World of Warcraft remade in Minecraft

I suppose it was really only a matter of time, and that time is now – somebody has rebuilt World of Warcraft’s Azeroth in Minecraft. In its entirety. That’s got to be some kind of impressive.

Okay, so maybe not quite so impressive when you find out that this was accomplished using a script instead of placing each block by hand, but let’s not underestimate the ingenuity of clever coding either. As creator Rumsey explains:

“I developed software to convert the continents of World of Warcraft into Minecraft blocks using a process known as voxelization. . The software converts everything in the game, including all the buildings and natural details, down to the individual tree stump. Once the parameters for the software have been set, the entire conversion process takes approximately 24 hours and requires no human intervention. Prior to the conversion process, I needed to match textures from World of Warcraft to the appropriate material in Minecraft.”

The finished product is a 24 GB map file, including over 68 billion blocks constituting the continents of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, as well as all non-instanced caves and dungeons, which is probably more than you’ve done with your day.

You can download a beta version of the map and check out the amazing comparison screenshots here: Crafting Azeroth – Minecraft Forum. Or you could, you know, try building it for yourself from scratch. You probably won’t, though.