Streets, homes, landmarks, rivers, parks-they're all there, limited only by the cubic-meter construction of Minecraft. The Danish Geodata Agency has built a buildings-and-all take using its own source material. That's what makes Denmark's case so special. Yet even in that case, the data was limited enough that it produced a terrain-only recreation of the UK. Thus, a more realistic Minecraft recreation requires an official handshake with a source of big data, the likes of which we'd only seen from the British Ordnance Survey.

As a result, that Manhattancraft project lacks a cohesive data core and will require a licensing partnership before it can truly go forward.

We thought we'd seen it all when a PhD student began building a 1:1 model of New York City this year. However, his work ran into more than a few logistical speed bumps. The project required a giant server farm and a mix of data from disparate sources, like US Geological Survey elevation maps, Google's 3D Warehouse, and for-profit map services like Bing and. (Warning: From here on out, many links are in Danish, and some do not play nice with Google Translate.) You can jump into Minecraft right now and virtually walk around the nation's shores, highways, and cities because the Danish Geodata Agency has launched a full 1:1 recreation. But what can happen when a city-or even country-opens its data doors for a total Minecraft recreation? For an answer, take a look at Denmark. The world-building power of Minecraft has spawned a zillion blocky, pixelated approximations of some of the world's most famous landmarks and cities. Now we can finally estimate how well Copenhagen's Rundetårn observatory, seen here, could withstand a creeper invasion. Denmark opened its data doors for a full nationwide Minecraft recreation.

Minecraft city life map