Build the Earth

Build The Earth (BTE) is a project dedicated to recreating the Earth in a 1:1 scale in "Minecraft". The project has attracted hundreds of thousands of users to its Discord server, and has surpassed 6,000 officially registered minecraft builders. 
Organization.
Minecraft users can register for the project on Build The Earth's official website. They then have to be accepted by staff members. All actions are managed on the project's Discord server. Through teams or solo projects, builders upload their world files to the official website, which are eventually merged into the master world.
Bedrock Edition.
At the start of the project, Build The Earth only allowed users with the Java Edition of the game to build. A system that let "Bedrock" users build for the project was later implemented. Users may claim individual areas, or join one of the two default Bedrock servers, which were working on Anchorage, Alaska and Riga, Latvia. The two Bedrock exclusive servers were abandoned in favor of a new system which allows Bedrock and Java version players to join the same server and play together. This system is now being used by most Build Team servers.
History.
Beginning.
On March 21, 2020, YouTuber PippenFTS released a video titled "The Earth in Minecraft, 1:1 scale... for the first time", in which he talked about the map, how it was made, and called for talented Minecraft players to help build. Within a few days, the video went viral, accumulating over 11 million views by October 2020. By the end of March 2020, the BTE subreddit, Twitter account, and Instagram account had been set up and were growing rapidly. A Patreon page was created on March 26, and currently accumulates over $250 a month from more than 50 patrons. The Discord server, where the project was synthesized and is currently being managed in, hit 50,000 members by 29 March and 200,000 by the end of April; it currently has about 230,000 members, though the number of new members has decreased.
Collaborations and advertising.
On Earth Day 2020, Mojang released an article featuring the project on their website. On 5 July of the same year, MrBeast, a YouTuber and social media influencer, released a video where he and a group of other players re-built his hometown, Raleigh, North Carolina, in 24 hours.
Resources.
Game Modifications.
The Build The Earth project primarily depends on the Terra 1-to-1 mod, which is in charge of generating all of the terrain, streets, building guides, etc., if available, as to ease the building process. Most of the time, dimensions of the real life won't fit into the normal limits of "Minecraft". Thus, it depends on two other game modifications to function:
The official "mod-pack" also provides a few other utility game modification by default, that can prove to be useful when building:
It also includes two other lightweight game modification, Performant and VanillaFix, which can help with certain performance improvements, though are not strictly needed.
The project has sparked the development of many 3rd party tools used to assist builders and server owners. The most notable include:
PippenFTS stated that "with the CubicChunks game modification breaking Minecraft's vertical limitations, we can now experience the Earth in Minecraft, just as it is, with no downscaling of any kind."
Terrain generation.
"Terra 1-to-1" uses various API instances to generate a Minecraft world based on real-life data. These include a Mapzen Terrain Tile instance for elevation data, an ArcGIS REST API instance to generate tree cover, and an Overpass interpreter for OpenStreetMap to generate water, roads, and building outlines.
Map projection.
The Terra 1-to-1 game modification implements several map projections by default; including the transverse Mercator, sinusoidal, Equal Earth, equirectangular, and Dymaxion or Airocean projections, and a modified version of the latter, made specifically for the project, named "Modified Airocean" or "Airocean-edit". PippenFTS released a YouTube video titled "We are now ready to Build The Earth, 1:1 scale in Minecraft", in which he detailed the process undergone to create it. This map projection provides an extremely low amount of distortion of both shapes and sizes on land, at the cost of heavily distorting the oceans. Unlike a typical Airocean projection, Modified Airocean is not intended to be unfolded into a 3D object like an icosahedron, and has its continents placed such that it looks somewhat similar to an equirectangular projection.
The projection used is configurable per world, though the project requires every contributing builder and build team to use the modified Airocean projection.