShowHN post for.
Please rewrite this in C++/Rust. Java at this point is a pure meme-tier language. I've dabbled with rewriting the JVM and actually properly optimizing but it's a complete waste of time when you can just generate optimal low-level code with inlined asm kernels where needed. You're genuinely leaving tons of performance/efficiency on the table. If you need a high performance minecraft engine there's TONS of rust rewrites on github, or you can generate your own.
Funnily enough, I have been dabbling at rebuilding this to work with this project: https://github.com/ludovic111/horizon
The only thing about rewriting it in rust is that no other mods will work with this and the thing that got me really excited about building this is using Create Aeronautics with it.
How does this work? You need to somehow flatten the globe into a plane, right? Are you just using a regular map projection? It says that everything is real scale in the description and that can’t really be true at high latitudes, right?
I used Web Mercator to flatten the map, so its "1:1" scale, but obviously not perfect because it is on a flat plane.
this is amazing! Now we just need a shared server that is accessible by anyone and see where that goes.
A world for anyone. should have more than enough are. it would be interesting to see if wars and terretorial conflicts arise here as well
Thanks! It is optimized to work on servers so if anyone wants to host it they can.
Also, great username my last name is Bussard :O
holy shit why is this ai slop top 1 now?
Welcome to life in the 2020s. Enshittification knows no bounds and cannot be contained.
"Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to the Collective." -- Borg Collective, Star Trek TNG
This is cool af.
Recently I've gotten to a point where I am put off when a clearly vibe coded website asks for money.
I have seen too many examples of people trying to earn money on apps they clearly vibe coded in an hour. Why would I pay for that - might as well make it and sideload it myself. I might even publish it for free to the app store to spite them.
I really don't think you are in a position to be asking for money if you just made something using an LLM. You didn't put in much work yourself, and anyone could replicate it for the "low cost" of their LLM subscription.
Why would I buy a potato when I could grow one myself. Why do I give a busker money when I could play the real track on spotify. Why do we give anyone any money? Why don't we just do everything ourselves?
>Why would I buy a potato when I could grow one myself.
Because growing fruits is hard.
>Why do I give a busker money when I could play the real track on spotify.
Because playing music is hard.
This project is just "I handed https://arnismc.com/ to Claude and it generated maps from the open data that the Swiss government puts out for free. Oh and also I'm charging you for the slop"
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>This project is just "I handed https://arnismc.com/ to Claude and it generated maps from the open data that the Swiss government puts out for free. Oh and also I'm charging you for the slop"
Why does this matter? I see the AI detractors still can't cope with the fact that you're allowed to charge for AI generated work. You have to be insane or severely demented to try doing something like this by hand.
As a follow up I just went and looked at the arnismc project since I haven't heard of it. At least it's written in Rust, which is respectable but it's only ~200k loc of Rust? And most of it is also 100% LLM generated by the looks of it?
That's not really how it works, because in all your examples there is a pretty reasonable amount of work being put in that you are paying for.
Many AI projects are just a few prompts away, and very little labor intensive - you are mostly just delegating.
A much more accurate example would be "Why would I pay your son to mow my grass when i can get mine to do it"
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So do it. Everything AI assisted I've made has involved a ton of work. The only difference AI has made is that I've increased the level of my ambition and avoided a ton of things that were previously blockers.
>Many AI projects are just a few prompts away
"Just a few prompts" is the new "can do that in a weekend". In reality it still takes a while to build everything, think about what features you want to have and how to prioritize them, how to build a good UX / UI, set up payment providers etc.
Why do people go to restaurants and pay significantly more when they can just buy the ingredients and cook at home? Those damn chefs make my food in 15 minutes.
Why do people go to real restaurants, with chefs who actually cook things, when they can cook at home? Possibly the quality of the food, atmosphere etc.
Why do people go to pub restaurants, where one of the overworked staff will put a frozen meal in a microwave until it goes "ding", then slop it onto a plate for you? Probably not the same reasons, and you'd expect a lot cheaper, though not as cheap as the same microwave meal from the supermarket.
Do people go to what they think is a real restaurant, because its marketing has diddled them, but find out it's actually a pub restaurant when they get there, replete with low-effort slop? If they do, I hope they leave a terrible review and don't come back.
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Interesting division you make there, I go to both "real", higher end restaurants and "low grade" pub restaurants. For me, the the reason is the same, convenience, laziness and lack of my expertise and willingness to cook.
Obviously I can judge a place based on the quality of service and food, but that's not the reason I've gone there in the first place.
I disagree. What might be "a few prompts in claude code" for you, could be a lot of work for someone else. Not everyone is comfortable setting up a domain name and hosting etc... and if you provide value, why not ask for something in return?
i only see it when they provide a service and it costs to host that service
If your only measure of value is human labour just say that. Whether it's AI or not is irrelevant at that point if that's your stance.
Obviously anyone can make anything once they've seen it implemented from someone else's idea. Maybe sometimes the idea is the value in itself, the action of taking it from zero to product is just a means to distribute the idea.
AIDR
How does it infer what's underground? Does it include tunnels / mineral deposits / bunkers?
Reminds me of the Dufour map of Switzerland
https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/dufour-map
I still think it's by far the greatest map I've come across throughout history: given both the limitations of the time period and the painstakingly consistent hachuring. It's just immaculate
This is a trivial task for any good model provided with all the tools it needs, and excluding the time it takes to download it from swissALTI3D -- which is the source of the data (heightmap, surface map, subsurface, building 3D models with swissBUILDINGS3D) and is a pretty useful resource for lots of terrain work. Other countries have similar datasets from airborne LiDAR, it's just very well published in Switzerland's case. Most European countries have this data available at similar 0.5m resolutions but coverage may not be as good in some cases. Some individual US states also publish them.
Would the time you spend getting a model subscription, giving it an environment to work in, and figuring out how to enable it to operate safely, be less than 15 francs of your time?
Minimum wage in Zurich city is 23.90 chf/hour. About 37 minutes of time, at most.
If someone wanted this, and lived outside of Switzerland (where it's sold exclusively, presumably to avoid digital sales headaches), or did not want to pay the equivalent of a monthly subscription for the conversion to Minecraft, that's what they'd do. This could've been a GitHub page with instructions to follow. The dataset does not impose any country restrictions unlike the product.
Do we really need to post projects like this? It's obviously of no practical or even entertainment use. In the past it would have been a somewhat notable achievement due to the effort required. Today it's obvious that you can easily do this so what's the point? Showing off how many tokens you can waste?
It's like... if someone typewrites out every number from 1 to 1 million, wow totally useless but impressive effort! If someone prints that with a laser printer... Why? Who cares?
I find https://buildtheearth.net/ way more interesting than this & the other autogenerated projects mentioned here. It's actually thousands of people coming together to build the actual buildings everywhere on earth, not just terrain.
This almost makes me want to have Minecraft, but apparently you need an effing Microsoft account for it. No way in hell.
An ETH student's project apparently. Despite the naysayers, I think it's great someone had the impetus to get this done, and it has my son quite excited.
Wow. How can I view this on the meta quest? Can I import this into Godot and run smoothly? Is the licensee permissive to use it in a game?
I guess the map is the territory