Emcify

About the Project

Emcify is an ambitious project that brings the entire city of Brno, Czech Republic, into Minecraft. What started as a plan to model the Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University for open days during COVID-19 evolved into a complete, algorithmically generated representation of Brno spanning 20×20 km.

Developed together with Jonáš Rosecký, the project transforms publicly available geospatial data into a playable Minecraft world where players can explore their city, discover their neighborhoods, and even build farms on náměstí Svobody. The world includes authentic details such as functioning tram lines, real shops, iconic Brno statues, and an explorable system of underground passages.

How It Works

The core of Emcify is a custom world generator that replaces Minecraft’s standard terrain generation. Instead of creating random landscapes, it connects to a geodatabase containing data from data.Brno and OpenStreetMap. This data includes detailed information about buildings, roads, water bodies, elevation, and other features.

This allows us to automatically generate the entire city without manual construction. A simple code change can modify how the whole city appears, making iteration and improvements efficient.

Technical Challenges

Roof Generation: One of the most challenging aspects was generating realistic roofs. Early iterations produced results closer to abstract art than architecture.

Pre-generation: While the world generates “on-demand” when chunks are first visited, running a public server this way would be too performance-intensive. We pre-generated the entire map. The final world is approximately 20×20 km (10,000 blocks from the center in each direction) and takes up 13GB of storage.

Runtime Plugin: Beyond the generator, we developed a runtime plugin that manages server operations, distributes treasure across the map, handles player teleportation between worlds (spectator with the original model and survival with allowed changes), and includes several Easter eggs.

Impact & Recognition

The project has received significant media coverage and support from data.Brno. It was featured in major Czech media outlets including iDNES and Czech Television, with Czech Television also creating a dedicated comic strip about the project.

The server was launched in 2022 and attracted a growing community of players who enjoyed exploring and contributing to the Brno Minecraft world. With its primary target audience being children and young people, the project has potential for further development with educational elements, making it a valuable tool for engaging youth with their city’s geography and history.

The public server was shut down due to high costs of hosting, but the world might still be available for download in the future.