THIS is how Minecraft Works 💎⛏️

Have you ever wondered how many  grains of sand are on this planet? Well …a rough estimate is…over 7 QUINTILLION! That’s a 7 followed by 18 zeros. And yet, that’s not even half the   number of the unique worlds in Minecraft. So how does Minecraft—and other games like it  

Build such complex, beautifully crafted yet fully procedural worlds?   I’m Alan Zucconi, and in this documentary   we’ll explore how the game generates its worlds: from its tallest mountain, to its deepest cave.   Welcome to the World Generation of Minecraft. And if by the end of this video you’ve learnt  

Something new about the game you love I hope I’ll have earned your subscription!   For many of you watching,  Minecraft might be the first   –and perhaps the only–game you’ve played in which worlds are not hand   crafted by a level designer, but are instead created procedurally.  

And yet, the Guinness World Record for the first  game to feature a procedurally generated world   goes to “Elite”, originally  developed for the BBC Micro   in 1984. The great-grandfather of the  more recent “Elite: Dangerous” from 2014.   Generating new worlds automatically might  appeal to some as a lazy way to create endless  

Content for a game. But actually it’s… quite the  opposite! You need to be such a good programmer   and such a good level designer …that you can  teach a machine what a good level looks like.   The content must be diverse enough to look  novel, but not so diverse that it looks  

Atypical. And it must create worlds that are  not only interesting to look at, but playable   in a way that—regardless of their actual  difficulty—feel fair to the player.   Procedural content generation is definitely  not for the faint-hearted. But no matter how  

Complex your algorithms are, they’re all  powered by one thing only: randomness.   And Minecraft is not an exception: each  world starts from a seed: which is basically   a number used to initialise the terrain  generation and everything it will contain.   These algorithms might be random, but  they are also deterministic. It means  

That given the same initial conditions–the same  seed–they’ll always produce the same results.   And this is why each Minecraft world  can be recreated just from its seed.   And since the seeds themselves are stored using  64 bits, there are 18.4 quintillion unique  

Values—and unique worlds—that can be created. No Man’s Sky is also using 64-bit seeds,   which explains why–incidentally–there are 18.4  quintillion unique planets in that game too.   But how can random numbers–which is essentially  your computer throwing dice–create worlds? Well,   perhaps it’s best to start from something  slightly smaller than Minecraft.  

“Hello Viewer, Welcome to the Dungeons of Doom”.   Originally released in 1980, “Rogue” is generally  credited with being the first graphical adventure   game and it served as a major source of  inspiration for the thousands of dungeon   crawlers which came in the following decades. Minecraft too shares many of the characteristics  

That made Rogue so iconic: and  generating procedural dungeons for   the player to explore is just one of them. Rogue is generally credited with being the   first “graphical” adventure game, and it  probably was at least one of the first   So how did Rogue create its  “Dungeons of Doom” back in 1980?  

Talking about “ typicality”  …have you figured it out yet?   Each level is divided into a 3 by 3 grid,  with a random room placed in each cell.   The algorithm proceeds by selecting a room for the  player to spawn in, and marks it as “reachable”.  

It then iterates through all of the other rooms,   connecting them to a previously reached neighbour  (if possible) or skipping to the next one.   A stair to the next level is then placed  in the last room to be connected.   “Rogue” can also feature dead ends, secret  doors and even monster rooms! All done  

In roughly 9.000 lines of code over 300  functions! …307, to be precise! By comparison,   Minecraft 1.18 counts over 52.000  functions from approximately 4200 files!   So get your diamond armour and  your enchanted sword ready,   because we are about to descend into the  treacherous depths of Minecraft’s source code.  

