How to turn a real city into a Minecraft world
In mcworld.app, search for a real place (a city name, address, landmark, or location), and it reads vector data from OpenStreetMap — buildings, roads, water features, and more — overlays open elevation, and then uses the open-source arnis to “translate” all of this into blocks, outputting a .mcworld you can import directly into Bedrock. A real city map’s reconstruction is built on public data: the more complete the local data, the more faithful the world. See the full steps in Real Map → World.
Which cities look good, and which are just okay
City centers usually look best: major streets, building footprints, rivers, and parks are relatively well tagged on OSM, so the generated skyline and road network have clear layers. By contrast, remote areas, newly built districts, or sparsely mapped places often have only scattered roads and lack buildings, so the result looks empty. This isn’t the tool “getting it wrong” — it reflects differences in the source data itself.
Check the free score first, then pick an area tier and generate
Before generating, you can check the free “map quality score” and a low-resolution 3D preview to judge whether the area is worth doing. The range is tiered by area size: the larger the area and the more data involved, the heavier the processing, so we recommend focusing on the city center or the district you truly care about first. The score and diagnostics are free and run on your device by default; you pay based on the result, with a refund on failure. Every generation is a new file and won’t overwrite your original world. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors; generation is based on arnis (Apache-2.0).