Massive World of Warcraft map in Minecraft

An enterprising Minecrafter is working on a 1:1 scale recreation of Azeroth in Minecraft, and it looks awesome.

People do all kinds of crazy things in the open-world game Minecraft, but we don't think we've ever seen a project quite this grand. A Minecraft enthusiast who goes by the handle of Rumsey on the Minecraft forum is working on a 1:1 scale recreation of the World of Warcraft map.

The work so far spans over 275 kilometres of Azeroth, comprising over 68 billion blocks. Relax; he hasn't done it all by hand. He has created software that converts the maps into a voxel grid without the need of human intervention. But he still had to individually select the textures to create the world, a process that he said took many hours.

The result is a playable World of Warcraft environment. So far, Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms have been created, with plans to convert Outland, Northrend, Tol Barad and the Lost Isles in the future. And, yes, that includes caves and underground areas, although instanced areas have not yet been included.

You can check out Rumsey's work for yourself at the Minecraft forums here, where a torrent-download link is included (warning: the mod does take 24GB of space), and see a full gallery of Rumsey's screenshots here.