Madness: The Entirety Of Denmark Recreated In Minecraft
Dencraft? Minemark?
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. No wait, blocks. Something is blocks in the state of Denmark. And by that, I mean everything. This isn't just an approximation, either. It's a 1:1 recreation of Denmark based on real-life data collected by the Danish GeoData Agency. Countless places, things, and well-known television show space ships have been reborn, phoenix-like, by way of Minecraft's blocky black magic, but I don't think we've ever seen anything quite like this.
Wild, right? The stats behind this massive undertaking make it even crazier. Creators Simon Kokkendorf and Thorbjørn Nielsen from the Danish Geodatastyrelsen are housing their homeland across three servers, to the tune of roughly 4 billion blocks. The whole thing constitutes 1TB of data.
You can roam around on their servers, or you can download Denmark (that still sounds strange to say) in 10km x 10km chunks. The servers will evaporate in October, so either cherish your virtual getaway/geography lesson while you can or drop an entire country on your hard drive and then, er, probably buy another hard drive.
As you might expect, the Geodatastyrelsen has some pretty strict rules in place for its own servers. However, you are allowed to alter the landscape so long as you build something new yourself. So now the real fun begins. What will Denmark become with a million power-mad ant gods crawling around on its colossal back? I am intrigued. Also terrified, because I would flinch if the Internet were given a moldy scrap of napkin and a single half-eaten crayon, let alone an entire country.