Turn Any Real Location Into a Playable Minecraft World

You've probably rebuilt your street in Minecraft by hand — or given up halfway through the second house. Cartosketch does it for you: pick any real place on Earth, frame the area on a map, and a few minutes later you're walking through your own neighborhood in the game, block by block, with every road and building where it really is.

What Cartosketch actually generates

Cartosketch builds the world server-side from real map data: streets, buildings, parks, rivers, and optionally the real elevation of the land. The output is a normal Minecraft save — not a mod, not a server plugin. You download it once and it's yours to play, edit, and share like any other world.

Two generation modes are available:

• Objects + Terrain — buildings and roads placed on the real elevation profile. Hills are hills, valleys are valleys.
• Objects only — the same buildings and roads on flat ground, which reads cleaner for dense city centers.

Step by step

1. Open Cartosketch and go to New World (Minecraft in the dashboard sidebar), then search for a place — an address, a landmark, or a city.
2. Adjust the region on the map. The current viewport is exactly what gets generated, and the live area readout shows the size and credit cost as you zoom and pan.
3. Name your world and pick a format: Java (a zipped save folder) or Bedrock (a .mcworld file).
4. Choose the generation mode — Objects + Terrain or Objects only.
5. Optionally set a custom spawn point: drag the marker, click the map, or use the map center. Leave it unset and a sensible default is chosen for you.
6. Hit Generate. Generation runs server-side; a small area typically takes under a minute, larger regions take longer. You'll see live status the whole way, and every world comes with a top-down map preview.
7. Download and play.

Importing the world into Minecraft

Java Edition: unzip the download and move the world folder into your saves directory — on Windows that's %appdata%\.minecraft\saves, on macOS it's ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft/saves, and on Linux it's ~/.minecraft/saves. Launch the game and the world appears in Singleplayer.

Bedrock Edition: just open the downloaded .mcworld file (double-click on desktop, or open it from your files app on mobile) and Minecraft imports it automatically.

How pricing works

World generation uses the same credits as sketches, billed by the size of the region:

Region size	Credit cost	Roughly
Up to 10 km²	1 credit	A neighborhood or small town center
10–20 km²	2 credits	A city district
50 km²	5 credits	Most of a mid-sized city

Frequently asked questions

Which places work best?

Anywhere on Earth works, but areas with rich public map data — cities, towns, campuses — produce the most detailed worlds. Remote areas with little mapped detail will generate mostly terrain.

How large an area can I generate?

Regions are capped by area, and cost scales at 1 credit per 10 km². For a first world, a 2–5 km² slice of a city is the sweet spot: detailed, fast to generate, and easy to explore on foot.

Java or Bedrock — which should I pick?

Pick whichever edition you play. Java gives you a classic save folder for the desktop game; Bedrock gives you a .mcworld file that imports with one tap on Windows, consoles, and mobile.

Can I regenerate or adjust a world?

If a generation fails, you can adjust the region and settings and try again on the same world — nothing is lost and failed runs are refunded. Completed worlds keep their region locked; generate a new world to capture a different area.

Is this an official Minecraft product?

No. Cartosketch is not affiliated with Mojang or Microsoft. It generates standard world files that Minecraft can load, built from open map data.