World’s biggest Minecraft project is a beautiful labour of love for thousands of volunteers
If you’re a fan of Mojang’s figurative and literal blockbuster game Minecraft (2011), then you’ve probably heard of some impressive builds in the game. Why, I myself know someone who made a giant effigy of Shrek’s head, for reasons that remain his own. But did you know that there’s a group of people who are using Minecraft to build the whole world? If not, it’s time to say hello to the Build The Earth project, officially the largest project in Minecraft.
You see, because blocks in Minecraft are the equivalent of a metre cubed, it means you can build things to scale with great exactness. The thousands of volunteers who make up Build The Earth (or, “BTE”) are attempting to make a scale model of the entire planet Earth, from the United Kingdom to the other side of the world in Australia, and as these gorgeous pictures show, they’re doing an amazing job.
The Alps BTE Team remade the Old Town of Graz, the historical centre of Austria’s second largest city.
Bruno Gideon Bergheim, who goes by Gideon, is from the International Build The Earth organizing team, and he took some time to explain the project in more detail. BTE first kicked off in March 2020. YouTuber “PippenFTS” figured out that such an ambitious project was possible using a combination of mods, and put out an open call for volunteers to help. PippenFTS has since left the project to work on other things, but, says Gideon, “his idea and vision was taken up by thousands of dedicated Minecraft players around the globe.”
In fact, the community grew to approximately 300,000 members in just three months, quickly hitting the member limits of the server on gaming instant messaging platform Discord.
“We had to fix the rocket while going at full speed, so to speak,” Gideon explains. “We started everywhere at once and invited the whole world from day one. A project that grows this quickly becomes a complex system very quickly.”
BTE split into around 60 regional “Build Teams”. These co-ordinate the various communities working on different areas of the world, some a single country, some a city, some even a whole continent. Each of these teams has their own organizational structure and server, and they’re loosely overseen by the International Build The Earth Project that Gideon is a part of.
“Today you can think of the whole project as a union of independent Minecraft ‘nations’ connected by the common vision to build everything,” he says. “Wherever you live, there is a Build Team that coordinates the recreation of your city or village.”
A view of the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, temporarily themed for the FIFA World Cup 2026 opening ceremony, featuring the flags of Mexico and South Africa, by BTE MXCA.
It’s a very complicated project. Co-ordinating the whole community is part project management, part diplomacy. BTE has seen border disputes, hostile takeovers, and disagreements of “nearly every aspect of the project”, according to Gideon. “There are no borders in Minecraft and we are all one large community, but we are all human," says Gideon.
Because the project is entirely volunteer run, Gideon says that the time people dedicate to BTE varies a lot. “During holiday time some builders spend weeks to finish a specific grand building, but a large amount of people just join, build a small house in a few hours, and then return after a few months to build something new when they have time,” he explains. “It is an artistic hobby for some, a development project for others.”
As well as people donating their time to the project, BTE is also funded entirely by donations – Gideon himself often puts his own money towards the costs of BTE.
“I would like to bring Build The Earth into education,” he says. When the project started, the average age of the members was 15, and it showed Gideon that young people can achieve great things together; he saw teens thriving as leaders in charge of groups numbering in the thousands. Minecraft is, he notes, a platform that is intuitive for most young people today.
“Imagine having a class about the Pyramids in Egypt and then starting up the game to explore how far it is from the Pyramids to the Nile river. How tall the Sphinx actually is, and how far the next fast food restaurant is in modern Cairo,” Gideon enthuses. “We can do that on our server. It is an amazing opportunity for digital classrooms, especially for those who might never have the opportunity to actually travel the world.”
The twin Dragon and Tiger Pagodas are located at Lotus Lake in Kaohsiung City and were completed (in real life) in 1976. They were brought to life in Minecraft by BTE Taiwan.
BTE has been used in some classrooms already, and Gideon says the first time that happened, as well as the first time it was showcased in a museum, felt like big achievements to him, as both showed BTE was more than just a videogame hobby. That kind of recognition is a desire he has for BTE as a whole: “I hope it will be seen as an art project, a cultural achievement and a work of real dedication. I want every builder who decides to join the project to get the recognition he or she deserves.”
There are challenges along the way, though. As well as the organizational challenge, new builders have to learn a different way of working – recreating real places requires measuring the exact angles and heights, and very few buildings in real life align perfectly with the Minecraft grid system. BTE teaches these techniques to new members, and has a team of reviewers to look over new builders' work, as well as share tips.
They encourage people to work on places they know and care about, but accuracy is still a challenge. Members of the community help each other; if someone lives near a location another player is working on, they might drive over to get pictures, which is something Gideon has done in remote parts of Africa.
“I have been in zoom calls with Ministers from Pacific Islands to ask them for ground level elevation data,” he says. “The person currently recreating Vatican City contacted the PR office to get more information and photos.”
Plaza Independencia is the most important and central square in Montevideo, the capital city of Uruguay, recreated in a cityscape built by BTE Paraguay + Uruguay.
This is linked to the technical challenges BTE faces. They’ve developed a lot of their own plugins and shortcuts to make it easier for people to get involved, but they're concerned about digital preservation on the project long term, as BTE already takes up hundreds of gigabytes. They create regular backups (one was even sent to the moon by the VideoLAN non-profit project). “We have, in the past, already lost months of work due to data loss, we learned from this and try to prevent it from ever happening again," says Gideon.
Most of the money the project receives from donations is spent on this data storage. The teams want to keep BTE - which they see not only as a piece of art, but a cultural resource and snapshot of the world - free to everyone, so BTE is hosted on open servers. “All you need is a copy of Minecraft,” Gideon says.
Despite all the work, BTE has completed far less than 1% of the total Earth’s surface. But as their website says, it’s not a race to 100%. Gideon estimates that it would take around a hundred years for the project to be “finished”, but notes that also depends on what you think “finished” means.
“The special thing about BTE is the love for detail,” he says. “Every place on Earth has someone who cares for it and therefore we care for every place, every detail. We want to get to a point where someone that joins our server and visits their own home can see that it is actually their home. So you could say that the project will never end as long as people care for any new place.”
Alexander Nevsky Cathedral is a Bulgarian Orthodox cathedral, built in Neo-Byzantine style in Sofia. It represents the symbol of Sofia and Bulgaria itself, rebuilt in Minecraft by BTE Balkans.
He points out, too, that the Earth is an evolving place. Buildings are torn down, new ones built, landscapes change. “I personally think that the project is already finished and becomes more finished every day. We have already recreated incredibly cool places that you can visit and explore, we have build an incredibly open and global community that everybody can join and make friends in. For me personally the process of building is the project, and that is already amazing.”
Build The Earth is, I think, one of the most beautiful and inspiring world record projects we’ve encountered. And Gideon has some extra inspiring words for anyone interested in joining the project: “Just start building.”
“We all started building a small dirt hovel in Minecraft at some point,” he says. “Join our community, and ask the experienced builders when you have questions. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, we all learn some new building technique every day.”
You can find more amazing Minecraft records, as well as other inspiring videogame communities, in the new Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition 2027, out now!
For more cool stories on videogame records, head over to our Gaming section.