Minecraft Earth Map Generator

How it works

Pick a spot, choose how much of it you want, and press Generate. Your browser downloads the OpenStreetMap data for that box and the elevation of the ground under it, then Arnis turns them into a Minecraft Java world at one block per metre — buildings at their mapped height, roads and railways, rivers and lakes, parks and trees — and hands you the world as a .zip. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account.

Unzip the file into .minecraft/saves and it appears in Singleplayer under the name you gave it. The world is written for Java Edition 1.21.4 and opens in 1.21.4 or any newer version, which upgrades it on first load. Bedrock Edition cannot open it.

Where buildings rise above Minecraft's normal build limit — Midtown Manhattan's towers do — the world carries Arnis's extended-height data pack, so Minecraft asks you to confirm its experimental settings the first time you open it, and Realms will not take the world.

Choosing the area

Start small. A few blocks is a 400 by 400 block world and is usually ready in under a minute. A city centre is 1,600 by 1,600: on a desktop, Midtown Manhattan took about a minute, over 500 MB of memory and a 28 MB download, which is more than many phones can spare. The whole world is built in the browser's memory, and the map data comes from volunteer-run servers that ask every user to keep requests modest, which is why the box stops there.

The result is only as good as the map. Buildings with a mapped height or number of floors come out at that height; the rest get a sensible default, so a well-mapped city centre looks far better than a suburb nobody has tagged. Anything you add to OpenStreetMap shows up here for everyone.

Where the data comes from

Buildings, roads, water and land use come from OpenStreetMap (ODbL), fetched through the public Overpass API at overpass-api.de, with maps.mail.ru as a fallback if the first does not answer. Terrain height comes from the AWS Terrain Tiles dataset, and place search from OpenStreetMap's Nominatim. Your browser talks to those servers directly; this site only serves the page and the generator.

The generator is Arnis by Louis Erbkamm, licensed under Apache-2.0. The copy here is an unofficial WebAssembly build of it, shipped unmodified with its licence and notice. Arnis's desktop app can also read satellite tree cover and extra building footprints; the browser build cannot reach those sources, so trees come from the map alone.