---
title: 'Xaryu Reacts to NEW YORK CITY Rebuild in Minecraft'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=nT5Z2_fm_pE'
video_id: 'nT5Z2_fm_pE'
date: 2026-06-14
duration_sec: 1093
---

# Xaryu Reacts to NEW YORK CITY Rebuild in Minecraft

> Source: [Xaryu Reacts to NEW YORK CITY Rebuild in Minecraft](https://youtube.com/watch?v=nT5Z2_fm_pE)

## Summary

A team spent five years recreating New York City in Minecraft at a 1:1 scale, building over 50,000 buildings across Manhattan and other boroughs. The project started during the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the Build the Earth initiative, and the video showcases the progress and challenges faced.

### Key Points

- **Project Overview** [0:00] — A team spent five years building New York City in Minecraft at a 1:1 scale, with over 50,000 buildings and many districts completed.
- **Origin Story** [1:38] — The project started in 2020 during the pandemic, inspired by a YouTuber named PippenFTS who called for building the entire Earth in Minecraft.
- **Initial Challenges** [3:10] — The team started with the World Trade Center district, but had no experience or tutorials for 1:1 scale building. They had 50-80 builders working simultaneously, leading to chaos and many mistakes.
- **Elevation Problem** [5:15] — The initial map lacked elevation data, making it flat. Later, they manually added elevation using WorldEdit and LIDAR data, releasing version 2 in June 2022.
- **Tribeca District** [7:22] — Tribeca spans 81 city blocks with over 850 buildings, taking years to complete with countless revisions.
- **Other Districts** [8:07] — The team completed 14 districts in lower Manhattan, including Two Bridges, Little Italy, Chinatown, and Soho, each with unique characteristics.
- **Community Building System** [10:10] — Anyone can join and build via nyc.buildtheearth.net, starting with simple residential homes in Brooklyn and progressing to more complex structures.
- **Map Release** [15:00] — Version 3 of the map is available for download on Patreon for Java and Bedrock editions, optimized for low-end PCs and smartphones.

### Conclusion

The project is ongoing, with plans to continue building for several more years. The team invites others to join or support via Patreon, as part of the larger Build the Earth initiative to recreate the entire world.