Regardless of its complexity, it is  undeniable that the universe crafted by Mojang   is built upon ideas, techniques and algorithms  that were pioneered by previous games (and even   movies), some of which date from decades ago. And so, it would really be a disservice to talk  

About the history of Minecraft without mentioning  the actual game that inspired it: “Infiniminer”.   At a first glance, it looks like a mining  game where two teams are competing to   collect as much ore, gold and diamonds  as possible. But “Infinimer” was as much  

About mining as it was about building;  not just your base, but entire stories.   It’s easy to see how this game directly inspired  Minecraft; from the blocks, to the pickaxe,   from the caves to lava lakes, from the gold to the  diamonds, from the sky to the void! Even the TNT!  

In a parallel universe, this is what  Minecraft could have been instead.   While far from being infinite, each “Infiniminer”  map is indeed generated procedurally.   It all starts with a solid chunk of dirt,  in which a number of ore veins are painted.  

Each one begins at a random position, with each  iteration moving the vein in a random direction.   This technique is–unsurprisingly–known  as “random walk”.   Mountains and caves are created  with the exact same technique:   the former erected by replacing air with  dirt, the latter carved by replacing dirt  

With air. Diamonds, meanwhile, are randomly  scattered towards the bottom part of the level.   While this might sound simple–perhaps too  simple–it was not dissimilar to how Minecraft   worked for the first nine months of  its development. In its very first  

Iteration–known at the time as “Cave Game”–each  world was only 256 blocks wide, and 64 tall.   And while “Infiniminer” never really intended to  be–well–infinite, it took indeed nine months to   finally fulfil the dream of a boundless Minecraft  world. And it happened using a very simple trick:  

Every time the player goes too far, a  new “chunk” of the world is created.   After that, each world would only be  bound in size by software limitations:   on a 32-bit system for example, that’s roughly up  to 4.3 billion blocks away from the spawn point.  

But wait! Before you start packing for the  journey, you can’t actually go that far!   Players are restricted to a  60,000,000 by 60,000,000 blocks area.   Which doesn’t sound like a  lot when compared to infinity.   But still, that’s seven times bigger than Earth’s  surface. Just about half the size of Neptune.  

And even so, bigger doesn’t  necessarily mean better.   No version of Minecraft does really offer any new  gameplay mechanic at a scale beyond 25.000 blocks.   While the world looks rich and diverse up close,  a pattern appears the further we zoom out.  

Eventually, each sufficiently large patch of the  world will look indistinguishable from any other.   At that scale, Minecraft is isotropic, pretty much  like our universe is expected to be at its largest   scale. This reveals the “true” scale at which the  game was designed to be played. And, consequently,  

The scale at which its world generation is  truly meant to operate. And to be enjoyed.   You might have noticed by now how all modern  Minecraft maps look somewhat “patchy”:   this is because each colour represents a  different “biome”: a region with distinct   geographical features such as vegetation,  animals, buildings and climate conditions.  

Nine months after the “infinite update”,  Alpha 1.2.0–better known as the “Halloween   Update”–introduced ten of those biomes. The way in which the game decided which part   of the world belonged to which biome was fairly  simple, and relied on so-called “noise maps”.  

In a nutshell, these are images whose pixels are  produced using random numbers. Based on their   initial settings and configuration they can be  used to generate a variety of different patterns.   Early versions of Minecraft used three of these  noise maps. One to determine the terrain height,  

And two for the temperature and rainfall. And it was the combination of the last two that   ultimately determined the biome of a region. High temperature and low humidity? Desert biome!   Low temperature and low humidity? Tundra biome! …and so on.  

What worked well is that because the temperature  and rainfall maps were fairly smooth,   so were the transitions between biomes.  Meaning that you would have rarely   encountered a forest next to–let’s say–a savanna. But because the biomes were independent from the  

Terrain, you could have them at any height,  making for some pretty unusual landscapes.   A big overhaul came with Beta  1.8: the “Adventure Update”.   First, it got rid of the Far Lands. They  marked a sort-of point of no-return,   after which the world generation  simply stopped working properly.  

