In the game Minecraft, you can explore a procedurally generated world unlike any other before it.
There are caves, mountains, forests, and even deserts. But the places you can go are only
limited by the world in which they inhabit. So how big is Minecraft?
Minecraft on PC features the largest world possible of any version of minecraft. In practical
terms, the terrain generation engine can can generate infinite number of blocks in any
direction, but the game itself limits the world with a boarder 60 million by 60 million
blocks. The world is limited to this size due to hard drive constraints. With each block
assigning 4 bits of information, Minecraft is technically about 410,000 terabytes at
it’s largest. With each Minecraft block being 1 meter by 1 meter by 1 meter, Minecraft’s
overworld surface area tops out at 3.6 billion square kilometers (1.4 billion miles). To
put this into perspective, the Minecraft overworld has about 7.1x more surface area than the
Earth itself. Every person who has ever lived, who is alive today, and who will ever live
could have been contained in only a small portion of a Minecraft world which is pretty
amazing.
In Minecraft, the overworld isn’t the only place you can visit. The nether is an alternate
reality filled with lava and strange creatures. The nether shares the same coordinate system
as the overworld but with a scaling factor of 1 to 8, meaning 1 block distance is equal
to 8 blocks in the overworld. With this reduction, the nether is about 53 million square kilometers
which is still about 5.7x larger than the United States and 40% the landmass of Earth.
So let’s say Minecraft with the overworld acting as the surface and the nether acting
as a moon. The planet would be about 2 and a half times wider than Earth and 5 times
wider than Mars. The nether on the other hand would be somewhere between Mercury and Io.
With these comparisons it becomes pretty clear just how much real estate there is in Minecraft.
If the entire size of Minecraft Overworld and Nether were to be maxed out and stored
on hard drives, it would require a facility that only companies like Google, Amazon, or
Microsoft could support. To put this into perspective, 300 hours of video is uploaded
to YouTube every second which accounts for about 1.1 terabytes per second of video. The
minecraft world would require the same space as 297 days worth of YouTube uploads. Judging
from the Google mega facilities, this would be very expensive to maintain.
But let’s assume Minecraft was not limited by the language in which it was written or
the hardware that was running on. Assuming an infinitely large hard drive fueling the
infinitely generating world, what would this mean? If the nether is only ⅛th the size
of the overworld and the overworld is infinite, wouldn’t that mean the nether was infinite?
Infinite isn’t big, it isn’t enormous, it isn’t tremendous, infinity just is…
Infinity is not a number, it’s an idea. It’s an idea that instils adventure, but
also complacency. When you know you can’t see everything, sometimes you begin to feel
as if you want to do nothing. Without boundaries some people lack the ability to function because
either deciding what they want to do prevents them from doing anything. This is why Minecraft
is such a great tool. It allows people to be in a world where anything is possible,
without boundaries, expectations, or goals. In this world, you can gain experience in
building wonderful things for the internal enjoyment alone even if you know nobody will
ever see it. This experience is intrinsic to that of an infinite world of infinite possibilities.
Because of this, Minecraft is much bigger than anyone could ever have imagined.