When Denmark set out to make a 1:1 map of the country in the virtual world of Minecraft, officials did not expect Americans to invade. That’s exactly what happened near the end of April when a group of players stole onto the server like an army armed with high explosives and bad taste—the group laid waste to portions of several cities and added giant US flags.

This Minecraft map, as first reported by SiliconAngle, was released to the public by Denmark’s Danish Geodata Agency as part of a public educational project. The agency used a combination of geodata from elevation maps, satellite images, and metadata to recreate the country in three large maps recreating Denmark in the virtual world.

Early articles about the damage (in Danish) done by the vandals reported that massive damage had been done to multiple cities, but later quotes from the officials revealed that the damage was minimal. Administrators were quick to recover the damaged areas from backup but will not be resetting the entire server to the original maps.

Officials acknowledged that this outcome is part of the nature of Minecraft, a game developed around deconstructing the landscape and building it up again to create new things.

This is why we can’t have nice things, Internet.

Originally, the administrators of the Minecraft maps had banned the use of TNT blocks, or in-game dynamite. Players could not create the blocks, which can be used to destroy regions of the landscape and user generated structures; however, the invaders had discovered that the administrators had failed to disable TNT in minecarts (a different block than TNT that can also be detonated) and used this to “smuggle” in explosions.

After levelling areas, the vandals built giant US flags and added red, white and blue virtual signs reading: AMERICA. In one locale, a square lot was fenced in with two-story high US flags. An image of the latter can be seen in the BBC’s coverage of the vandalism.

This sort of vandalism is not uncommon for public Minecraft servers—although the patriotic pro-America element is not. Many server administrators must enact rules or restrictions on the game itself to prevent malicious players from causing massive damage to the work of others, a phenomena known to the Minecraft and gamer community as “griefing.”

Danish officials still happy with Minecraft map in spite of vandalism

According to Danish officials visitor reaction to Minecraft virtual Denmark has been positive.

To date, approximately 19,000 unique visitors have made digital tracks across the project and there have been over 200,000 map downloads.

Photo courtesy of The Reg, via Reddit