They were found at around 12 million blocks  in any direction from the spawn point.   But getting rid of the Far Lands  was just the side effect of a much   deeper change. The “Adventure Update” came  with an entirely new terrain generator!  

Veteran players might remember that during  this era, worlds had a very distinct vibe.   They were somewhat “continental”. Big  islands separated by an even bigger ocean.   This changed completely with Minecraft 1.7.2–best  known as “The Update that Changed the World”.  

And indeed it changed it quite a lot! Starting  by massively reducing the size of the oceans.   Within the course of three years, Mojang had  significantly changed the way worlds generate.   Twice! And this had quite a profound impact on  all those servers that had been around for a long  

Time, such as the infamous 2b2t–Minecrat’s  oldest anarchy server. FitMC made a very   interesting video showing how something as  simple as upgrading to a different version   permanently scarred the already  distressed landscape of 2b2t.   Despite some other tweaks  in the following updates,  

The world generator introduced in Minecraft 1.7.2  has been pretty much in use for almost 10 years.   And although Minecraft 1.18 somewhat changed  that, the worlds that for years you explored,   mined, built, loved and lost …they were  all crafted by the same algorithm.  

So I know why you’re here: you want  to know how that actually works.   Sooooo. Minecraft uses congruential  generators to seed Perlin noise maps   which serve as octaves for fractal Brownian  motion noise maps, which are then processed in   a layered stack of cellular automaton-like  operators to determine the biomes, which  

Ultimately modulate the amplitude of the fractal  density map that controls the terrain height.   Ok. Perhaps that was not the most  effective way to explain how it works.   So what about if I show you instead?  

It all starts with the so-called “biome map”:  which serves as a template to dictate which type   of biome goes in each region of the world.  Plains, deserts, mountains and oceans are   all examples of possible biomes, and nowadays  the Overworld alone counts over 60 of them.  

The second phase of the world generation focuses  on the terrain, and works in three steps.   The first one creates a basic outline,  using the biome map to decide the height   each region can have. The result is a solid,  barren landscape, entirely made out of stone,  

Where every empty block below  y=62 is turned into water.   The following step replaces all the  surface stone blocks with a type   appropriate to their biome. Grass for plains,  sand for desert, gravel for oceans, and so on.   This is also where the bedrock layer is generated.  Interestingly enough, in the Java Edition its  

Pattern doesn’t depend on the world seed, and  is the same across every Minecraft world.   In the third step, caves and ravines  are literally carved out of stone.   Finally, the third phase populates  the world with the remaining features.   Structures like villages, strongholds  and ocean monuments are placed first,  

Followed by decorative elements like  trees and grass. This is also when ore   veins are added in the world, in a process not  dissimilar to the ones used by “Infiniminer”.   Generating the biome map is the most  critical phase, as it serves as the  

Blueprint the rest of the world is built from. The map is built using a sequence of fairly simple   operations, referred to as “layers”, which  are stacked on top of each other. Each layer   takes the biome map from the previous one, adds  some details, and passes it to the next one.  

Minecraft worlds are crafted using  not one but four different stacks.   The main one is responsible for  the land, while two smaller ones   are used to draw the rivers and  to give temperatures to the ocean.   An additional stack is used to add  even more nuances to hills and rivers.  

It all starts with a noise map–an image generated  randomly—which features only two colours,   representing land and ocean in a 1 to 10  proportion. The process is not dissimilar   to rolling a D10 for each pixel: if you get a 1,  it becomes land, otherwise it becomes an ocean.  

Minecraft obviously doesn’t have a D10  at its disposal, but it can nonetheless   “roll” random numbers using what is known  as a quadratic congruential generator.   Internally, the source code calls this the  “Island Layer”, as each individual pixel of  

This noise map will be the template from which  continents will emerge. Each pixel, in fact,   corresponds to 4096 in-game blocks. The deeper we go in the biome stack,   the more refined the details added are. This  is possible due to a series of scaling layers,  

Which increase by a factor of two the resolution  at which the following layers will operate.   For example, if a pixel from the Island  layer corresponds to 4096 blocks,   each pixel added after the zoom will  have an in-game size of 2048 blocks.  

