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Blocks, a 1:1 Minecraft Switzerland generated from swisstopo's open data, runs on a height mod because the Dufourspitze stands 4,634 blocks tall
Manifold's Blocks turns Swiss terrain, glacier and building data into a walkable Minecraft Java world at one block per metre, and it needs the Cubic Chunks mod on version 1.12.2 because regular Minecraft stops at 384 blocks.
The Dufourspitze, the highest point in Switzerland, is 4,634 blocks tall in Blocks. That number is the whole engineering problem. “Normal Minecraft is at most 384 blocks tall,” the project’s FAQ says (in German: “Normales Minecraft ist höchstens 384 Blöcke hoch”). The country runs from 193 metres at Lago Maggiore to that summit, so a faithful Switzerland overflows the game by more than ten times.
The fix is a mod. Cubic Chunks bills itself as an “Infinite* height mod for Minecraft,” and the asterisk is honest: “The only limitation is size of 32-bit integer.” Blocks’ FAQ says Cubic Chunks “runs stably on 1.12.2,” which is why a world released this month asks you to install Forge, Java 8 and Minecraft Java 1.12.2 through Prism Launcher. Bedrock, consoles and phones are out, because the mod only exists for Java.
Nobody built it by hand. “A program built the world from open data, not someone by hand,” the page says. Terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams come from swisstopo, the federal mapping office, whose data the page notes has been free to use since 2021. Glacier outlines and debris come from the GLAMOS inventory, ice thickness from an ETH Zürich dataset, tree species mix from the federal forest inventory, and Zürich’s street trees from the city’s own tree cadastre. Past the border, the world keeps going on coarser Copernicus terrain.
That pipeline has a day job. Manifold turns the same swisstopo data into watertight 3D-printable models: pick a section, set a scale, download the STL. Blocks points it at a voxel game instead of a print bed. The imprint names Beda Good.
The world doesn’t exist as blocks until you show up. “The world is made while you play,” the page says: the first time you walk somewhere, the game builds the blocks from the downloaded world package. That package is 1.1 GB zipped for the free Jungfrau-Aletsch region, about 2,400 km² that includes the largest glacier in the Alps. The full 41,285 km² country is a 24 GB download and about 60 GB on disk, and the game wants 8 GB of a 16 GB machine.
The page is blunt about the gaps. Buildings are simplified, and bridges, roads, trees or water are sometimes wrong or missing. “Where building data is missing, trees stand instead of houses, for example near Geneva.” The whole country is sold only to Swiss residents “for legal reasons,” with a Swiss address at checkout and no refunds, even if it runs badly on your machine.
It’s labelled Early Access. Asked when it will be finished, the FAQ answers: “There is no date for that.” Multiplayer works through your own Forge server, every player still needs the full package locally for the long views, and the setup guide for that is listed as “to follow.”
How far the pipeline goes is the open part. The page lists the sources down to the tree cadastre, and the free corner is downloadable from anywhere, so the next question is whether another mapping agency’s open terrain ends up in someone else’s 1 world, and whether Mojang ever lifts the ceiling that made the mod necessary.