About Us
The Earth in Minecraft, 1:1 scale
March 21, 2020
It all started with a YouTube video by PippenFTS that asked a wild question: What if we rebuilt the entire Earth in Minecraft, step by step, at a perfect 1:1 scale?
The video went viral over a short amount of time, and before anyone knew, thousands people rushed onto a newly created Discord server. We were just a bunch of gamers stuck at home, wanting to build our neighborhoods. Together, we suddenly found ourselves at the starting line of the biggest collaborative building project in human history.
House of Commons, London
Center, Vologda
A new map projection
April 12, 2020
When people first started building, they qucikly realized that the standard map that came with Terra++ at that time didn't fit all the needs of BuildTheEarth. A lot of places with high population density had issues with high distortion amounts.
To fix this, a team came together to adopted a modified Dymaxion map projection. By shifting distortion areas to oceans, we managed to preserve the true shapes and sizes of the continents.
Growing our global community
2022
Over the next couple of years, the BuildTheEarth community exploded into dozens of localized regional BuildTeams, each taking ownership of their specific countries or regions. Together, we achieved things we never thought possible.
The BuildTheEarth Discord server hit over 300.000 members.
Azteca Stadium, Mexico City
Frankfurt Airport, Frankfurt
Moving to modern Minecraft
2024
As BuildTheEarth relied heavily on a custom modpack featuring Terra++ and CubicChunks as primary mods for terrain generation, the project was long stuck on the old 1.12.2 Minecraft version. Thanks to the development efforts of many people and changes made in newer Minecraft versions it was now possible to start updating all servers to more modern versions while at the same time removing the need for a modpack entirely.
By 2025, most BuildTeams successfully moved their worlds to the 1.20+ versions of the game.
BTE Games 2.0 & The future
February 8, 2026
To celebrate how far we’ve come and spark some friendly competition, we hosted our historic BTE Games 2.0. The energy was incredible. With over 6.337 total buildings, the event is the largest BuildTheEarth event to date.
Today, with over 17.000 builders across the globe, we are still going strong! We are not just placing blocks: We are preserving history, celebrating culture, and proving what humanity can achieve when we work together.
World Trade Center, New York City