Discover Great Britain in Minecraft

Fun fact: our latest Minecraft is so large, the world save file is more than 100GB!

While it would be incredible to see the entire country recreation, and we are working on this in the background, we want gamers to be able to play and interact with our creation. That’s why, to make things much more manageable, we’ve selected a list of locations to release instead, as smaller files that are scaled-down and free-to-download, but with the same level of detail:

Each file is a county, plus a 15km buffer around it, and will contain well over a billion blocks.

Once added to their game files, players can discover iconic landmarks, explore familiar towns and cities, swim in rivers or play on the beaches, and everything in between.

With Minecraft’s ‘Creative’ mode, you can dive right in and see where your imagination takes you. Build your own creations, redesign existing structures, establish your own railways of minecarts, and more.

Be just like Ordnance Survey, and try out the in-game mapping functionality to map Britain for yourself! Discover the world, map the places you love the most, and follow in the footsteps of the National Mapping Agency.

Remake Britain counties, your own way!

To improve your experience when you enter the world, we recommend that you type:

/gamerule randomTickSpeed 1000

This will speed up tree growth, so as you explore, the forests will load in.

You can also use a teleport ability in Minecraft, using in-game coordinates. For each individual county file, we’ve included a location you can try exploring, with its coordinates below:

To teleport, while in game type /tp followed by the X Y Z coordinates. If you’re playing in London, for example, you’d type /tp 64 152 -151 to be teleported to and visit the Tower of London.

Also should you reach the edge of our created world, and go ‘off-map,’ Minecraft will continue to autogenerate its normal world environments. If you wander into an unexpected jungle or frozen sea, chances are, OS didn’t put it there!

This is the second time OS has built a world in Minecraft. In 2014 we made the Guinness Book of Records for ‘the largest real-world place in Minecraft.’ 83 billion blocks, 86,500 square miles of landscape.

This latest version is even bigger.

It uses block sizes that are 15 metres squared, compared to 25 metre squared blocks from 11 years ago.

There’s also been numerous updates to the Minecraft game engine in that time. New blocks, colours, and textures means this new version is more detailed, and a closer representation of the real GB. These worlds are perfect for seasoned gamers or for educational purposes letting users explore the UK in virtual space like never before!