To me, almost the most impressive part of the whole project is not the city itself, but the sprawling countryside around it. Just look at the following image, captured from Greenfield's dynamic map, and tell me you wouldn't dream of creating something like this in SimCity 2000:

The result of all this is a city that doesn't just look as realistic as a minecraft city can from ground level, but from the air, too - it's got a layout that's totally convincing as the result of professional city planning. These quality assurance exercises are just one facet of a project management effort that seems almost unfeasibly competent: there's a whole workflow system for laying out new districts, construction codes to keep style and quality consistent among the swarm of builders at work on the city, and regular staff meetings over discord to co-ordinate the mammoth effort. According to NJDaeger, almost every building has a fully detailed interior, with regular inspections - yes, inspections - to check everything has a functional inside when a build is released. If that sounds too much like hard work, you can be shown around on YouTube here instead. Let's take a look.Īccording to NJDaeger, one of the Greenfield server's five admins (he brought the server to my attention with this post on Reddit), Greenfield's 11th iteration - Version 0.5.3 - is about to be released on the construction team's Planet Minecraft page, where keen tourists can download the current build and have a mooch around it without a care in the world for lockdown. Managed by a committee of ten people, and built by legions of architects, it's now grown to a size of 20 million blocks, making it the largest Minecraft city build that exists at present. There's everything, in fact, you might expect to find in the metropolis it's based on. But alas, this is a screenshot from Minecraft, and it is a view over the city of Greenfield, possibly the most impressive build project I've seen to date.īased closely on Los Angeles, and built to 1:1 scale so every block represents a cubic metre in real life, Greenfield has been the work of more than 400 people for the last nine years.

Until you fullscreen the image above and peer closely, noticing the flat tones on the buses and the blocky curve on the roadway, you wouldn't expect it to have come from a game more commonly used to build eye-hurting failure hovels from ugly cubes of cobblestone.

Minecraft city greenfield map