Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale

theanonymousone 466 points 214 comments October 26, 2026
blocks.manifold3d.ch · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (19 comments)

mehwoot

I guess the map is the territory

4ggr0

almost want to download this just so that i can put furniture into the apartment i live in :D nice project.

ShadowOfThePit

Funky stuff, nice use of government data. It would be fascinating to see how my house and town is rendered in-game. Unfortunately, the full map costs 15 CHF o_O > For legal reasons I sell all of Switzerland only to people who live in Switzerland. Why tho? Something about the data itself, or because you don't want to bother with international purchases?

evrimoztamur

It's not the most pleasant that you get the constructed buildings embedded into the map as crappy voxel approximations. Would be sweeter to have the terrain only. Also, total LLM goop.

qbane

Missing context: in Minecraft.

stabbles

See https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/height-model-swissalti3d , which is an excellent resource.

abricq

Nice ! I have a fun survival challenge: the swiss Via Alpina hike in Minecraft ! Quickly did the math. The real trail is ~390 km long, with 23,500 m of elevation gain and 14 Alpine passes. I found that Minecraft walking speed is 4.317 m/s (1 block = 1 m), so that's ~25 hours of continuous walking, or ~33 hours assuming 75% movement efficiency for terrain. That's one Alpine pass every ~2.4 hours, and a new hiking-stage destination every ~1h40!

amiga386

Denmark did this in 2014 and didn't need a pile of LLM puffery to do it: https://minecraftdanmark.dk/ https://geoboxers.com/denmark-in-minecraft/ > ‘Denmark in Minecraft’ was released in April 2014 by the Danish Geodata Agency. The project was conceived, developed and operated by Simon Lyngby Kokkendorff, Thorbjørn Kjærshøj Nielsen and Nynne Sole Dalå, the founders of GeoBoxers. > The work was funded and carried out by the Danish Geodata Agency as an initiative following the 2013 “basic data programme”, where a significant amount of public Danish data were made available for free. The purpose was to make geographical and topographical data available through Minecraft, and help disseminate the free data to a broader audience and specifically reach children. > Denmark in Minecraft was released with an invitation to teachers and schools to use the data in geography, math, science and history lessons, and within the first few months Minecraft-data were downloaded 300.000 times from the Geodata Agency, and around 37.000 unique users logged in to the agency’s Minecraft-servers. > January 1st, 2016 the Danish Geodata Agency changed into the Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency, and links in English regarding “Denmark in Minecraft” were removed. Since 2020 Denmark in Minecraft can no longer be downloaded.

netsharc

This AI-written page seems to be typical of LLM: Sentences are 4 to 5 words long, and the reader have to fill in the details. Did someone make 1x1x1 wooden cubes and remade Switzerland? Oh no, the tiny tiny text above the gigantic title says "Minecraft". "Exactly as tall and as steep". How is a mountain that exists in a video game exactly as tall and steep as the real one? Then there's an embedded map that is an attempt to convey information that I still can't figure out what. How to run it? Aha, download Prism Launcher (not a clickable link), import the zip... and oh, you need to have purchased Minecraft too! What an exercise in convolution...

Pirut

I’ve actually been building the same thing except with the whole world. https://github.com/pirut/earth-platform

efilife

holy shit why is this ai slop top 1 now?

imilev

This is cool af.

petterroea

Recently I've gotten to a point where I am put off when a clearly vibe coded website asks for money. I have seen too many examples of people trying to earn money on apps they clearly vibe coded in an hour. Why would I pay for that - might as well make it and sideload it myself. I might even publish it for free to the app store to spite them. I really don't think you are in a position to be asking for money if you just made something using an LLM. You didn't put in much work yourself, and anyone could replicate it for the "low cost" of their LLM subscription.

dguest

How does it infer what's underground? Does it include tunnels / mineral deposits / bunkers?

lmpdev

Reminds me of the Dufour map of Switzerland https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/dufour-map I still think it's by far the greatest map I've come across throughout history: given both the limitations of the time period and the painstakingly consistent hachuring. It's just immaculate

0x_rs

This is a trivial task for any good model provided with all the tools it needs, and excluding the time it takes to download it from swissALTI3D -- which is the source of the data (heightmap, surface map, subsurface, building 3D models with swissBUILDINGS3D) and is a pretty useful resource for lots of terrain work. Other countries have similar datasets from airborne LiDAR, it's just very well published in Switzerland's case. Most European countries have this data available at similar 0.5m resolutions but coverage may not be as good in some cases. Some individual US states also publish them.

IshKebab

Do we really need to post projects like this? It's obviously of no practical or even entertainment use. In the past it would have been a somewhat notable achievement due to the effort required. Today it's obvious that you can easily do this so what's the point? Showing off how many tokens you can waste? It's like... if someone typewrites out every number from 1 to 1 million, wow totally useless but impressive effort! If someone prints that with a laser printer... Why? Who cares?

FireInsight

I find https://buildtheearth.net/ way more interesting than this & the other autogenerated projects mentioned here. It's actually thousands of people coming together to build the actual buildings everywhere on earth, not just terrain.

hotelsacher

This almost makes me want to have Minecraft, but apparently you need an effing Microsoft account for it. No way in hell.

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