This is a first of its kind in the world. Denmark has used official topographical data to create a reasonable facsimile of itself in Minecraft. The game map is based on real, official measurements made public by the Danish Geodata Agency, though various things have had to adapt to the game’s scale and, naturally, its blocky graphics.

Thanks to two employees of Geodatastyrelsen (roughly translated as “basic data program”) Simon Kokkendorf and Thorbjørn Nielsen, you can now play Minecraft in Denmark as the first and only country in the world. That is to say that you can visit Mons Klint or build a house in the middle of Amalienborg Palace. Minecraft users can also pull public data of historical places, buildings, roads, monuments, elevation models and more.

“This means that all of Denmark is now a virtual world in the ratio 1:1 inside the Minecraft,” reads the Danish Geodata Agency site, “thus you can freely move around in Denmark, find your own residential area, to build and tear down as you can in whichever any other Minecraft world.”

Geodatastyrelsen responsibilities include developing and maintaining elevation model, which contains a lot of data on the Danish subsoil and landscape. Simon Kokkendorf from Geodatastyrelsen had seen his son play Minecraft, and thought that the game could be used as a tool to work with the elevation model in 3D. Along with his colleague, Thorbjørn Nielsen, they translated the entire model into the game. The two were soon discovered that you could add a wealth of other information into digital Denmark, such as houses, lakes, streams, lampposts, roads and railway tracks.

Photo taken from within Geodatastyrelsen Minecraft server near the Bellahoej warp point by Kyt Dotson

Denmark officials say that the Minecraft project is designed to give pupils the opportunity to move around in a 3D model of Denmark that can be used in both social studies, geography and more. You can also use it in mathematics where students can use the task to build a new playground next to the school within Minecraft, with a certain number of blocks available or students can also use Minecraft to build and remove blocks in the model and make their own buildings, hills or roads or change the shoreline.

Players can log into Danish government servers in Minecraft to try them out. The complete Denmark model will be available for download on Oct. 23. Users can also sign up at the country’s Map Supply site to download Danish Minecraft map files for private use.

This isn’t the first time a portion of the real world has appeared within Minecraft. Up until now, the biggest example was the terrain-only version of the U.K. by the British Ordinance Survey. The version created a Minecraft world representing over 224,000 square kilometers of Great Britain. The OS GB world contains more than 22 billion Minecraft blocks. The resulting map shows the massive potential not just for using Minecraft for computer technology and geography purposes in schools, but also the huge scope of applications for OS OpenData too.

The other example is the Lord of the Rings Mod, which is a huge expansion for Minecraft that aims to add the world of Middle-earth into the game. This will include content from J.R.R.Tolkien’s most famous work, The Lord of the Rings, and from other related tales such as The Hobbit and The Silmarillion.

“Grass Block” top photo courtesy of Mojang AB