## Transcript

We spent five years building New York
City in Minecraft, guys. As a new
Minecraft player, this is like like five
years.
What? For the past 1,000 days, my team
and I have been recreating New York City
into Minecraft at a 1:1 scale. Now,
after 5 years, we built more than 50,000
buildings and already [music] fully
finished the huge amount of districts in
Manhattan. Every single building is
being recreated from real life with
insane amount of precision, details, and
secrets for you to explore with your
friends. All in a massive world spanning
across 700 km. Today, we are exploring
what's been built by the team over the
past 5 years. Many sleepless nights and
hundreds of hours went into this video
alone. Get ready for the most extreme
progress update on this channel so far.
So, lean back. Okay, so is this like
Google Earth and they're like zooming in
on each building? Um, like quickly, just
cuz I don't know this, I've only played
hardcore Minecraft so far. They didn't
farm all these mats, right? They're
playing in some mode where they have
infinite blocks. I hope probably, right?
And creative mode. Okay. So, they can
build whatever they want. They have
infinite blocks. And then they're like
onetoone mapping it through Google Maps
or Earth or whatever.
>> Take a coffee and enjoy a tour through
the history of building New York City in
Minecraft. [music]
Okay,
dude. The amount I mean just the time 5
years.
Okay, so how do you get started? 5
years. That's quite a lot of time.
>> Yeah,
>> basically it all started in 2020 when
the entire world shut down.
>> Oh,
co
suddenly
>> CO hits. They have in like it's like all
right, we're trapped inside. Let's
rebuild New York City within Minecraft
then. I mean, that makes sense. That
makes sense.
>> From one day to another, all of us were
stuck at home with nothing to do. As bad
as this pandemic was, Build the Earth
probably wouldn't exist without it.
That's when a YouTuber named Pitman FTS
dropped a video that changed everything.
>> One day, a one:1 scale model of the
Earth with all our humanmade structures
will be completed. But I don't want to
stand alone in this project. That's why
I'm calling for all mcrafter around the
world, skilled builders and
organizations to join in on this effort.
Start their own planet Earth map, pick a
large city or territory of their own,
and work on creating it onetoone scale
just as it stands today. Bro, wait.
They're going to So, they did New York,
but they're going to do the whole world
and then put it all together. Bro, that
would be Bro, imagine you download an
Earth Minecraft map and you have the
entire Earth to ex No. No way. And yeah,
so we did. Our team chose New York City.
Afterwards, we prepared everything
needed to start something as insane as
this. How we pulled it off and all the
technical challenges along the way would
take a full video on its own. For now,
let's just say somehow we managed to get
started. [music] The first area that
everyone wanted to work on was the World
Trade Center District for obvious
reasons. We all were hyped, but there
was one issue. None of us had much
building experience, especially not for
this kind of building. Recreating an
entire city at a one:1 scale was never
really attempted before, and [music]
there were no tutorials or guidelines
online that you could just watch and
learn from. So, we just started and had
huge building sessions every day with 50
to 80 builders working on
>> I was literally just going to ask how
many of them was it? And then he read my
mind and answered it in real time on a
YouTube video that was recorded years
ago.
>> One area at the same time.
>> It was complete chaos, but also super
fun to make that much progress in just a
few hours. The learning curve was brutal
and we made so many mistakes. [music]
Honestly, most of that early work
doesn't even exist anymore. We've
already rebuilt most of it multiple
times. For example, here's what it looks
like in 2020. And here's the version
from 2024. See [music] the difference?
Over the years, we realized how much
details matter. Like when a random guy
from New York City logs in and finds his
flower pot on his balcony exactly where
it is in real life, that's when you know
it's worth it. Their reactions are
always priceless.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. So, here's an overview of
Manhattan Island with all of its
districts. Each one of them has its own
story. And in this video, I want to show
you how all these districts came
together over the years. As mentioned
before, we started with the World Trade
Center District, but it's tiny compared
to Tribeca, which is right next to it.
It literally took years to finish
Tribeca completely. So, let me show you
a time-lapse of its creation process to
give you an idea of how much work went
into this.
>> Times 5,000 speed. by the way,
>> one district. [music] Same as the
Memorial area. This wasn't built in one
go. For nearly 2 years, it was 99%
complete simply because we kept finding
new things to improve and more details
to fix. Many parts of the district were
rebuilt over and over again just because
they became outdated over time and
didn't meet our standards. Now,
>> another huge challenge we faced,
especially during the creation of
Tribeca, was our ongoing elevation
problem. See, after Pippen's first build
the earth video went viral with over 60
million views, all this code was just
flooded with thousands of people who all
wanted to help build New York City. This
meant we had to start fast. And once we
helped to solve the projection problem,
we began building within a week. But
>> projection build the earth.
>> Since we had to set up everything so
fast, our first version of the New York
City map didn't include any elevation
data at all. Everything was just flat.
In my first video from 2020, you can see
that these headlight image was just
printed in a flat world with staked
building shells on top. At first, this
wasn't a huge problem at all since
Manhattan is mostly flat anyway. But we
knew that eventually we'd need to
migrate all our buildings to a new map,
and the more we built, the harder this
house would obviously become. And
getting high quality elevation data was
another headache.
>> That's annoying.
