Arnis, an open source tool, transforms real-world locations into playable Minecraft worlds by processing geospatial data hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). By migrating to Terrain Tiles—a global elevation dataset on the Registry of Open Data on AWS—Arnis eliminated data retrieval costs while serving nearly 300,000 users.
To make terrain believable at a global scale, especially for areas with major elevation differences such as Niagara Falls, Arnis relies on high-quality and globally available elevation data. In 2025, Arnis migrated from a commercial elevation data provider to Terrain Tiles, hosted on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). This migration meant that Arnis could eliminate the costs for millions of tile requests needed to generate realistic locations. Through the Open Data Sponsorship Program, AWS covers the cost of data distribution for publicly available datasets like Terrain Tiles, enabling open-source projects like Arnis to access…
