Build the Earth

All organization actions, excepting land claiming, and announcements, are managed on the project's official Discord server. Individual build teams also have their autonomous Discord servers, and every builder of the project must have a Discord account. Once a user is accepted as a builder, they are automatically given the Builder role on the main server.

At the start of the project, Build The Earth only allowed users with the Java Edition of the game to build. A system that let Bedrock users build for the project was later implemented. Users may claim individual areas, or join one of the two default Bedrock servers, which were working on Anchorage, Alaska and Riga, Latvia. The two Bedrock exclusive servers were abandoned in favor of a new system which allows Bedrock and Java version players to join the same server and play together. This system is now being used by most Build Team servers.

The YouTuber MineFact implemented an alternative system for Build The Earth which does not depend on any mods and can run on Minecraft 1.16, instead of the current version of the Build The Earth mod-pack, 1.12, which is dependent on the latest version supported by CubicChunks. He initially developed the system to be used to build New York, though later on it was planned to be used on other big cities like Amsterdam.[4]

On 21 March 2020, YouTuber PippenFTS released a video titled The Earth in Minecraft, 1:1 scale... for the first time, in which he talked about the map, how it was made, and called for talented Minecraft players to help build.[5][6] Within a few days, the video went viral, accumulating over 11 million views by September 2020. By the end of March 2020, the BTE subreddit, Twitter account, and Instagram account had been set up and were growing rapidly. A Patreon page was created on 26 March, and currently accumulates over $250 a month from more than 50 patrons.[7] The Discord server, where the project was synthesized and is currently being managed in, hit 50,000 members by 29 March and 200,000 by the end of April; it currently has about 230,000 members, though the amount of new members has decreased.

On 3 April, PippenFTS released a video outlining the problems of the currently used projection, the Equirectangular projection, including its "disastrous" distortion. He explained that after days of research, he and his team narrowed down what could be the next used projection to either the Mercator projection or a modified version of the Dymaxion projection, a "more contemporary design".[8]

On the next day, he created two polls in the Build The Earth Discord server; one asking whether the map projection should be changed, and the other asking which the new map projection should be, if it were to change. Nine days later, the official map projection used for the project was updated to the modified version of Dymaxion, named Modified Airocean.[9] Five days later, the official project website was released.

On Earth Day, Mojang released an article featuring the project on their website, attracting even more users to the project.[10] On 5 July, MrBeast, a YouTuber and social media influencer, released a video where he and a group of other players re-built his hometown, Raleigh, North Carolina, in 24 hours. The video reached 11 million views, though the Discord server did not see a surge of new users as big as expected.[11] MrBeast also made a second video in Raleigh, in which he played hide and seek for $10,000. Several members of BuildTheEarth participated, although none of them won. BTE is waiting for more collaborations in the near future.[12]

The Build The Earth project primarily depends on the Terra 1-to-1 mod, which is in charge of generating all of the terrain, streets, building guides, etc., if available, as to ease the building process. Most of the time, dimensions of the real life won't fit into the normal limits of Minecraft. Thus, it depends on two other mods to function:

• OpenCubicChunks, (otherwise known as CubicChunks) which essentially bypasses the 256-block height limit and the negative height limit of vanilla Minecraft.
• CubicWorldGen, which enables the customization of terrain generation in conjunction with OpenCubicChunks.

The official mod-pack also provides a few other utility mods by default, that can prove to be useful when building:

• JourneyMap, which allows users to see their surrounding areas from a mini-map.
• WorldEdit, a powerful and well-known tool used for creating and modifying buildings swiftly.
• Effortless Building, similar to WorldEdit, but with less features and a more user-friendly GUI.

It also includes two other lightweight mods, Performant and VanillaFix, which can help with certain performance improvements, though are not strictly needed.

The project has sparked the development of many 3rd party tools used to assist builders and server owners. The most notable include:

• TerraPlusPlus (T++), a feature filled fork of Terra 1-to-1 focused on performance.
• Terramap, an in-game map that allows users to easily teleport across the Terra 1-to-1 projection.
• BTE-Tools, a custom tool used for generating rails, hedges, and shapes. (Currently un-maintained)
• Sledgehammer, a proxy addon which allows server owners to create hubs which connect multiple build teams together.

PippenFTS stated that "with the CubicChunks mod breaking Minecraft's vertical limitations, we can now experience the Earth in Minecraft, just as it is, with no downscaling of any kind."[13]

Terra 1-to-1 uses various API instances to generate a Minecraft world based on real-life data. These include a Mapzen Terrain Tile instance for elevation data, an ArcGIS REST API instance to generate tree cover, and an Overpass interpreter for OpenStreetMap to generate water, roads, and building outlines.[14]

Modified Airocean projection

The Terra 1-to-1 mod implements several map projections by default; including the transverse Mercator, sinusoidal, Equal Earth, equirectangular, and Dymaxion or Airocean projections, and a modified version of the latter, made specifically for the project, named Modified Airocean or Airocean-edit. PippenFTS released a YouTube video titled We are now ready to Build The Earth, 1:1 scale in Minecraft, in which he detailed the process undergone to create it.[9] This map projection provides an extremely low amount of distortion of both shapes and sizes on land, at the cost of heavily distorting the oceans. Unlike a typical Airocean projection, Modified Airocean is not intended to be unfolded into a 3D object like an icosahedron, and has its continents placed such that it looks somewhat similar to an equirectangular projection.

The projection used is configurable per world, though the project requires every contributing builder and build team to use the modified Airocean projection.

Regional teams are teams that aim to complete a specific region. This list does not include subteams of teams. A subteam is a part of a team that aims to complete a specific part of the team's region. They usually have their own discord server.

Non Regional teams are teams that do not focus on building a specific region. Non-Regional teams are teams that specify in building a specific type of thing. Most Non-Regional teams are teams that collaborate with regional teams in events to complete that certain type of thing in the Regional Team's Region. The only team that does not collaborate with Regional teams is BTE Theme Parks, as it completes theme parks on its own. BTE Seaside, although specializing in Shipwrecks, also collaborates with Regional teams when completing things like piers.

A complete list of build teams as of 26 January 2021.