>> Because Manhattan is so densely packed
with buildings, it's nearly impossible
to capture. I mean, this would be a lot
easier if the earth was flat. Like,
unless it is like, you know what I'm
like, if if the earth was flat, this it
would be easier to build Minecraft that
way. [sighs]
Accurate ground elevation data for the
entire island. In the end, the best
approach was to manually apply elevation
in lower Manhattan using World Edit
while using high precision lighter data
for the rest. [music] Special thanks to
Leax for spending hundreds of hours to
manually adjust the elevation on
Manhattan Island. This was a crazy task
and in my eyes, he did a perfect job.
[music] Finally, in June 2022, we
released version two of New York City.
Now, imagine one day they finished this
and these guys this guy has like a like
a a great grandchild and he's asking him
like, "What did you do in your lifetime,
great granddad?" And then he's like, I
rebuilt Earth
in Minecraft.
Like just just imagine that for a sec.
>> Featuring proper elevation across the
entire map.
>> But enough about elevation. Let's get
back to Tribeca. As you can see in the
time lapse, this district is massive. It
spans 81 city blocks and contains over
850 [music] buildings. We tried to build
all of them as detailed as possible. And
eventually after countless revisions,
Tribeca came together beautifully. It's
now one of the most complex and detailed
zones in the entire map and one we
incredibly proud of. But Tribeca isn't
the only district, of course. Just in
lower Manhattan, we already fully
completed 14 more districts. [music]
Unfortunately, I can't show you every
district today in that much detail.
Otherwise, this video would probably be
hours long.
>> Maybe in future videos, we'll take a
deeper dive into the history behind some
of them.
>> [music]
>> For now, let's just take a quick look at
each district one by one so you can see
how the city evolved over the years.
After finishing Tribeca, we moved on to
the Two Bridges District, home to the
Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge. We put so
much effort into the bridges because
they are so famous and iconic. First, we
studied its architectural drawings to
get everything right, obsessing over
every detail, from textures to the angle
of every single beam. We just wanted to
make it perfect. If you ever spot a
mistake, please don't tell the builders,
otherwise they'll instantly want to
rebuild the whole thing. The rest of the
district was finished in 2021, [music]
and it's been evolving ever since. A
year into the project, we are making
tons of progress all over the city, but
the grant never stopped. For months, we
made one big session after another,
building landmarks all over the city,
like Times Square with its massive
amount of billboards, or the Flat Iron
District in Midtown Manhattan with its
beautiful Medicine Square Park. At the
same time, we also continued to build in
lower Manhattan. The first area we
concentrated on was Little Italy, a
compact neighborhood defined by narrow
streets, cozy restaurants, and a
character that immediately stood out to
me. It's a small district, but it feels
completely different from the rest of
lower Manhattan. Almost like stepping
into another city within the city. Right
next door is Chinatown, over three times
the size, but completed in the same
amount of time thanks to more routined
and efficient teamwork.
>> That's crazy. This early district still
holds some personal touches from the
builders, like a Chinese New Year parade
that was placed right in the middle of
Chinatown. To bring all the areas
together, we hosted a 48 hour build
event to complete the civic center this
morning and combine all districts into
one massive completed area. It was a
huge success and I still remember I was
quite exhausted after this because I
live streamed a big portion of it. But
we made so much progress in this event
alone, it was crazy.
after grinding through man.
>> I don't know about you guys, but what I
want to see is the building process.
Like what are they looking at to then
replicate and like how does it look to
actually like how quick can you actually
just like see something and then rebuild
it? I like I want to see how that works,
right?
>> Skyscrapers for months. We needed a
break and we wanted to try out something
different because actually most of New
York City isn't just skyscrapers. It's
neighborhoods and a huge part of the
city's soul lives in Brooklyn and
Queens. While we were busy polishing
lower Manhattan, tens of thousands of
buildings were popping up in the outer
burrows, made possible by our building
system that lets the entire community
work on the city in parallel. The core
idea has always been that anyone can
join a project and start building
immediately. What stops griefers from
just griefing?
>> Like, you know what I mean? If it's open
to the community and anyone can start
helping, what if someone just went in
and just started burning everything to
the ground? Are you kidding me?
admins. But like what if someone just
deletes like half of it before the admin
got to them? Maybe there's something
where like you can only delete one block
every
10 seconds or I don't I don't know. And
there's like backups, too. Oh, you can
make certain things unbreakable. So once
a part's finished, you just like safe
zone it. Uh so there's Okay, there's
probably ways, bro. I'm just thinking
like dude, what if someone gets in there
and they they burn the thing to the
ground? much prior knowledge. Just
launch Minecraft, go to
nyc.buildoff.net,
join the building server, and boom,
you're put in front of a real New York
building that you can now work on. New
players usually start with residential
homes in Brooklyn.
>> Oh, this is how so they just build it
and then they copy paste it to the
actual world. But if you're building it,
you're like isolated.
They thought this through Queens.
simple, iconic, and great for learning,
especially if you don't have much
building experience or never recreated a
structure at a 1:1 scale in Minecraft
before. As you level up, you unlock more
complex structures like multi-story
apartments, town houses, and eventually
even skyscrapers. Once all buildings in
the neighborhood are done, our advanced
team steps in to finish the area, adding
