Data first
No handcrafted geography. If it's in the data, it's in the world — and when the data improves, so does the Earth.
About the Project
About the Project
MineTerra: Hydrosphere brings the real Earth into Minecraft — its terrain, its water, and its weather — so you can walk the planet you actually live on.
The Idea
One planet, one world
Every Minecraft world starts as noise. Ours starts as Earth. MineTerra: Hydrosphere is a Minecraft Java server whose world is a 1:30-scale replica of the real planet — built from satellite elevation, real ocean depth charts, real land cover, and live hydrosphere data.
The result is a world where geography means something. The Alps tower because the data says they tower. The Sahara is dry because the real Sahara is dry. When a river floods in the real world, it floods in-game too. You can spawn on the equator, pick any real location — your hometown, a mountain you've climbed, a place you've only read about — and travel there block by block.
We built it because Minecraft is at its best when the world feels like a place, not a random seed. Here, every journey has a real destination, every river has a real name, and the map is the one you already know.
Data Sources
Built on real data
Every hill, river and desert in the world traces back to a public, real-world dataset:
| Dataset | Source | What it shapes in the world |
|---|---|---|
| ASTER GDEM V003 | NASA / METI | Land elevation — 22,912 one-degree tiles of mountains, valleys and plateaus |
| GEBCO 2026 | GEBCO | Ocean bathymetry — real seafloor depth, from shallows to the Mariana Trench |
| FROMGLC30 V002 | Tsinghua University | 30 m land cover — forests, grasslands, cropland, deserts and ice |
| Köppen-Geiger | Beck et al. | Climate classification — which biome variant each region grows |
| SWORD | NASA / UNH | Global river network — real river courses, names and widths |
| GloFAS | Copernicus / ECMWF | Real-time flood forecasts — rivers rise when real floods are predicted |
| IMERG | NASA | Satellite rainfall — river levels respond to real-world rain |
| ECMWF | ECMWF | Thunderstorm data — storms strike when real storms do |
Gameplay
What makes it different
- Rivers that live. They carry real names and real widths — and they rise and spill their banks when real floods are forecast.
- Weather with a memory. Real-world rainfall lifts the rivers downstream; thunderstorms strike when real storms do.
- A sun that knows where you are. Day and night follow your local solar time — fly east and dawn comes earlier.
- Geography you can trust. Deserts, tundra and rainforests stand exactly where they stand on Earth; oceans get deeper the further you sail.
- Real navigation. Any GPS coordinate converts directly to a block position — see the coordinate system.
Principles
How we run it
Always improving
The world is playable today and in active development — terrain detail, water behavior and performance keep getting better.
Walk the real Earth
The world is live and waiting. Pick a coordinate — any coordinate — and go see it.