Minecraft builds always seem more fun in your head, don't they? By the time you hit the halfway point and realize how much more you have left to make, it's more tempting to play something else than continue making your block-based utopia. Fortunately, if you want to recreate your hometown in Minecraft, this third-party tool can do it automatically and save you weeks of time.

The Arnis project converts OpenStreetMap data into Minecraft worlds

As spotted by Hackaday, the Arnis project aims to make it as easy as possible to convert real-life cities into Minecraft worlds. It does this by grabbing data from OpenStreetMap and converting it into Minecraft scenery using Rust.

There are a few caveats to using this tool. Unfortunately, Arnis only works for the Java version of Minecraft, so any version that uses C++ won't work with this tool. Plus, it's very computationally heavy, so you may want to start off with a teeny-tiny town before you try importing all of New York City into the game. In fact, the project got its name from the smallest city in Germany, which the developer used to debug and enhance the algorithm Arnis uses to make its cities.

The developer says this project is ideal for a whole range of uses, from re-creating your hometown in Minecraft to generating a realistic city for a post-apocalyptic zombie survival map. Plus, Arnis is entirely open-source, so you can check out (and even contribute to) the project's code and see what it's doing.

If you're interested, head over to the project's GitHub page and follow the steps listed to remake real life in Minecraft. And if you need something to host the map, why not check out how to host a Minecraft server on an SBC?