You can build just about anything in Minecraft, and many users have taken it upon themselves to remake the physical world within the game, erecting pixelated homages to the entirety of Denmark, for instance. Now Minecraft tourists have a new destination to explore: the city of Chicago. A dedicated Minecraft user recently recreated the Windy City in painstaking detail at half-scale, as Curbed Chicago reports.
The project, posted on Imgur, took three and a half years to complete. Redditor Koodoo25 slowly built up the virtual city using data and images from Google Maps, Emporis, and Skyscraper Page, along with models from SketchUp 3D Warehouse to make the model accurate down to the details on the buildings’ facades. “There may be a few tiny details or dimensions a little bit off, but everything down to the placement of street lights and trees was done to recreate what I saw in Google Maps StreetView as accurately as I could,” the creator writes on reddit.
The city is at half scale because the model has to accommodate the Willis (Sears) Tower, which at a 1:1 scale would be far taller than Minecraft allows. The game has a 256-meter (840 feet) height maximum, and the building stands 442 meters (1450 feet) tall. And that’s without its spire.
Since the model is so exhaustive, it only includes buildings in the center of downtown Chicago. At this rate, it would take decades to visualize the entirety of the city’s 234 square miles.
You can download it and explore yourself via Planet Minecraft. It’s still in progress, though, so although it’ll never include every neighborhood in the city, expect to see a few more areas added in the near future.
[h/t Curbed Chicago]
February 15, 2017 – 11:00am