As far as we're concerned, digitizing all these maps is just the first step. Building Inspector is our project to visualize New York's past by applying computer vision and crowdsourcing techniques to old insurance atlases.

This isn't the first time Labs has taken inspiration from NYPL's digitized map collection. It's still not a good model of nineteenth-century America-there were no creepers or Endermen back then- but I think it gives a better feeling of actually inhabiting a space. You can play this map like you would any other survival-mode map-cut down trees, dig for hidden resources, create farms, and build structures. The survival-mode map has the same shape and terrain as the creative-mode map, but it also features randomly scattered trees, flowers, vegetation and animals.

Bright green means 'water', dark green means 'grass', cyan means 'cobblestone' (for paved roads), dark purple means 'stone brick' (for building footprints), and so on. The greyscale image shows how high the elevation is at this point on the map, and this image shows which Minecraft block should be visible at that point. The result was a second image which covers the same area as the greyscale image. He traced the footprints of buildings, including the map's most prominent feature, the New York Institution for Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb. Paul then used Inkscape to trace over the map's major features: water, grass, dirt paths and the paved roads of the city grid system. Land in the middle of the map is a very light grey, which tells us that that part of the Minecraft map should be much higher than the river.

Land near the riverbank is dark grey, which tells us that part of the Minecraft world should be a few blocks higher than the river. The Hudson River shows up as an area of entirely black pixels on the left side of the map-an area where the elevation is zero.

Maps for minecraft new york city