Ordnance Survey maps Britain in Minecraft

A complete map of the British Isles built using the Minecraft has been made freely available by Ordnance Surney.

A total of 22 million blocks were used in its construction, which represents an area representing 220,000 square kilometres. Anyone can download it for free, although they will need a copy of Minecraft, 5GB of free HDD space and 4GB of RAM.

Once loaded users appear next to the Ordnance Survey offices.

It was built using a combination of data from OS Terrain and OS VectorMap files. Each block represents an area of 50 square metres, with different blocks used for different terrain – A roads are represented with Emerald and motorways with Diamond, for instance.

You can check it out for yourself here.