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Minecraft map of Switzerland ships at 1:1 scale from open geo data
A project site for Blocks said a Minecraft Java 1.12.2 world of Switzerland at one block per meter, built from swisstopo open data, is in early access, with a free Jungfrau-Aletsch sample and a 15 Swiss franc full download limited to Swiss residents.
- New headline Was: “Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale”
- Our desk filed its story
- blocks.manifold3d.ch is now reporting this
A project calling itself Blocks published a Minecraft Java Edition world of Switzerland at one block per meter, built from open federal geodata, and offered a free sample of the Jungfrau-Aletsch UNESCO area plus a paid download of the full country1.
The site said the map runs on Minecraft Java 1.12.2 with the Cubic Chunks mod, because vanilla height limits cannot cover the range from Lake Maggiore to the Dufourspitze at 4,634 meters1.
Terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams are generated from open swisstopo datasets, including swissALTI3D for elevation and swissTLM3D for water, forest and infrastructure, which the site said have been freely usable since 20211.
It listed additional sources including glacier inventories from GLAMOS and ETH Zurich, habitat maps from WSL, cantonal survey data, a Zurich tree cadastre and coarser Copernicus elevation beyond the border1.
A free ZIP of about 1.1 gigabytes covers roughly 2,400 square kilometers of the Jungfrau-Aletsch heritage area, including the Eiger, Monch, Jungfrau and Aletsch Glacier, with no account required1.
The full country package is described as 41,285 square kilometers in a 24 gigabyte ZIP, including a mod, texture pack and shader, priced from 15 Swiss francs via Stripe, with later versions included; the site said it sells that license only to people who live in Switzerland1.
The project labeled the full map early access, dated 2026-10-19, and said it is playable but still being improved, with no refunds even if hardware struggles; it recommended trying the free sample first and cited test machines with 16 gigabytes of RAM or more1.
The site cautioned that one-meter blocks do not mean a hand-built replica: buildings are simplified, some bridges, roads, trees and waterways may be wrong or missing, and areas outside Switzerland use 30-meter Copernicus elevation that can look coarse or incomplete1.
Setup instructions point to the Prism Launcher, Java 8 and Forge, with teleport commands mapped to Swiss coordinates; Bedrock, consoles and phones are not supported1.
