3D geological models in Minecraft

• a licenced copy of Minecraft
• 50 MB free disk space per local area world
• 6 GB for the Great Britain world
• more than 4 GB of RAM

1. Download the 3D model as a zip file archive (between 1 and 65 MB).
2. Unzip the archive to a temporary location.
3. Start Minecraft.
4. On the home screen, click ‘Options’.
5. Click ‘Resource Packs’.
6. Click ‘Open resource pack folder’. This will open a new window showing the contents of your Minecraft ‘Resource Packs’ folder.
7. Navigate to the folder (called .minecraft on Windows).
8. Open the ‘saves’ folder.
9. Move the unzipped archive to this ‘saves’ folder.

This Glasgow Minecraft world is based on the BGS central Glasgow 3D geological model. The geological model gives engineers and construction companies a subsurface view of the geology underneath Glasgow to help save time and money during construction projects. It also provides insight into the potential for geothermal heat from the water found in flooded mine workings — see UK Geoenergy Observatories Glasgow.

Covering about 100 km², the area shows the superficial deposits of the central Glasgow area, including glaciated material from successive ice sheets. The model was built within BGS’s GOCAD® and GSI3D software, using a digital elevation model of 20 m cell resolution, and is based on datasets held by BGS, such as digital maps and boreholes.

The superficial deposits in the Minecraft world are mostly glacial tills, reflecting the advances and retreats of ice sheets. The tills often rest directly on bedrock geology and comprise a mixture of clay, sand and silt with pebbles, cobbles and boulders.

Other types of superficial deposits in the area are related to several marine inundations (raising and lowering of the sea level) during and since the last glaciation, the development of river terraces, the deposition of estuary sediments, and local lakes, some infilled partly by peat.

The bedrock geology in the Minecraft world dates back to the Carboniferous Period (485–541 million years ago). The majority of the rocks were deposited in an environment such as a river delta or a shallow sea and consist of sandstone, coal and limestone. The rocks were identified using borehole material and descriptions from borehole drill wells and using things found in the rock, such as fossils and minerals, to give the rocks an age.

The geological model was built by BGS in 2010 using GSI3D and is calculated using a digital elevation model (DEM) with a 5 m grid spacing, it extends to about 100 m OD.

The Minecraft world contains three areas of worked ground, one in the Great Scar Limestone Group in the north and two in the Ingleton Group in the main valley. The world contains three superficial rock units; alluvium from the rivers Doe, Kingsdale and Ribble, peat on the flanks of Ingleborough and till in the south-west and north-east.

The till has been modelled in areas of drumlin development to accentuate the landforms. Till is present elsewhere in the area, but is not displayed in the world. The till in this region was laid down by the Devensian ice sheet, which covered the whole region.

The bedrock geology is made up of several layers. The youngest late Carboniferous deposits of the Pennine Lower Coal Measures Formation comprise interbedded sandstones, siltstones and mudstones with several coal seams. The early Carboniferous limestones of the Great Scar Limestone and Yoredale groups contain classic karst features such as Gaping Gill. The limestone is up to 500 m thick.

In the south-west, the Dent Formation, of Ordovician age (444–485 million years ago) and comprised of shallow marine sediments, limestone and pyroclastic rocks is encountered south of the North Craven Fault. Most of the area is unconformably underlain by the Ordovician Ingleton Group of sandstones, siltstones and conglomerates, which is over 300 m thick.

The York model was built by BGS in 2005 as a result of a geological survey and model building programme for the Selby and York areas. The rocks were identified using borehole material and descriptions from borehole drill wells and using things found in the rock, such as fossils and minerals, to give the rocks an age.

The model extends to about 50 m depth and has been calculated using a digital elevation model (DEM). At high vertical exaggerations, despite processing, some residual effects, mainly due to local woodland, can still be seen in the top model surface.

The world shows the large flat areas of alluvium of the River Ouse in the extreme south-west and its tributary the Foss.

The Vale of York Till forms the core of the York Moraine, which is a low ridge near the southern end of the world. During the glaciation, meltwater became ponded at several times in the Vale of York due to ice blocking drainage via the Humber into the North Sea Basin and beyond.

The bedrock in the area is Triassic Sherwood Sandstone, which is a significant aquifer in the Vale of York.

The original geological model was built in 2009 in GSI3D. It shows a developed landscape with several extensive areas of artificial ground, including the building of the Lakeside shopping complex within an old chalk quarry.

The southern part of the world occupies the River Thames’s floodplain. Here, interbedded alluvial silts, clays and peats overlie gravel deposits. Together, these sediments are up to 15 m in thickness. Older river terrace deposits comprising sands and gravels fringe the alluvium and are preserved as erosional remnants farther north.

The bedrock geology is dominated by chalk, which underlies the whole area with the world extending to a depth of about 150 m. In the northern portion of the world, younger bedrock units are, in ascending order, the Thanet Sand, Lambeth, Harwich and London Clay formations.

This Minecraft world uses the BGS Soil Parent Material Map to describe the geology across the whole of mainland Great Britain. The country was divided into smaller chunks (100 × 100km grid squares) so that Minecraft could cope with the whole area.

For each 100 × 100km square we:

• loaded the height of the land surface from an elevation of Great Britain, using a modified and scaled version of NEXTMap Britain data
• loaded the geology from the Soil Parent Material Map
• loaded the OS VectorMap® District raster files
• for each chunk we used the height data to add blocks repeatedly up to the specified height and using the real world geology for that location
• for the topmost block, we decided which material best matched the OS VectorMap® District data
• finally, we compiled groups of 32×32 chunks into regions, and then compiled the whole lot into one zip file

The Minecraft GB geology world represents the geology at the surface, but that geology does not change as you dig down into the world, as BGS doesn’t have 3D data covering the whole of the UK. It’s important to know that this is why the GB geology world is different to the larger scale models described above, which do have 3D geology included.

To do this, we have used BGS’s Soil Parent Material dataset. A parent material is a soil science name for a weathered rock or deposit from, and within which, a soil has formed. In the UK, parent materials provide the basic foundations and building blocks of the soil, influencing their texture, structure, drainage and chemistry. By using the parent material dataset we can get a general understanding of the types of geology to be found across Great Britain.

Using the methodology developed by the Ordnance Survey, we took the data from the OS VectorMap® District raster to decide the material of each block.