Build The Earth

**Build The Earth** is a Minecraft server and project created by PippenFTS created on April 21, 2020. This project is dedicated to recreating the Earth in a 1:1 scale in *Minecraft*. The project has attracted hundreds of thousands of users through its Discord server, and has surpassed 6,000 officially registered Minecraft builders, some of which can be found helping PippenFTS on building certain parts of the project through PippenFTS's YouTube channel (also, some people, like Hunt3r, upload videos of them helping out on the project).

## Organization

Minecraft users can register for the project on Build The Earth's official website. They then have to be accepted by staff members. All actions are managed on the project's Discord server. Through teams or solo projects, builders upload their world files to the official website, which are eventually merged into the final world.

### Bedrock Edition

At the start of the project, Build The Earth only allowed users with the Java Edition of the game to build. A system that let Bedrock users build for the project was later implemented. Users may claim individual areas, or join one of the two default Bedrock servers, which were working on Anchorage, Alaska and Riga, Latvia]].

The two Bedrock exclusive servers were abandoned in favor of a new system which allows Bedrock and Java version players to join the same server and play together. This system is now being used by most Build Team servers.

## History

### Beginning

On March 21, 2020, YouTuber PippenFTS released a video titled *The Earth in Minecraft, 1:1 scale... for the first time*, in which he talked about the map, how it was made, and called for talented Minecraft players to help build. Within a few days, the video went viral, accumulating over 11 million views by October 2020.

By the end of March 2020, the BTE Discord server (which hit 200,000 by the end of April 2020), subreddit, Twitter account, and Instagram account had been set up and were growing rapidly. A Patreon page was created on March 26, and currently accumulates over $250 a month from more than 50 patrons.

### Collaborations and advertising

On Earth Day 2020, Mojang released an article featuring the project on their website.

On 5 July of the same year, MrBeast, a YouTuber and social media influencer, released a video where he and a group of other players re-built his hometown, Raleigh, North Carolina, in 24 hours.

### Other events

Also, in that month, it happened that a video indicating progress through the project was missing, because of a server mistake. When Pippen was walking through the world border, after days of automatically walking while being AFK, so many chunks were loaded to the point where the server's size grew beyond 100 gigabytes, which has later caused an interruptive crash of the entire control panel. The server that was used the most already had an excess in plug-ins and it was the one server that suffered. However, despite this, Pippen decided to allocate more storage to the Patreon server for his world border walk and he managed to get the panel back up. After that, the server and chunks barely loaded, temporarily slowing the progress of this project. In the middle of the month, he cancelled the event, because he spent a week trying to save all of the buildings people made as separate files and wiped the server clean. They took a bit of a break, then continued their journey through Iceland.

April 2021 marks the date of the first year anniversary of the Build the Earth project. PippenFTS claims that at that time, one of the largest Minecraft buildings in history will take place.

## Mods

The Build The Earth project primarily depends on the Terra 1-to-1 mod, which is in charge of generating all of the terrain, streets, building guides, etc., if available, as to ease the building process. Most of the time, dimensions of the real life won't fit into the normal limits of *Minecraft*. Thus, it depends on two other mods to function:

* OpenCubicChunks, (otherwise known as CubicChunks) which essentially bypasses the 256-block height limit and the negative height limit of vanilla *Minecraft*.
* CubicWorldGen, which enables the customization of terrain generation in conjunction with OpenCubicChunks.

The official *mod-pack* also provides a few other utility mods by default, that can prove to be useful when building:

* JourneyMap, which allows users to see their surrounding areas from a mini-map.
* WorldEdit, a powerful and well-known tool used for creating and modifying buildings swiftly.
* Effortless Building, similar to WorldEdit, but with less features and a more user-friendly GUI.

It also includes two other lightweight mods, Performant and VanillaFix, which can help with certain performance improvements, though are not strictly needed.

The project has sparked the development of many 3rd party tools used to assist builders and server owners. The most notable include:

* TerraPlusPlus (T++), a feature filled fork of Terra 1-to-1 focused on performance.
* Terramap, an in-game map that allows users to easily teleport across the Terra 1-to-1 projection.
* BTE-Tools, a custom tool used for generating rails, hedges, and shapes. (Currently un-maintained)
* Sledgehammer, a proxy addon which allows server owners to create hubs which connect multiple build teams together.

## See also

* PippenFTS on Wikitubia - the creator of Build The Earth.