Help please! How can we recreate our town in Minecraft?

[Sabine McKenna]

Hi all,

as part of our town's annual Arts festival, we want to recreate our town (its basic geographic features) as a Minecraft world. You know, bay / coast line, main roads network (ca. 10 roads), railway line.

This is to be hosted on a server for the two weeks of the Arts festival.

We then want to get local Minecrafters to create our town in 2112. Everyone is to create the town itself, individuals could do a single building, school groups might want to do their school... landmarks... we'll see how it goes. 

Now: How do we get the basic geographic features into Minecraft? Is there an easy way of taking a map (as in Google Maps) and turning that into a Minecraft map? Or do you have to do it block by block? My resident MC expert (aka my son) is using World Edit, but it seems very slow and involves a lot of jumping from one screen (Maps) to the other (Minecraft), and he is saying that getting the proportions right is very difficult.

Thanks a lot in advance for any pointers!

Sabine

[EduElfie]

Hi there, unfortunately I do not know of a way to bring a map into Minecraft without placing the blocks yourself, but perhaps if you had multiple people help getting the basic features it would get done quicker.
Elfie.

[MrsGielen]

You may want to download this map:  http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/224048-creation-the-earth-updated-final/.  It is quite a large file, but it may contain what you need for your town.  Here is the link to the thread where someone else was looking at google earth and minecraft:  http://forums.spout.org/threads/converting-os-google-earth-map-to-minecraft.1291/. There were some other suggestions that might help.

[Sabine McKenna]

Hi,

Quick update - we ended up using Google Maps, drew a hugely simplified map of the most important roads based on it:

We then used Worldedit to create a (flat) landscape and the main roads.

Then, we uploaded this world to our server provider, mooshroom.net, and got everyone playing.

More info about our project is here:

http://soundwavesminecraft.wordpress.com/about/ 

And this is just one snapshot of the world much later. We have lots of screenshots on our blog, too!