Scrolling past different parts of a building in ‘Street View’ can help you get little details right and give you a sense of the building's scale so much better than just reference pictures from the image search. “Google Maps has proved immeasurably useful for me in the process of recreating real-life buildings in Minecraft. He then establishes the areas where residential, commercial and industrial buildings should be built. When adding new districts, MattuFIN always start with the infrastructure, working out a rough map sketch with ideas. As for districts, if I'm really determined and have time to spare, I may build one in a week or two.” More if it's a particularly large or complex building, design-wise. “A single building usually takes somewhere between 30 minutes and a couple hours. Considering it a hobby, he builds it in his spare time a few hours every week. Since then, MattuFIN has been working alone, assuming the role as city-planner, grand architect and builder.

“I decided to rebuild the existing map instead, tearing down 95% of what had been built, only conserving a few select buildings that I and the others had built during the first phase.” “I thought about starting a new city from scratch, but then realised that I'd gotten too attached to Mattupolis to do that,” he remembers. He was left as a governor of a ghost town. The crew soon started to lose interest in it and in 2013 the last remaining team member was MattuFIN. Though the city grew at a steady rate, MattuFIN and his team lacked a long-term plan for their project. “I guess we wanted to create something similar and eventually started working on a modern city, not thinking it would result in anything particularly big.” “A city project called Greenfield was becoming popular back then,” MattuFIN remembers. Luckily, they found inspiration in one of the world’s biggest map projects. They had grown short of ideas and needed a new daring challenge to put their minds to.

MattuFin’s own journey began in early 2012 as he and a couple of friends joined forces to start a brand new project. As famous poet Lao Tzu once said: “The journey of a perfect Minecraft build begins with one block”. The amount must be in the hundreds, if not thousands,” he says. “I've never counted the buildings, actually. Measuring from one edge to the other, Mattupolis is around 2500 x 2000 blocks wide, complete with all the necessary districts, buildings and point of interests you might find in a real city. Perhaps the right word for MattuFin’s map would be megalopolis, as his city is humongous in size.

Modern city map for minecraft