Switzerland rebuilt in Minecraft at 1:1 scale from swisstopo open geodata

One block per meter, 41,285 square kilometers

A project published by Manifold3D recreates all of Switzerland inside Minecraft at 1:1 scale, meaning every block in the game represents one real meter. According to the project site, the terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams were generated by a program from swisstopo's open geodata, and the Matterhorn stands exactly as high and as steep as the real one. The country's 41,285 km² of surface area is covered, and the Dufourspitze, the highest point, sits 4,634 blocks above sea level.

The world targets Minecraft Java 1.12.2 with the Cubic Chunks mod, which removes the game's usual height ceiling and makes terrain of this vertical range possible. The link spread through Hacker News, where a dev.to write-up recorded nine points and no comments at the time of publication.

A free sample, a paid country

The site offers a free slice first: the UNESCO World Heritage Jungfrau-Aletsch region, roughly 2,400 km² covering the Eiger, Mönch, Jungfrau, the Aletsch glacier and the Oeschinensee, packaged as a 1.1 GB download that requires no registration. The full country is a 24 GB package sold from 15 CHF in early access (build dated 19 October 2026), with all later versions included free. The purchase page states it is aimed at people resident in Switzerland and is paid through Stripe with TWINT, card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. The mod, texture pack and shader are free in both packages; what you pay for is the generated world itself.

A browser map wired to the game

The project page doubles as a map viewer, showing the country at one pixel per block from Lake Geneva to Val Müstair. A slider fades in the real swisstopo aerial photograph, SWISSIMAGE, which the browser loads straight from swisstopo's servers when you move it. Clicking anywhere on the map produces a teleport command you can paste into the game's chat, and the page supplies a formula for converting Swiss LV95 coordinates from the federal map viewer into in-game coordinates. Ready-made teleport commands cover viewpoints such as the Jungfrau summit at 4,158 m, the Eiger North Face and the Konkordiaplatz, where four ice streams meet.

Demanding hardware, candid caveats

This is not a lightweight download. The world assembles itself as you explore — chunks are built from the package on first visit — and the site recommends 16 GB of RAM, with testing done on a Windows PC (Ryzen 7 7800X3D, RTX 4070, 32 GB) and a MacBook Pro (M1 Max, 64 GB). The full install wants about 60 GB of disk space, and only the Java Edition on Windows, macOS or Linux is supported; Bedrock, consoles and phones are out. Setup runs through the free Prism Launcher, which handles Forge and Java 8 automatically.

The fine print is unusually honest. The site stresses that the world is 1:1 in scale but not a 1:1 replica: buildings are simplified, and bridges, roads, trees and bodies of water are sometimes wrong or missing. Outside the border, and occasionally right at it, the terrain comes from the coarser 30-meter Copernicus elevation model rather than swisstopo's data, so it can be patchy or flat, and where building data is absent, trees stand in for houses, for instance near Geneva. The world, the site says, was spot-checked rather than verified meter by meter.

Why it matters

Swisstopo publishes its imagery, boundaries and place-name datasets as open government data, and this project is a vivid demonstration of what that policy can power: a walkable, flyable copy of an entire country, generated by a data pipeline rather than hand-built. It also maps the limits of the approach with unusual clarity — the detail is richest exactly where high-resolution public data exists, and thins out where it does not. As a showcase for national open geodata programs, a 24 GB playable Switzerland makes the case more memorably than most policy papers.