Minecraft is using the Zoom layers for  another important task: adding variation.   Instead of scaling the maps perfectly, they  sometimes introduce some small changes.   They are coded to work more like an  old photocopier: adding the occasional   mistake and smudging the edges of what would  otherwise be some perfectly square islands.  

The next layer encountered in the biome stack  is designed to expand the existing islands,   creating a more connected world. Every piece of land has a chance   of expanding into the corners of nearby shallow  waters, but can also be eroded in the process.  

If we run this layer over and over again, we  can see that it doesn’t always produce the   same effect. Even layers introduce randomness! So perhaps a better way to understand how most   of them work, is to see them as stochastic  cellular automata. Which is just a fancy way  

Of saying that they’re simple rules that change a  pixel based on the colour of the surrounding ones.   The “stochastic” part comes into play because some  of those rules might be driven by randomness.   Cellular automata look deceptively simple, but  they hide an endless universe of complexity. And  

Are one of the most used tools when it comes to  procedural content generation in video games.   If you want to learn more about them, there’s  an entire documentary on this channel.   Most of the land shape is created by  alternating AddIsland and Zoom layers.  

This allows the world to have prominent  features at various different resolutions.   The ocean, on the other hand, is  mostly shaped by these two layers.   The first one was added in the “Adventure Update”  to specifically make the word less “continental”   and more “connected”. Internally, Minecraft  literally calls it “remove too much ocean”,  

Leaving very little to the imagination. All ocean regions surrounded by more ocean   have a 50% chance of becoming land. This not only creates more fragmented coasts,   but also brings the amount of land versus  ocean from barely 27% to over 50%.  

The next layer from the main stack marks all ocean  regions which are surrounded by more ocean as   “deep”. This will later give rise to  shallow ocean and deep ocean biomes.   Up to this point, we have only mentioned two  things: land and ocean. As a prelude to biomes,  

A series of climate layers are responsible  for determining the temperature   of each region: either Warm, Temperate,  Cold or Freezing. Later in the stack,   this information will determine which  biomes these regions can turn into.   First: each piece of land is randomly assigned  a temperature: Warm, Cold or Freezing,  

In proportions of 4, 1 and 1 respectively. With such a random distribution,   you could very well have a desert next to a snowy  tundra. To avoid that, the following two layers   blend each region’s temperature, ensuring  a smoother transition between them.  

Any warm land adjacent to a cool or freezing  region will turn into a temperate one instead.   And any freezing land adjacent to a warm  or temperate region will turn cold.   These temperatures are ultimately the  main factor in determining which biome  

A piece of land will end up being. For  example, Warm regions have a 50% chance   of turning into a Desert, 33% into a  Savanna, and the remaining 17% into Plains.   In a similar process, Temperate, Cold and Freezing  regions will have certain probabilities of turning  

Into their respective Temperate, Cold and Freezing  biomes (such as forests, taigas and ice plains).   Up to this point, the landscape  already looks familiar,   but lacks variation within the  individual biomes. To fix this,   this layer has a small chance of converting a  biome into its “hilly” variant. For example, it  

Could turn a desert into a desert hill, a forest  into a wooded hill, or a savanna into a plateau.   This layer also works on ocean regions, and  can turn deep oceans into plains or forests.   This is what disseminates the  ocean with a lot of tiny islands.  

The decision on which areas to change  comes from an additional noise map   which is generated by a separate stack. When  the colour of each pixel is chosen at random   and independently from the others–like  in this case–we talk about “white noise”.  

Which is pretty much the same distribution you  get when an old TV is not receiving any signal.   Usually, every layer operates on the  map locally, ignoring the big picture.   And with so many steps it’s hard to  guarantee a harmonious blend between biomes.  

