A talented player of Cities: Skylines has made a 1:1.5 scale recreation of the entire city of San Francisco, California, within a game that has only been out for a little over three weeks.

Paradox Interactive’s Cities: Skylines is one of this year’s biggest surprise hits so far, selling over 250k units in its first 24 hours and more than double that amount by the end of its first week. The city-building sim has broken previous sales records for Swedish developer Paradox Interactive, and less than a month after release, the game has already generated a dedicated fan base that has created some amazing cities.

Reddit user ixohoxi posted his creation yesterday, much to the admiration of his fellow players.

“I divided the districts according to SF Planning Department Neighborhood Group Map,” he explained. “In large districts I would break it down to smaller subdistricts. I also issue policies according to the real world. No reference here, just from my memory and Google street view. For example, I banned high-rise buildings in almost all districts except Financial District and SOMA. I also allowed ‘recreational use’ in Civic Center district.”

While ixohoxi was able to complete much of his project using the game’s native features, he also used a few mods to make the city more realistic, including a baseball stadium, as well as an imported map of the San Francisco road system. He notes that the roads were “pretty close,” but he had to rebuild the entire highway system. Ixohoxi is also quick to point out that due to the slightly reduced scale, his recreation is not perfect, and a few roads and locations are a little off or missing entirely.

While ixohoxi’s impressive creation is a labor of love (or perhaps obsession), it has raised interesting questions about possible uses for video games in real-world applications, such as city planning, road construction, resource management and so on. “I’ve plopped all the hospitals, fire depts, and police depts as close to the exact location as possible,” ixohoxi said. “Turned out the fire department coverage is not that good.”

You can view a full gallery of ixohoxi’s creation, complete with detailed neighborhood views, here.

Image credit: Norrus/Imgur