Realistic Earth

Realistic Earth

Beta. An early release: expect bugs, and back up your worlds before trying it. Report problems on the Discord.

The real Earth as a Minecraft world, at life size or any other scale. Pick a place on a map, pick a scale, and the world is built from survey data as you walk. An addon for Better Cubic Chunks.

Support me and get early access on my Patreon.

The world

• The real land and sea floor: at 1:1 a block is a metre, Mont Blanc is 4 808 blocks tall and the Mariana Trench 11 km deep.

• Coastlines, rivers and lakes where they really are, forest where the satellites see forest, biomes from the real climate. Deserts, ice sheets, rainforests and tundra are where they are on Earth.

• Lakes below sea level stand at their real level; the Dutch polders and Death Valley stay dry.

• Soil, caves, ores, trees, animals and structures are vanilla’s own, so other mods’ biomes and structures work.

• Not real: buildings and roads. A city is the land it stands on.

  

Creating a world

• World Type Earth → Customize: a world map with search (8 900 places), zoom and coordinates.
• Any scale, from life size to the whole Earth in 40 000 blocks at 1:1000.
• Seven projections, height exaggeration for small maps, limited sea depth, a warmer or colder climate (ten degrees colder is an ice age).
• Goes round: on the Equirectangular and Mercator maps, walk far enough east and you arrive from the west.

In the world

• F3 shows latitude, longitude and altitude in metres.
• /earth where, /earth find <name>, /earth goto <name>, /earth tp <lat> <lon>, /earth info.

Distant Horizons

With Better Distant Horizons the land beyond the loaded chunks comes straight from the map data without generating it, so a continent appears at once. Forests show as a canopy, meadows keep their grass and flowers, and the distance bends around a globe at the world’s scale, so coasts sink below the horizon. From high up the world is a globe with the atmosphere above it.

Map data

Downloaded while you play (about 100 KB per few square kilometres, once) and kept for every world; offline mode uses only what is already there. All public, no account or key: Terrain Tiles (Mapzen, AWS Open Data), Global Surface Water (EC JRC / Google), Global Forest Change (University of Maryland / Google), CHELSA climate, Natural Earth.

Requirements

Minecraft 1.21.1, Java 21, Fabric (with Fabric API) or NeoForge 21.1, and Better Cubic Chunks. Needed on the server and on every client; an internet connection the first time a place is visited. On a dedicated server set level-type=cubicearth\:earth. Better Distant Horizons is optional.

Related mods

The other two mods of this set

Fabric and NeoForge 1.21.1, with Better Cubic Chunks, on the server and every client. Free to use in modpacks.