To avoid any problem, two more layers  are tasked with ensuring a gentle   transition between different climates  and extreme regions exists at all times.   The second one, Shore, also adds beaches  where land meets shallow oceans.   Rare biomes deserve a special mention, as their  generation works in a slightly different way.  

On top of assigning temperatures,  the climate layer has a 1 in 13   chance of tagging a region as “special”. When the time comes to assign biomes   based on temperatures, special  regions get a special treatment.   Warm, Temperate and Cold climate regions all have  their own special biome variants they turn into:  

Badland plateaus, jungles and giant tree taigas. A different story takes place for the more   niche biomes such as bamboo  jungles and sunflower plains,   as the idea is not to have them on their own,  but as small patches within much larger regions.   And so, two additional layers are  responsible for randomly turning  

One jungle out of 10 into a bamboo jungle, and  one plains out of 57 into a sunflower plains.   The somewhat legendary mushroom islands are  created in a similar fashion. With each ocean   block surrounded by water having a 1 in 100  chance of turning into a mushroom field. The  

Layer responsible for this is pretty high  in the stack, which is why mushroom islands   tend to be quite large and uniform. This is also one of the rarest biomes   in Minecraft, and the only one in which  hostile mobs don’t naturally spawn.  

The main stack focuses mostly on the land,  and does nothing to create rivers. They’re   Generated in a separate stack, which operates  on the same noise map used for the hills.   After being scaled several times,  the noise map looks quite patchy.   The River Layer works as a  kind-of edge detection algorithm,  

Creating candidate river beds  along the seams of those patches.   They are then smoothed to fix any gaps  or rough edges with a low-pass filter,   and finally feed into the main stack  through the River Mixer Layer.   That simply carves a river into the land, with  the exception of snowy tundra biomes–which  

Get frozen rivers instead–and mushroom fields,  which apparently have no rivers at all.   The last bit involved in the biome  generation is the Ocean Temperature stack.   It adds variety to the oceans which–besides  being shallow or deep–would otherwise   have no other distinctive features. The stack creates its own temperature map  

Using a technique known as Perlin noise. That is  a very common algorithm for procedural noise maps,   which was originally developed in 1982–not  for a game–but for the movie “Tron”.   If you create a white noise map by rolling a dice  for each pixel–like the first layer was doing–the  

Overall result will look unpleasantly rugged,  because nearby pixels will likely have very   different values. Perlin noise, instead, is known  to create very pleasant, very smooth images.   And it does so by generating random values on  a grid much larger than the final image we want  

To render. All the points in between are then  gently interpolated between those random values,   resulting in a much smoother finish. There  is much more to Perlin noise than this,   but that is as far as we will go. Once ready, the map is scaled up to size  

And merged into the full stack  through the OceanMixer Layer.   This finally gives a biome to the ocean regions,  which can now be warm, lukewarm, cold or frozen.   The very final step–this time for real–is  to upscale the map two more times.  

This is not done using the traditional Zoom  layers that we have seen before, but it relies   on a different technique which breaks up even  more the edges between the different biomes.   After this, we are left with the actual  biome map, in which each pixel corresponds  

To an actual in-game block. We are  now ready to move to the next stage!   The second phase of the world generation focuses  on the terrain, and works in three steps.   In the third step, caves and ravines  are literally carved out of stone.  

This is done with a slightly more sophisticated  variant of “random walk”, called “Perlin   worms”. But at its core, the idea is the same:  gently moving a sphere in random directions,   carving long tunnels along its path. Out of the three steps that Minecraft  

Takes to generate its terrain, the first one  definitely needs a bit more explanation.   Minecraft builds a complex and interesting terrain  through a technique known as “fractal Brownian   motion noise”: yet another type of noise map. Fractal noise is constructed by adding together  

Several Perlin noise maps, sampled at different  scales. Each new one—called an octave—has double   the resolution of the previous one,  but its contribution is also halved.   Fractal noise is famously good at  generating plausible-looking terrains.   And it works because it adds different  amounts of details at different scales.  

