finland2mc

Give it a place in Finland and it builds a 1:1 Minecraft Java Edition world of it: one block is one metre, horizontally and vertically. Everything comes from the National Land Survey of Finland's open data: terrain, lakes and sea, roads, bridges, buildings, fields, and trees placed where laser scans found them.

Jyväskylä	Naantali	Keuruu

Top-down maps drawn from the generated world files.

Getting started

You need uv and Minecraft Java Edition 26.3 or newer.

uvx finland2mc "Jyväskylä"

uvx downloads finland2mc and the Python packages it needs on the first run. After that it keeps using the version it downloaded; uvx finland2mc@latest gets the newest one. To get a plain finland2mc command, run uv tool install finland2mc.

Run like that, it asks a few questions, each with a default you can accept with Enter:

1. Which match you meant, if the name fits several places.
2. How big an area to build (default 4 × 4 km).
3. Whether to use laser scans for real tree and building heights. This is usually most of the download.
4. Whether to install the world into Prism Launcher.

Then it prints the download size and a time estimate, and asks before starting.

To skip the questions, give the answers as options:

uvx finland2mc "Porvoo" --size 2 --yes                # defaults, no questions
uvx finland2mc "Kallio, Helsinki" --size 3 --prism    # also install into Prism Launcher
uvx finland2mc --at 61.4981,23.7608 --name "Tampere centre"

The finished world goes to worlds/<name> 1-1/, with a top-down map next to it (<name> 1-1.png). It needs Minecraft 26.3 or newer.

Options

How long it takes

Measured on 11 cores, with the data already downloaded:

Dense forest is by far the slowest part. The program prints an estimate before it starts.

Downloads are cached in ~/.cache/finland2mc, which you can change with the FINLAND2MC_CACHE environment variable. Neighbouring or repeated areas reuse the cache. Laser scans are the big part of a download: older scans (about 1 point/m²) are about 50 MB per 3 × 3 km tile, and newer ones (5 points/m²) can be several hundred MB per tile.

In the world

• You start in creative mode on peaceful difficulty, on a street near the middle of the area.
• A world border keeps you inside the area. There is only void beyond it.
• x = 0, z = 0 is the centre point. +x is east and +z is south.
• The most common water level (the sea, or the biggest lake) is at y = 62. The program prints how y relates to height above sea level.
• Far views look best with a level-of-detail mod such as Distant Horizons.

Where the data comes from

All map data is open data from the National Land Survey of Finland (Maanmittauslaitos), downloaded from the Funet mirror:

Some things are guesses, because the data doesn't say:

• Tree species are chosen from the terrain: pine on ridges, rock and bogs; spruce in hollows; birch near open land.
• Building colours and roof materials are picked at random from typical Finnish choices.
• Roofs are hip roofs on houses and flat roofs on large buildings. Interiors are empty floors with no doors.
• Sea depth isn't in the open data, so the sea gets deeper with distance from the shore, down to 10 m.
• Laser scans can be several years old, so newer clear-cuts and buildings won't match.

The biome is birch forest everywhere. In a superflat world the game thinks sea level is y = −63, so colder biomes such as taiga would freeze the lakes.

How it works

The world is written directly in the 26.3 format. Newer Minecraft versions upgrade it when they open it. data/blocks_26.3.json and data/template/ were produced by the official 26.3 server: its data generator's block report (trimmed to names, properties and default states), and an empty world it saved.

To work on the code, clone the repository and use uv run finland2mc in it. Run the tests with uv run pytest.

Limits

• Finland only, because the data is Finnish.
• Areas up to 10 × 10 km. Memory use grows with area. 3 × 3 km measured about 1 GB, so expect roughly 4 GB for 6 × 6 km and 11 GB for 10 × 10 km.
• Places with more than about 370 m height difference within the area (some Lapland fells) don't fit Minecraft's 384-block world height. Use a smaller area there.

Credit and licence

The code is under the MIT licence (see LICENSE).

Worlds made with it contain data from the National Land Survey of Finland: Topographic Database, Elevation model 2 m, and Laser scanning data. Licence: CC BY 4.0. If you share a world, keep this credit with it.

Place search uses OpenStreetMap Nominatim (© OpenStreetMap contributors). Please keep to its usage policy; the program searches once per place name you enter.

NOT AN OFFICIAL MINECRAFT PRODUCT. NOT APPROVED BY OR ASSOCIATED WITH MOJANG OR MICROSOFT.