Terravox is a Python cartography engine that turns any bounding box into a playable Minecraft Java world. LiDAR elevation, OpenStreetMap features, carved rivers, and clustered forests — all from open data, all at 1:1 meter scale.
From a rectangle on a map to a loadable Minecraft save in a single command. No manual downloads, no Java toolchain, no Gradle.
Define a rectangle with lat/lng coordinates. Any place on Earth. Urban grid, desert canyon, alpine ridge — Terravox handles them all with the same engine.
Terravox fetches USGS 3DEP elevation, queries Overpass for OSM features, classifies land cover, carves water, and places terrain, roads, buildings, and vegetation into Anvil region files.
Output is a standard Minecraft Java save. Move the folder into .minecraft/saves, open Java Edition 1.20+, and walk through the real world.
Not uniform green grass on a height map. Terravox reads the shape of the landscape and the traces of human activity, then writes both back in blocks.
USGS 3DEP at ~10 m resolution for the continental US. AWS Terrain Tiles as a global fallback. Slope-aware surface materials expose stone, gravel, and andesite on cliffs instead of painting grass on rock.
Forest floors get podzol patches. Deserts mix sand and bare rock. Industrial zones use concrete — never a single uniform block.
Rivers cut parabolic cross-sections. Lakes sink into bowl basins. Sand beaches and sugarcane follow the waterline.
Oak, birch, spruce, and dark oak placed in natural groves with density that varies per biome — not random scatter.
Glass curtain walls for commercial, brick for residential. Story counts pulled from OSM tags, with foundations, parapets, and interior lights.
Roads use lane counts from OSM for correct widths, with sidewalks, center lines, street lights, guard rails, fences, and parking lots. Highway ramps, roundabouts, and cul-de-sacs all resolve from the same tag system.
LiDAR-derived elevation for the continental US at ~10 m resolution — the same dataset the federal government uses for flood mapping and infrastructure planning.
Global elevation coverage via Amazon's open dataset. Terrarium-encoded PNG tiles at zoom 14 fill any gap 3DEP doesn't reach.
Every road, building, park, waterway, and fence comes from OSM's crowdsourced geodata via Overpass QL with 3-server failover for reliability.
Terravox is in pre-alpha. Phase 01 is complete and shipping in the engine today. The rest is planned and on the rail.
Java Edition 1.20 and above. Worlds use DataVersion 3465 and the modern chunk format with 24 sections spanning Y -64 to 319.
Yes. USGS 3DEP provides high-resolution elevation for the US; AWS Terrain Tiles cover the rest of the planet automatically. OSM is global.
No hard limit. Areas over 2 km × 2 km (~4 million blocks) take longer and need more memory. A typical 1 km × 1 km city block finishes in a few minutes.
A few megabytes of elevation data from USGS or AWS, plus OSM feature data from Overpass (varies by density). All fetches are automatic.
Not yet. Terravox emits Anvil region files (.mca) which are Java-specific. Bedrock support may follow once the core engine stabilises.
Python 3.10+ and three libraries: requests, numpy, and Pillow. No Java, no Gradle, no C++ toolchain.
Pure Python. Three dependencies. Real-world data in, Minecraft world out.
The source code isn't public yet. Check back when the first release drops.
building something cool…