We’ve seen our fair share of ambitious Minecraft builds these past couple of years, but even so they never get any less impressive. From faithful recreations of Hyrule, an extravagant imagining of the USS Enterprise in block form, even entire cities built from the ground-up. But still, not a single one can come close to the ‘Crafting Azeroth’ project, an attempt to build a “full-scale reproduction” of World Of Warcraft’s Azeroth.

Now entering beta, the magnificent scale of the project can only be fully-realised when you consider the full file extracts to a quite-considerable 24Gb, and packs in a map of approximately 275 square kilometres and contains, according to creator Ramses, “over 68 billion blocks”. The highest part of the world, the peak of Mt. Hyjal, meanwhile, stands a proud kilometre(!) above sea level. Sufficient to say, it’s a massive piece of work and is looking mightily impressive for it.

Before you estimate the kind of hours needed to be invested in such a gigantic project however, the actual creation of the map is instead “heavily automated, assisted by custom software” – so no, this isn’t a case of placing individual blocks, God forbid. But don't let that fool you, this is still an extraordinary piece of work. In fact, take a moment and fully explore the first two continents created, Kalmidor and Eastern Kingdoms, in your browser – you won't be disappointed.

For more information, the creator of the project has detailed his full work on MinecraftForum.net, where a link to the torrent for download is also available.

Richard Birkett