Behold, code from 2011! 🤢 It was the second semester of university, when I discovered Minecraft and python. My coding style was atrocious back then...

What I really wanted at the time was a script that could create maps from real terrain data. Specifically, I wanted to see if I could recreate the fjords of Rogaland, Norway. Below are some examples!

A birds eye view of Stavanger

Preikestolen / Lysefjord (It's too small to resolve in the elevation data 😅)

Folgefonna glacier to the right

Sunset in the mountains

The maps are generated by a single script that goes through each pixel in an image and renders the terrain based on some rules.

Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) were easily obtainable from SRTM, which is where I think the PNGs in maps/E*.png come from. For example:

The "terrain" data (water, grass, rock, data) was composed using photoshop along with the terrain data. For example other words, if the elevation was 0, I assumed it was water. I also overlapped some lake/glacier data either from OpenStreetMap or NaturalEarthData. I can't remember because it's been so long ago... (Apologies OSM contributors!)

The colours correspond to colour definitions which can be found in info/*.txt

Can't be bothered to write instructions for this, but you'll need:

• Python 2.7, because the code is old
• Install the requirements in requirements.txt using pip
• run make install_mcedit
• Change the filepath of the world in the Makefile to point to your Minecraft world
• run make generate_example_map

There are two scripts:

python generateMapTerrain.py will generate a map. The code claims I wrote a readme.txt file... but I think I copy-pasted that comment 🤦. Thankfully the source code seems to be mostly self-explanatory. The idea is that passes in:

1. Minecraft World Name
2. An e.txt file, which specifies min-elevation, max elevation, bedrock.
3. An t.txt file, which specifies what the colours mean
4. An d.txt file, which adds "deposits" (coal, red-stone, gold, etc.) under ground.
5. The E.*.png file, which is the elevation map
6. The T.*.png file, which is the terrain map
7. The X, Y coordinates of where the data should be rendered.

Then it'll run for a long time... like, a few hours. I was in uni, so I had plenty of time on my hands.

python emptyChunk.py will delete all chunk data in a Minecraft save file. Not sure why I would need such a script, but apparently it exists. I've not bothered to fix it, so it probably does not work without fixing some of the import statements.