Minecraft gets a complete re-creation of Denmark — yes, the entire country

They say it’s the happiest country on Earth, and now you can punch its trees.

Denmark’s Ministry of Environment has re-created the whole country in Minecraft, as first reported by Danish news site DR.dk. That’s right: The nation’s government has built a 1-to-1 replica using publicly available elevation and map data. This is the first country to get a full model in the phenomenally popular indie game. I you have the hard-drive space, you can visit Denmark in Minecraft right now.

And you’ll need a lot of hard-drive space. Digital Denmark comprises 4 trillion individual bricks, and it takes up around 1 TB. That’s a big download.

The Ministry of Environment’s Simon Kokkendor and Thorbjørn Nielsen worked on the projec together. They took all of the data they could get from Denmark’s Geodata Agency to get an accurate representation for the model. How long does it take to lay down 4 trillion bricks in Minecraft? Well, even if they were doing one a second 24 hours a day, that amount of work would require 126,755 years. Don’t worry — Kokkendor and Nielsen didn’t build it by hand. Instead, they fed the raw data into an algorithm that spit out the finished product.

The Danes are already using the map in schools. Teachers are utilizing the digital Denmark in lessons relating to social studies and geography. They even describe sessions where math teachers will have students build playgrounds next to schools with a limited number of blocks.

You can download the file and play on servers with others by going to Denmark’s Geodata Agency website. Keep in mind that the website is in Danish, so you might want to use Google Translate (or learn a new language for once in your life).