roads trees sidewalks lights and
more. Only when everything is fully
completed and perfectly detailed
district is marked complete on our
>> someone in the chat says go on their
Zar. Bro, have you seen me try to build
a house? I put like four doors in and
they're like hitting each other and like
it's like the wrong dimensions. It's
it's bad, man. I need some more
experience. Okay, progress website. On
Manhattan's west side is Battery Park
City, a modern mix of luxury to peaceful
green spaces. Our builders took their
time capturing its clean, modern wipe.
We hosted another 48 hour build event to
complete Battery Park, the one at the
south of Manhattan Island. From there,
you can see the Statue of Liberty, which
we built during a Mr. Beast challenge,
competing for an $8,000 trip to New York
City. By the way, congrats to John Andre
for winning the trip. You really
deserved it, man. Battery Park is the
largest park we finished so far, soon to
be dominated by Central Park, which uh
we haven't started yet.
>> Oh my goodness. This financial district
is the last one in this area that is
still under construction. Most
skyscrapers of lower Manhattan are
located here. So, we are taking extra
care to get every one of them just
right. But nearby, the tiny seapot
district was finished back in 2022. With
that, we've now completed almost all of
South Manhattan. Just north is the Soho
district, finished in 2021. Known for
its artistic wipe and cast iron
buildings, Soho really changed how we
worked. Instead of group builds, each
builder now took full responsibility for
an entire block, which somehow brought
some sort of consistency and style
across the entire district. The result
is a detailed, stylish district, and
it's just cool to rock through it and do
some exploration.
With Soho done, we moved on to its
neighbors, Bowery, Nolita, and Nohoo.
These areas might not have skyscrapers,
but they are full of personality. old
tenementss, boutique shops, narrow
streets, and yeah, we recreated each
district carefully to preserve its
unique blend of history and culture.
>> Together, they stitched the final pieces
of Lower Manhattan into one seamless,
fully connected, finished world. After
all these years, this world has turned
into one of the largest 1:1 recreations
ever created in Minecraft, and you can
literally explore it for hours and
hours. We also wanted to make this
>> when he says one one to one and someone
in the chat asked this question too a
second ago is like how many feet one
block is or yards or whatever like is it
based off the height of the Minecraft
character and they like translated it
perfectly so it's actually a true one to
one in terms of like the height of a
person. I mean there's some people that
are taller than others like I I'm I'm
tall for a Mexican. I'm like 58 almost
5'9. the average height's more like like
in the 5'7 for a Mexican-American male.
Um, but that's not the point. The point
is I wonder what the scaling is.
>> World available to you guys. You can
download and explore it together with
your friends or do other creator stuff
with it. That's why we just released a
new map on our ability of Patreon called
BTE New York City version 3, which is
available both for Java and Bedrock
Edition on the latest Minecraft version
for you to download. The map lets you
teleport to all the lower Manhattan
districts that were covered in this
video and contains many Easter eggs
which are waiting for you to find.
>> We tried our best to optimize the world
to perform as smooth as possible even on
low-end PCs and other devices like
smartphones or conscious.
>> If you are impressed by all the work
we've put into the map for the past 5
years and want to support the project
moving forward, make sure to check out
the download link in the description and
visit our Patreon. Of course, there's so
much more ongoing progress across the
city, but that's a story for another
video. Hopefully, this gave you a solid
look at how Low Manhattan came together
over the years and just how much effort
it's taken to get this far.
>> Oh, yeah.
>> In future videos, we'll dive into other
parts of the city and show you what the
builders are working on right now. We've
already spent so much time on.
>> I wonder if they have this statistic for
manh hours.
Like, there's like Okay. Yeah, 50,000
hours fast forwarded, whatever. But like
each person is working on one building
at a time and there's hundreds maybe
thousands of people working on it as a
community. I wonder if they if they have
it logged like how many hours each
person spent and aggregate it. That
would be really interesting.
>> This project and I'm definitely not
stopping now. So we'll have to continue
for a few more years until one day it's
all finished. But we need your help. If
you want to be part of it, jump on the
server or support our work on the
Patreon at patreon.com/buthe
is just one city. But in build the
earth, we are not just building New York
City. We are building the entire world.
And there's over 40 other teams out
there helping to build every single
country on Earth. Hability of Patreon.
>> Do you guys think this project ever
concludes
that build the earth.net net. Like
there's a bunch of different people
trying to build like I I don't know. No,
no, no, no. Does anyone believe? Yes.
Yes. No. No. Like maybe Oh, yeah. Maybe
with AI. If you get a AI on it. Bro,
this is this project is just so massive.
Um, a lot of people in the chat, uh,
we're not talking
>> every single country on Earth. Rhdy of
Patreon also does not only include this
map, of course. It also contains
hundreds of other buildings and maps
from across the globe as well. So, if
you're curious, go check it out. But
that's it [music] for now. If you like
the video, make sure to give it a like
and let me know which other parts of the
city you want to see next. Thanks for
watching and I'll see you in the next
one. Cheers.
Okay, that I mean that's as mind-blowing
as the title of the video makes it seem.
A lot of people in the chat were asking
for the video link. Let me link it for
you guys. And if you guys Yeah. want to
check out the video link has like the to
download and the Patreon and everything
like that. That's crazy, guys. That that
is I mean absolutely wild.