About the Project

PortlandMC - Portland, Oregon in Minecraft

Created in 2016 by Maxine D. and Jonathan G., PortlandMC is an ongoing 1:1 scale replica of the city of Portland, Oregon, USA in Minecraft. All of what is currently in PDXMC was built between 2016-2020, with the help of Google Street View imagery, Google Maps/Google Earth, and terrain data (with the help of Ash G.). No AI or procedurally-generated content was made or used. Every building was measured in Google Earth, and built by hand using Minecraft server tools such as WorldEdit. Every bit street-level detail was done by hand. Every street-level tree was hand-made based on how the tree looked in Google Street View imagery. Trees for the landscape were hand-made using reference imagery, and then pasted onto the terrain using WorldPainter and WorldEdit. Terrain was generated using elevation data that is publically available. So far, development has only covered Downtown (SW), which as of December 2025 is still incomplete.

PortlandMC has been featured in Portland-area news outlets such as Willamette Week, and fan-run sites such as MinerStuff.

PortlandMC is currently not under full-time development, however we are still active and still occasionally working on it in our free time. PDXMC was created when we were teens, when we had much more free time available than we do these days as working adults. Rest assured, though, that PDXMC will never die! We owe it to the Planet Minecraft community, as well as the subreddit /r/portland, Sophia June of Willamette Week, and the many that have visited our server in the past, for helping us realize our project. Thank you!

If you want to stay up-to-date, our Discord server is a good way to see what we're up to. We will also be posting occasional updates here on the site.

Read More Below

SFMC

SeattleMC

PortlandMC (early development)

Before PortlandMC, there were two projects; SFMC and SeattleMC, attempts to make San Francisco and Seattle in Minecraft, respectively. SFMC and SeattleMC were projects created by me (Maxine) before Jon joined the team. SFMC was my first city project and it was very crude. I still wasn't very good at measuring or building at 1:1 scale yet. Many of the buildings were "eye-balled", and there were tons of inaccuracies.

SeattleMC was a bit better, but still not great. No terrain data was used in either project, so elevation was very inaccurate. The geography of the Puget Sound doesn't make for an easy Minecraft project. Plus, the height limit meant the skyline had to be compressed. I was getting better at building and measuring, but it was still a bit of a mess, so it was abandoned too.

Jon joined the team just before I wrapped up SeattleMC, saw the post on Planet Minecraft and happened to join the server while it was online, we quickly became friends. We bounced the idea around about building Portland, and work began not long after in November 2016. The screenshot you see above is from December 2016, only a month into development. Fun fact - much of PortlandMC has been rebuilt since then. Almost no original builds exist from this period, due to detail and scale issues, which were fixed when we had more experience. Also, PDXMC's hills downtown were all hand-made, due to issues with our heightmap. This would become a growing concern, and as of 2025, plans to migrate PDXMC to a new map with proper terrain are still desirable, although with the amount of work required, it may not happen for a long time, if at all.

The percentage of builds between us is hard to say for certain, however we usually agree on an 80/20 split (80% Maxine, 20% Jon). Jon built many of the key landmarks, such as Wells Fargo Center, while I built the vast majority of smaller buildings and several landmarks. When it came to terrain and technical advise, that's where Ash came in. Ash joined the team I believe in 2017 or 2018. Found out about PDXMC on Reddit or Planet Minecraft. They also quickly became a friend of ours and is the third main person behind the project. Ash helped a lot with terrain, specifically elevation data (LIDAR and point-cloud data) and outlines, as well as more complex large-scale editing.

Several others have contributed to PDXMC over the years. SimCS, aka SimDaBuilder, a PSU student at the time, helped us with field research and built Shattuck Hall. BuilderBeate helped with car models and misc. stuff.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse