Can you turn New York, Tokyo or Paris into Minecraft?
Yes. Using the real-map create flow in TopoBlocks, search for famous cities like New York, Tokyo or Paris, box-select an area on the map, and it will read public data from OpenStreetMap (building footprints, roads, water) plus open elevation data, then use open-source tools to generate a .mcworld world you can import into Bedrock.
Famous big cities are usually a better-looking choice — they have denser building, street and river data on OpenStreetMap, so the generated city fabric is richer and the blocks more coherent. That’s also why cities are better suited to real maps than remote areas with sparse survey data. To compare which places work best, see which places make the best real maps.
Honest note: it’s an approximation of the city’s fabric, not a landmark replica
This has to be said clearly so expectations don’t fall flat: the generation is an approximation from public data, not a block-by-block replica. It recreates the city’s overall “fabric” — building footprints and rough heights, street layouts, rivers and coastlines, terrain relief. It will not build the Statue of Liberty, Tokyo Tower or the Eiffel Tower in their real shapes; on OpenStreetMap these landmarks are usually just a footprint, and during generation they become a block mass at the matching location rather than a detailed model. If you want a block-by-block recreation of a famous building, you have to build it yourself in-game.
The quality score is an estimate of data coverage, not a guarantee of accuracy. So the right approach is: after box-selecting an area, first use the free quality score and low-resolution 3D preview to see whether the area has enough data and looks right, then decide whether to pay to generate. For more on “how accurate is it really”, see how faithful a real city map can be.
How big to pick, and how to generate
All of New York or Tokyo covers an enormous area, and generating the whole thing is usually unnecessary. Pricing has 6 tiers based on the box-selected area (roughly 0.2–500 km², ¥19–¥239); the larger the area, the bigger the world, the higher the price, and the longer it takes. A better-value and better-looking approach is to pick one iconic area — Lower Manhattan, central Paris, the Shibuya area of Tokyo — where data is dense and the fabric is clear. For how to choose an area tier, see what area size to pick for a real map.
The steps are simple: search for the city → box-select an area → check the free quality score and 3D preview → choose a gameplay template (“City Exploration” is great for wandering blocks; “Faithful Recreation” aims for the highest fidelity) and an area tier → pay to generate. When generation finishes you get a new .mcworld file; it never overwrites any source data, and every generation keeps a traceable version. Prices are shown in the app, and if a paid task fails it is refunded automatically.