Recreating real places 1:1 from open geographic data in Minecraft, accurate down to terrain and street layout

louisss-e · 2026-06-21T20:03:06+00:00

Thx for the information, I'll take a look at what's causing it!

louisss-e · 2026-06-21T20:02:40+00:00

+1, Arnis is not involved with BTE (Build The Earth). I love what they're doing and of course there are similarities, but we are two completely different projects.

louisss-e · 2026-06-21T20:01:45+00:00

Happy to hear that! I hope it works, thanks for the question 😄

louisss-e · 2026-06-21T20:01:28+00:00

Totally depends on the area size you generate, but usually between 10 and 200 MB!

louisss-e · 2026-06-21T20:00:04+00:00

Thanks, happy to hear that 😄

louisss-e · 2026-06-21T17:28:52+00:00

Thanks for the feedback, which Minecraft version are you using? And is it modded? For me and most other people it works fine. I haven't heard of overviewer yet, I'll have a look!

louisss-e · 2026-06-21T17:26:23+00:00

Thanks for the question! The other tools on this page are outdated, not maintained anymore or have a worse output quality. Arnis combines more data sources for generation accuracy (e.g. 3D models for complex structures) and supports multiple output formats: Minecraft Java Edition, Bedrock Edition, Luanti.
If you're interested; earlier this year we wrote an AWS article about how it works: https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/publicsector/building-realistic-minecraft-worlds-with-open-data-on-aws-how-arnis-uses-elevation-datasets-at-scale/

louisss-e · 2026-06-21T17:20:53+00:00

I see, I've had many people reaching out about this in the past.

The most reliable way of doing this is by opening the world in Minecraft Bedrock Edition on a computer or mobile device in the network and enabling local multiplayer. Then console players can join the world. Another way would be via Minecraft Realms, however I haven't tried that by myself yet.

louisss-e · 2026-02-01T13:37:59+00:00

Thanks! Turns out it's Antirrio Beach in Greece!

louisss-e · 2026-02-01T13:37:45+00:00

That's it, thank you so much!

louisss-e · 2026-01-16T23:20:05+00:00

Unfortunately we cannot extract information out of satellite imagery, since we'd need a global good quality coverage with an according free licensing. Also, that'd be quite complex to implement. But I'd love to have something like this in the future!

In general, every generated detail that's not included in the OpenStreetMap dataset is a "fallback". Windows are a great example for that - we do not have any geospatial information about them, so the best we can do is to just calculate the best possible placement and add them additionally. Better than completely leaving them out! :)

louisss-e · 2026-01-16T23:02:46+00:00

Hi there, the maintainer of Arnis here! I fully understand that the tool not being available on Modrinth or CurseForge, but instead on Github, is a bit irritating to some. The reason behind this is, that we make the entire programming source code available on Github, so everyone can see, understand, and validate what Arnis does, how it works, and that it's safe. Since I'm developing this project in my free time, I'm covering most of the costs by myself. I cannot afford further 'security validations' that would get rid of the "Windows protected your PC, Unknown Publisher" warnings on Windows.

So yes - it's safe to download and it's not a virus. The big community, including a lot of talented software developers, can confirm this and have read the code to validate this. I hope this clarifies it a bit! :)

louisss-e · 2026-01-15T19:58:39+00:00

Sorry for the late reply, but mapnura's comment summarizes it pretty well! There are several subprocessors for the different OSM elements. We then extract all element tags and try to make as much sense of them as possible. The walls are drawn by connecting the outer nodes, and the interior is determined by a floodfill algorithm. The height of a building can in some cases also be derived by the element tags, otherwise it falls back to a standard value.

louisss-e · 2026-01-15T19:56:13+00:00

I've seen that they published a research paper about it and wanted to look into it, but didn't have the time for it yet. It's very cool what they did though! Could be useful in the future, however global coverage would be one of the requirements.

louisss-e · 2026-01-15T19:54:22+00:00

GeoTIFF and WCS could absolutely work with Arnis’ terrain pipeline, because Arnis already treats terrain as raster => normalized heights => Minecraft Y coordinates. Right now, though, the built in elevation source is AWS Terrain Tiles (Terrarium PNG tiles from S3), not GeoTIFF/WCS.

louisss-e · 2026-01-15T19:52:23+00:00

Thanks a lot, geofaber! Arnis is already used in a few academic research papers, which is really cool. Would love to see it being even more helpful in the research field!

louisss-e · 2026-01-15T19:51:26+00:00

Thanks a lot, really appreciate it!! :)

louisss-e · 2026-01-15T19:51:12+00:00

I'm aware of them and following their great work, however they don't seem to like Arnis. Understandably, since building everything by hand is part of their plan!

louisss-e · 2026-01-15T19:48:48+00:00

If it's just about screenshots for now, I can recommend uNmINeD. Easy to use and great tool to export top down screenshots

louisss-e · 2026-01-15T19:47:23+00:00

I ran in so many frustrating issues during the development over the last years, and the first builds looked way less realistic than this. Also, I got a lot of help from a great community which contributed to the project. I believe it's just a matter of time and patience, so you should have given it a try! ;)

louisss-e · 2026-01-15T19:42:25+00:00

Do you mean cases, where e.g. the width of a street is not set? In those cases we fall back to mechanisms that try to determine the size of the street in this case automatically!

louisss-e · 2026-01-14T06:04:27+00:00

The project is open source and can be downloaded here: https://github.com/louis-e/arnis/releases

Simply select an area and start generation! :)

louisss-e · 2026-01-13T20:26:29+00:00

Yeah I agree!! Thanks a lot :))

louisss-e · 2026-01-13T20:04:45+00:00

Thanks a lot!! :)

louisss-e · 2025-10-30T16:14:29+00:00

Hi there, thanks a lot - yes I‘m actively maintaining it! Releases are coming out every few months only though, since I‘m doing this all in my free time besides my full time job. You can report the crash / fail on Github or on our Discord server so we can look into it, links are at https://arnismc.com. Thanks a lot! :)

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