A Japanese Minecraft player has built a world that recreates the entirety of Tokyo, including not only the metropolis’ 23 central wards but also the wider Western Tokyo region (also called the Tama region) and even surrounding islands.
The project was unveiled by Rikuma Mikuni on March 15. Mikuni is a doctoral student specializing in architecture at Japan’s Waseda University, and part of the organizing committee of Minecraft Cup, a Japanese Minecraft competition aimed at children.
A video showcase of Mikuni’s Minecraft Tokyo shows glimpses at famous landmarks such as Tokyo Tower, Tokyo Station, and the MUFG Stadium recreated faithfully. The world also includes locations such as Mount Takao and the remote island municipality of Hachijō Town, covering an incredibly vast area.
According to Mikuni, the recreation was build using PLATEAU – 3D data provided by Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT). Unrelated to Minecraft, PLATEAU was launched as an initiative led by the ministry to create 3D models or “digital twins” of cities across Japan. Using data obtained through aerial surveying and similar methods, PLATEAU provides 3D urban models including both buildings and geographic features. The government has made this data freely available for anyone to use (including for commercial purposes) and it’s generally applied in fields such as infrastructure management, urban planning simulations, and disaster prevention.
To achieve the recreation, Mikuni developed a tool that converts PLATEAU’s data into Minecraft with high accuracy. He’d been working on the tool alongside his university research for the past two years, and has now finally completed it. Since there are PLATEAU datasets available for each prefecture in Japan, Mikuni also plans to convert other locations into Minecraft worlds.
While many have attempted to recreate real-world locations in Minecraft using actual geographic data (including Japan’s MLIT itself), what makes this project noteworthy is that a single player developed an original tool and used it to recreate the entire Tokyo Metropolis area from open-source data. If Mikuni continues his efforts, it may not be long before we see the entire Japanese archipelago reproduced in Minecraft.
While Mikuni’s Tokyo world isn’t available for download, he is currently considering publicly releasing it. In the meantime, he has shared a link to a tool released by the MLIT that can likewise convert PLATEAU datasets into Minecraft worlds. Unlike his own new tool though, this one will not output with texture mapping.
