Building your Minecraft Topography

(An earlier version of this uses Microdem, which is just a huge page in the butt. I re-wrote this using Qgis, for my hist3812a students. If you’d like to see what some of them accomplished, head over to the github repo where there’s ‘Slave of Portus’, ‘Vimy Ridge’, and ‘Crafting the Canal’)

If you are trying to recreate a world as recorded in a historical map, then modern topography isn’t what you want. Instead, you need to create a blank, flat world in Worldpainter, and then import your historical map as an overlay. In worldpainter, File >> New World. In the dialogue box, uncheck ‘circular world’. Tick of ‘flat’ under topography. Then, on the main icon ribbon, select the ‘picture frame’ icon (‘image overlay’). In the dialogue box, tick ‘image overlay’. Select your file. You might have to fiddle with the scale and the x, y offset to get it exactly positioned where you want. Watch the video mentioned below to see all this in action. Then you can paint the terrain type (including water), raise, lower the terrain accordingly, put down blocks to indicate buildings… Worldpainter is pretty powerful.

If you already have elevation data as greyscale .bmp or .tiff

• Watch the video about using Worldpainter.
• Skip ahead to where he imports the topographic data and then the historical map imagery and shows you how to paint this against your topography.
• You should also google for Worldpainter tutorials.

If you have an ARCGIS shapefile

This was cooked up for me by Joel Rivard, one of our GIS & Map specialists in the Library. He writes,

• Using QGIS: In the menu, go to Layer > Add Vector Layer. Find the point shapefile that has the elevation information.
• Ensure that you select point in the file type.
• In the menu, go to Raster > Interpolation.
• Select “Field 3″ (this corresponds to the z or elevation field) for Interpolation attribute and click on “Add”.
• Feel free to keep the rest as default and save the output file as an Image (bmp, jpg or any other raster)

If you need to get topographic data

In some situations, modern topography is just what you need.

• Grab Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data for the area you are interested in (it downloads as a tiff.) To help you orient yourself, click off ‘toggle cities’ at the bottom of that page. You then click on the tile that contains the region your are interested in. This is a large piece of geography; we’ll trim in a moment.
• Open QGIS
• Go to Layer >> Add Raster Layer. Navigate to the location where your srtm download is located. You’re looking for the .tiff file. Select that file.

• You now have a grayscale image in your QGIS workspace, which might look like this

• Now you need to crop this image to just the part that you are interested in. On the main menu ribbon, select Raster >> Extraction >> Clipper

• In the dialogue box that opens, make sure that ‘Clipping Mode’ is set to ‘Extent’. With this dialogue box open, you can click and drag on the image to highlight the area you wish to crop to. The extent coordinates will fill in automatically.

• Hit ‘Select…’ beside ‘Output File’. Give your new cropped image a useful name. Hit ‘Save’.

• Nothing much will appear to happen – but on the main QGIS window, under ‘layers’ a new layer will be listed.

• UNCHECK the original layer (which will have a name like srtm_36_05). Suddenly, only your cropped image is left on the screen. Use the magnifying glass with the plus sign (in the icons at the top of the window) to zoom so that your cropped image fills as much of the screen as possible.
• Go to Project >> Save as image. Give it a useful name, and make sure to set ‘files of type’ to .bmp. You can now import the .bmp file to your Worldpainter file.

Importing your grayscale DEM to a Minecraft World

Video tutorial again – never mind the bit where he talks about getting the topographic data at the beginning

At this point, the easiest thing to do is to use WorldPainter. It’s free, but you can donate to its developers to help them maintain and update it. Now, the video shown above shows how to load your DEM image into WorldPainter. It parses the black-to-white pixel values and turns them into elevations. You have the option of setting where ‘sea level’ is on your map (so elevations below that point are covered with water). There are many, many options here; play with it! Adam Clarke, who made the video, suggests scaling up your image to 900%, but I’ve found that that makes absolutely monstrous worlds. You’ll have to play around to see what makes most sense for you, but with real-world data of any area larger than a few kilometres on a side, I think 100 to 200% is fine.

So: in Worldpainter – File >> Import >> Height map. In the dialogue box that opens, select your bmp file. You’ll probably need to reduce the vertical scale a bit. Play around.

Now, the crucial bit for us: you can import an image into WorldPainter to use as an overlay to guide the placement of blocks, terrain, buildings, whatever. So, again, rather than me simply regurgitating what Adam narrates, go watch the video. Save as a .world file for editing; export to Minecraft when you’re ready (be warned: big maps can take a very long time to render. That’s another reason why I don’t scale up the way Adam suggests).

Save your .world file regularly. EXPORT your minecraft world to the saves folder (the link shows where this can be found.

Go play.

Wait, what about the historical maps again?

The video covers it much better than I could here. Watch it, but skip ahead to the map overlay section. See the bit at the top of this post.

Ps. Here’s Vimy Ridge, site of a rather important battle in WW1 fought by the Canadian Army, imported into Minecraft this way: