--- title: Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale | daily.dev description: This is the privacy policy for Blocks, a project recreating Switzerland at 1:1 scale in Minecraft using swisstopo data, covering 41,285 km² with one block per... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/switzerland-block-by-block-at-1-1-scale-lwzbld5ny twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale | daily.dev og:description: This is the privacy policy for Blocks, a project recreating Switzerland at 1:1 scale in Minecraft using swisstopo data, covering 41,285 km² with one block per... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/switzerland-block-by-block-at-1-1-scale-lwzbld5ny og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/lwzbLd5NY.png og:image:alt: Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary This is the privacy policy for Blocks, a project recreating Switzerland at 1:1 scale in Minecraft using swisstopo data, covering 41,285 km² with one block per meter. The page explains data handling for the website, hosted by Hostpoint in Switzerland, which uses Cloudflare to serve map tiles and swisstopo for aerial images. Purchases go through Stripe (Ireland), which receives payment and address details, while order data and license keys are stored via Cloudflare. Update emails are sent through Resend, and keys are automatically blocked after a refund or dispute. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 135 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-26). **TL;DR:** The project draws a lot of skepticism for being an AI/LLM-generated clone of older, free prior art (notably Denmark's 2014 Minecraft map) that now charges money for data and tooling that's largely open and free elsewhere, though some defend it as a fun, legitimate use of AI to build something new. **Sentiment:** 20% positive · 25% mixed · 55% skeptical **The case for** - Some see it as a neat, fun project regardless of how it was built, with one commenter's kid reportedly excited by it. - Charging for convenience and packaging is seen as reasonable since building and hosting still takes real effort even with AI assistance. - It demonstrates practical reuse of Switzerland's excellent open geodata (swissALTI3D, LiDAR) for something playful. **The pushback** - Many argue it's just open-source tools (like arnis) and free government data repackaged with an AI-written website and a price tag. - Critics call the site's copy 'LLM puffery'/slop, citing oddly generic, padded sentences typical of AI-generated text. - Several question the legality/ethics of charging for data derived from Swiss open geodata that's meant to be free under fair-use terms. - Some feel there's no real artistic or practical value since it was trivial to produce compared to earlier manual efforts like Denmark's map. - Concerns raised about using terrain data this way wasting electricity/compute for little benefit. **By community** - hackernews (heated): A long, contentious thread splits between people dismissing it as AI-generated slop profiting off free data and others defending it as a legitimate creative and technical effort. **Hottest debate:** Whether it's acceptable to charge money for a project built largely with AI tools on top of free, open government data versus it being exploitative 'slop'. **Open questions** - Is selling access to data derived from Switzerland's open geodata actually compliant with the data's fair-use terms? - Why is the full map restricted to buyers living in Switzerland? - How much of the underlying terrain/building data is accurate versus faked or approximated? **Highlights** > Denmark did it 10 years ago with existing open source tools and open data. This reuses the same open source tools, the same open data, and has the gall to put up a slop website and ask for 15CHF (or worse, 48) to pay for a Claude subscription that's doing it all behind. > — [well\_ackshually on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50241536) > I think the point that might've been lost here is that Art (and this is Art) is not supposed to be about the destination but about the journey. The whole magic of someone doing this is someone doing this. No one did this. And there is no utility in it either. No one needs a 1:1 scale Minecraft map of Switzerland for anything. So the whole thing is just an empty husk of an idea implemented in a way that shows lack of understanding why this niche of content existed in the first place. > — [hypfer on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50241834) > “No one did this … the whole thing is just an empty husk of an idea“ If you think it’s easy enough that “no one” made it, why not voxel-ize a location yourself to test your hypothesis? I imagine it wouldn’t take but moments of your day to fire off the prompt “Build New Jersey out of voxels”. Based on your comment, it sounds like you believe that’s the sum total of work the author put into it. > — [jnovek on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50242680) > Deal! Let's go! Here's Chicago (assuming their preview is always the same): https://map2minecraft.com/for/developers#world-demo. It took zero effort. Picking Providence, New York on a map took two minutes to render, and I was walking around it. Paying 20 bucks gets me the whole 88km². Is it steep? Yeah, a bit. At least they get to have the excuse that it takes some actual CPU time to render because it's all on demand, but they don't have the gall to pretend that they "need it to improve the peaks". But if you don't want to pay a single cent, feel free to download https://arnismc.com/, it'll fetch the data from OSM, terrain elevation from Tilezen, and you can get absolutely any area in the world you want. It'll cost you... The electricity and the time. You don't even need to prompt it. cargo run --release --no-default-features -- --output-dir="C:/YOUR_PATH/.minecraft/saves" --bbox="min_lat,min_lng,max_lat,max_lng" is right there. It's a single command. >it sounds like you believe that’s the sum total of work the author put into it. It _is_ the sum total of work the author put into it. Prism Launcher (https://prismlauncher.org/) handles the modding part of it. OptiFine makes it playable. Cubic Chunks removes the height limit. Can't be arsed to download 1GB of test data, but arnis or equivalent open source software is used to voxelize it. Leeching off of free work, through and through. Also the "author" is trying to pass this off as a small, funny little independent artist stuff, when the company behind it quite literally sells 3D prints of the same areas of Switzerland. The entire goal is to be a profiteer, a leech. Literally a dropshipper. > — [well\_ackshually on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50243109) > Wait is that not a 1 to 1 derived work from the official "swisstopo open geodata", taking 15.- is for sure not "fair use" >>Obtaining and using the data and services is free-of-charge, subject to the provisions on fair use. https://www.geo.admin.ch/en/general-terms-of-use-fsdi#2.-Dat... Am i wrong here? > — [BSDobelix on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50242252) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50240922) · 259 points · 135 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [MXmap — Email Providers of Swiss Municipalities](https://daily.dev/posts/mxmap-email-providers-of-swiss-municipalities-iamclzlfa) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [World geography gotchas](https://daily.dev/posts/world-geography-gotchas-4tly7cdnx) · A Java geek · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Our ongoing commitment to privacy for the 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver](https://daily.dev/posts/our-ongoing-commitment-to-privacy-for-the-1-1-1-1-public-dns-resolver-eushnliuk) · Cloudflare · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Geocoding with Cloudflare](https://daily.dev/posts/geocoding-with-cloudflare-2tzjuiam5) · Laravel News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#cloudflare](https://daily.dev/tags/cloudflare), [#stripe](https://daily.dev/tags/stripe) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/switzerland-block-by-block-at-1-1-scale-lwzbld5ny) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Switzerland. 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