Arnis turns any place on Earth into a Minecraft world

Louis Erbkamm knows his way around Arnis, the smallest town in Germany, but he’s never set foot in it.

I know where the shops are. Where the boats are… I know the city pretty well, but I haven’t been there yet.

Arnis is also the name of his open source project, which takes real-world data from OpenStreetMap and other sources to turn places you know into Minecraft worlds you can freely explore. Since Louis started Arnis in 2022, it’s reached close to 900,000 downloads from GitHub and about 70 contributors.

Louis grew up playing Minecraft and started coding at 13, always looking for ways to bring code into the game. Arnis began as a fun diversion combining Minecraft with geospatial data, and it went on GitHub, where he already kept his side projects. He finished the first prototype within two weeks while on a break from school.

That first version was Python written by hand, built only on OpenStreetMap, and …