Find your home in Minecraft: here’s how to see your real-life city in incredible detail

Minecraft isn’t just the best-selling video game of all time: its enormous popularity has led to the creation of all kinds of side projects with virtually unlimited applications. The one we’re looking at here lets you turn any location in the real world into a small, playable map within Mojang’s game—from your neighborhood to entire cities—which is nothing short of a minor revolution.

From the Real World to the Virtual: The Open-Source Minecraft Project That Generates Maps from Real-World Locations

The Arnis GitHub repository, created by louis-e, is an open-source tool that allows users to generate Minecraft maps based on real-world locations across the globe, replicating cities, roads, and landscapes with a high degree of accuracy using the game’s blocks. Broadly speaking, Arnis converts geospatial data using OpenStreetMap to recreate the topography and architecture of almost any location in the world with considerable accuracy, and it works on both the Java and Bedrock versions of the game.

Its core is written in Rust, leveraging libraries such as fastanvil and fastnbt to read and write Minecraft world formats, as well as using other dependencies for concurrency, file handling, and geospatial processing. Its graphical interface is built with Tauri 2, and the project also offers a command-line mode. Given its open-source nature, the author encourages users to contribute by reporting issues and submitting pull requests, with a list of tasks and known bugs that is being refined with each new iteration.

In practice, Arnis allows us, for example, to select our city or neighborhood on a map and turn it into a playable Minecraft world with a fairly accurate recreation of its streets and buildings. Best of all, using it doesn’t require mods or advanced programming skills, so it has already become, in its own right, an indispensable tool for recreating cities and towns for creative, educational, or even research purposes, especially in school settings.

Essentially, Arnis has turned Minecraft into a sort of “playable Google Maps,” where any place in the world can be transformed into a map that can be explored chunk by chunk. That said, remember that once you’re inside, the game’s rules still apply, so don’t venture too far on your own without being properly equipped, and be very careful of the stealthy Creepers, which will explode at the slightest provocation, completely destroying the virtual versions of your home or your neighborhood grocery store.

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