The crowdsourced design-build was begun by a German user named MineFact who had attempted a similar project the year before for his hometown of Frankfurt using rendering software that incorporated data taken from Google Maps. 

Incorporating a replacement for the obsolete Mercator projection maps they call Airocean, an impressive workforce of over 2,700 Minecraft users started at the 9/11 Memorial Site and has to date completed mostly exterior versions of different New York area landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, and Brooklyn Bridge.

The New York City group is a spinoff of a larger consortium called Build the Earth, which has recently completed digital versions of other important sites across the Tri-State Area. Users don’t have an exact anticipated date of completion just yet (the city has approximately 1 million buildings across all five boroughs) but say much progress has been made when compared to the construction’s start at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020.

“You go back and look at the builds we did a year ago, or even longer than that, and compare them to what we’re doing today,” a Toronto Minecrafter who uses the username Bobert told Curbed. “You can see that there’s a real difference in terms of accuracy, in terms of how good it all looks.”