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My 7 year old has started playing Minecraft and I'm curious as to how big in "real" measurements a block is. Would be fun to make some scale models…

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    @Frank it's gaming trivia, which you could maybe bend into being "plot", which is on-topic. Commented Oct 21, 2017 at 0:02
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    @Nick I'm having real trouble seeing how a block size can be lore. Care to elucidate? Commented Oct 21, 2017 at 0:29
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    @Frank They are asking for measurements of an in-game item, what they plan to do with that information is irrelevant. This is no different than if I asked how wide the continent of Erathia is or how far Ascalon is from Lion's Arch. Commented Oct 21, 2017 at 4:23
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    Bam, question solved: The statistics screen shows the statistics distance walked/crouched/sprinted/swum/fallen/climbed/flown/dived/by minecart/boat/pig/horse/elytra in cm/m/km, so it is an in-game measurement, therefore this question is on topic. Commented Oct 21, 2017 at 16:06
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    If you're making scale models, then the "real" measurements are irrelevant. Commented Oct 21, 2017 at 16:19

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It has been well established that the length of the sides of one solid block in Minecraft is 1m, making its volume 1m³. This is supported by Gamepedia.

The height of the player is 1.8 blocks, thus 1.80 meters.

The wiki also mentions voxels, which is kind of like a 3D pixel. Because the blocks use 16x16 textures, you could consider a voxel to be 6.25 cm on a side and to have a volume of 244 cm³.

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    This answer is slightly wrong: Minecraft does have 1m^3 voxels, i.e. blocks are voxels. The pixels mentioned in the wiki are just for textures. Note that voxels are not always cubic (see Space Engineers for example) Commented Oct 21, 2017 at 9:55
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    @JohnSmith entity texture pixels are hardly consistent. the outer layer of a helmet/hat/hair player texture, for example, has bigger pixels than the head itself. Synxis is right, the only thing that is made out of voxels in Minecraft is the world, and those voxels are the blocks, which have 1m³ volume. Commented Oct 21, 2017 at 11:08
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    If you are talking about the "pixels" in the texture, those are texels. If there is something to be called voxels in Minecraft, that got to be the blocks. The size of the texel depends on the resource pack. if the texture has 16 texels on the side and the block is 1 meter³, then the length of that texel is 1m/16 = 6.25 cm, then the volume of the hypothetical voxel of that size would be (6.25 cm)³ = 244.1 cm³. Commented Oct 21, 2017 at 13:28
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    I think there are two different points of view here on what is called a "voxel" in this case: People who think that a block is completely filled and that the texture applies to a 3D space, therefore justifying a calculation of the cube of the texture pixel length and calling it a voxel. This view was apparently the one of whoever wrote that part of the wiki article. And the other side, looking at Minecraft blocks as six flat (2D) textures that have no depth at all and would therefore have nothing to do with volume calculations, here "voxel" instead refers to the entire block, because it's in Commented Oct 21, 2017 at 15:57
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    a grid of blocks that makes up the Minecraft world. This is my view. Since the textures are indeed flat, as you can see when you slowly fly at a 1° angle to their surface in gamemode 3 (there is no point where you see a width, it's just inside the block or outside), the calculation of the texture pixels in cube form has no use, because there's no in-game equivalent to this volume. You can then call the blocks "voxels", but then you just have 1m³, which has no more information for this particular question than saying that a block is 1m long. Commented Oct 21, 2017 at 16:00
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According to the Minecraft wiki, Minecraft uses the metric system. Each block is 1 cubic meter.

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I was thinking about the 1 cubic meter, and if you take the avatar's height, yes, it's 1.8 meters, but if you take his width (shoulder to shoulder), it is 1 meter, and no one has 1-meter-wide shoulders.

So I took the drawing approach. To make an evenly proportional human body, you can measure the head and multiply by 8 to determine the ideal height.

Example: my head measurement is 24 cm (9.6 inches), so my ideal height should be 192 cm (76.8 inches), but my height is 168 cm or 7 times my head size.

If I take this approach and put it into Minecraft, the Minecraft avatar's height is only 3.5 heads, from which you can draw the conclusion that he's ultra short or he has the proportions of a child.

If you agree with me that the avatar is very short/a child (to take my measurements of 24 cm for his head, his body is 84 cm), the conclusion can be taken that every cube is approximately 46 cm, 0.5 meters per side, 0.125 m³, or you need 4 cubes to make 1 m². So if you need to make a cubic meter, you need 8 Minecraft cubes.

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A block is 1 meter (approx. 3 feet), half the size of a full grown adult however if you plan on making replicas or recreations I would adjust the height for your 7 year old. (Assuming they’re shorter than about 5’5)

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I did some math and I found out 1 side of a Minecraft block is: 0.825 meters. I think this is the right math, correct me if I'm wrong: average human height divided by 2 blocks (1.65 / 2).

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  • Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please edit to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center. Commented Oct 17, 2024 at 4:57
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If you didn't know, one block in minecraft is 1 meter in real life. So that means if something in real life is 20 meters high, you would build 20 blocks high. It's different when you are refering to other blocks such as saplings and rods,sea pickles and Turtle Eggs(In the aqua update).

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Well, Minecraft is 125 times bigger than Earth, so 1 block would be 1/2 the height of 1 full-grown man cubed times 125. Since the average height of a full-grown man is 70 inches, divide that by 2 (35 inches), cube that (42875 cubic inches), despite the fact that Minecraft has cubes, and multiply 42875 cubic inches by 125, which is about 5.4 million cubic inches (exactly 5359375 cubic inches)! Also, this is exact IRL (in real life) measurements. The volume of the planet of Minecraft is 2.6*(10^14) cubic miles, which isn't even as big as Jupiter, despite that the volume is 3.43*(10^14) cubic miles! Woah!!

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  • That is 136128.1 IRL cubic meters! Commented Oct 21, 2017 at 21:56
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    I don't know what you're basing this on, but most "Minecraft world is bigger than Earth" assessments are based on the standard 1 meter conversion - i.e. it has many more blocks in each direction than the number of meters (20 million) in any direction on Earth, not that the blocks themselves are bigger. Commented Oct 22, 2017 at 0:54
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    Aside from this being the wrong interpretation of those external sources, your math relating to cubic measurements is off. 5.4 million in^3 is 88 m^3 (because you need to multiply by the cube of the inch -> meter conversion factor to convert in^3 -> m^3); and if something is "125 times bigger", either that means you should multiply by 125^3, or it would be more useful to write that as 5^3 (depending on whether that's 125 times more volume, or length). Commented Oct 22, 2017 at 12:16
  • @EthanKaminski look at youtube.com/watch?v=jL80LeiX6TU. Then, go to google.com/…. You should see the side is rounded to 5 when rounding to nearest whole. Cube 5, and you get 125. Commented Jan 6, 2018 at 3:42
  • In the first 20 seconds of that video, it says that blocks are 1 cubic meter in size. So, that should be the starting point for calculations. Commented Jan 6, 2018 at 6:35

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