Minecraft players run the gamut of all ages and values. While some players take pride in their ability to build some truly impressive structures, there are others who love nothing more than knocking those structures down, just to piss people off. This not so subtle form of trolling is known as "griefing" in the Minecraft community, and a group of them just laid waste to the recently released map that had recreated the entire country of Denmark.
Reports the Copenhagen Post, "Since last week users of the Minecraft computer game have been able to explore a life-size model of Denmark in the game. [But] within a couple of days the model had been changed radically and the creators of the model will now reboot it."
"Several large Danish towns have been leveled to the ground and a lot of new things have been built all over the place," described Chris Hammeken, press officer for the organization behind the recreation, Geodatastyrelsen.
Pics of the invasion were shared by Redditor RandomDKguy with via the site's Denmark sub-thread. The pictures, seen above, show an apparent American invasion of what's left of the blocky, virtual Copenhagen, complete with tanks clad in the American flag, pointing their cannons at the Danish flag.
The map was created by the would-be cartographers Simon Kokkendorf and Thor Bjørn Nielsen, who used publicly available information from the country's Ministry of the Environment. Sounds dry, but consider that the entire map was screated on a 1:1 scale. Denmark is over 16,600 square miles, making the map come in at 4000 billion bricks, and took up an entire terabyte of data.
Typically, server mods can take certain precautions to ensure that their particular areas of their Minecraft "worlds" can't be altered, but that would have destroyed the point of the creation. The original concept was meant to be educational.
The Danish Broadcasting Corporation DR said the map could "give school pupils opportunity to move around in a 3D model of Denmark that can be used in both social studies, geography and much more - One can also use it in mathematics, where pupils eg will have the task to build a new playground next to the the school inside the Minecraft, with a specific number bricks available. At the same time one can also in Minecraft build to and remove bricks in the model, and low its own buildings, hills or roads - or change on the shoreline, if one is not satisfied with the beach."
Nielsen was aware of the possibility for this sort of behavior, and at the time the map became available, appealed users to make changes on the map "with respect and [to] show consideration for others."
So much for that plan...
Moving forward, the map will have to be rebuilt. Said Hammeken, "We don't have a complete overview yet, but we'll probably choose to reconstruct Copenhagen and the other cities."
