Gothenburg in blocks

You can grab the maps here, though the download link is a little unclear. Government websites! Click on the “I” icon next to any of the district names on the right and then you'll get a pop-out menu showing you the download URL for that area's map.

Governments and national agencies are getting pretty familiar with building stuff in Minecraft to get people interested in the real world. In fact, we’ve seen something of an arms race among mapping people. In 2013, the UK’s Ordnance Survey made all 220,000 square kilometres of mainland Great Britain and its surrounding islands into a 22 billion block world. Then in 2014, the plucky Danish Geodata Agency made Denmark into blocks at glorious full-scale, so you can wander by entire buildings and gaze inside their empty shells.

Not to be outdone, the Ordnance Survey then updated its UK map into a more detailed 83 billion block world in 2015, while Norway’s Kartverket also got in on the act. Later in the year, Lantmäteriet, Sweden's National Land Survey agency, did, too. And why not? With a bit of number-crunching it’s not so difficult to convert map data into Minecraft data. (Admittedly, I have no idea how to do this, but this is because I do not have an amazing maths-brain.)

It’s pretty cool to know that a huge world around you is a precise representation of the real one, but the intimate scale of the city somehow feels more immediate. Seeing landmarks you pass every day immortalised in Minecraft is special.

I haven’t been to Gothenburg before; my first impressions are that it has a lot of long buildings! And I like all the trees and the rocky bits in the centre of the city. Top marks, Gothenburg!