Exactly what we can see on a real landscape. Minecraft could have easily sampled a fractal   map at every (x,z) coordinate to get the  respective terrain height–like you see here.   But this is not how the game actually works! So how is Minecraft getting the terrain height?  

Well, it starts at the very top of the world, at  y=255, and keeps moving downward, calculating the   fractal noise value at each specific (x,y,z)  location along that vertical column. The first   y coordinate for which the fractal noise is  equal to or above zero will become the final  

Height of the terrain at that (x, z) coordinate. An early devlog described the rationale behind   this process saying that we should interpret “the noise value as the “density”, where   anything lower than 0 would be air, and anything  higher than or equal to 0 would be ground.”  

That very same post also mentioned how  computationally expensive this process is. So,   as a form of optimisation, this fractal  noise map is sampled at a lower resolution,   with the world split into  “cells” of 4x8x4 blocks each.   To be more precise, Minecraft isn’t using one  single fractal noise map: it’s using three  

Of them! The reason is simple: those maps are  awesome, but they are also fairly uniform. By   using two, initialised with different parameters,  and blended according to a third noise map,   Minecraft is able to add even more interesting,  natural-looking variation to the terrain.  

But that’s not all! In earlier versions of  Minecraft, the biomes and the terrain height map   were independent of each other. But from Beta 1.8  onwards, that is no longer the case, and the biome   map directly affects the terrain generation  by modulating how tall each biome can be.  

It does so via two parameters: “depth”  and “scale”. Those values depend on the   type of biome, and represent its average  height and how much it can vary from that.   Having the biome directly linked to the  terrain height ultimately results in a more  

Natural looking landscape, preventing bizarre  things like …a mountain beach, for example.   Technically speaking, there are at least two more  noise maps involved in the terrain generation. The   “Depth noise” map adds a bit of extra variability  to compensate for the fact that the interpolation  

Between cells smooths out the finer details. And the “Surface noise” which determines how   many blocks of stone need to be replaced  with the default block in each biome.   And there are probably at least  ten more, involved in minor details  

Such as the flower distribution. But we are  not going to go that deep in this video!   After the biome map and the terrain height, we  are pretty much left with a finished landscape,   but devoid of any vegetation,  animal, structure or even ore.  

And yet, no Minecraft world would be truly  complete without its dozens of different features:   grass, flowers, trees, mushrooms, mineshafts,  dungeons, ruined portals, villages and outposts,   ore veins, dripstones and amethyst geodes,  fossils, ocean monuments, witch huts,   jungle and desert temples, icebergs, igloos,  shipwrecks, ocean ruins and woodland mansions.  

Because each one spawns according to its  very own rules, it would be impossible   to cover them all in this video. So let’s  just focus on the only structures that are   really necessary to win the game: strongholds. These underground dungeons serve as the only way  

To access The End dimension. Each world contains  only 128 of them, which spawn inside 8 concentric   rings, the last of which has a radius between  22 and 24 thousand blocks from the origin.   Within each ring, the strongholds are generated  at roughly equal angles from the centre.  

While the actual strongholds are placed along  with other structures in the “Population phase”,   their position is calculated even before the  terrain generates. Unlike all other features,   Strongholds are key to the completion of the  game, making them a critical step that the world  

Generation needs to prioritise over cosmetic  decorations or other overly abundant features.   Congratulations: you are now a  procedural generation expert!   Now let’s take everything you’ve learnt  so far, and throw it into the lava.   Because with the “Caves & Cliffs Update”,  Minecraft 1.18 brings on a completely new terrain  

Generator. While before the landscape was only 128  blocks tall, now it can stretch up to 320 blocks.   With so much more vertical space to play with,  it is not surprising that one of the biggest   changes is mountains, which are now much taller  and proportionate to the rest of the world.  

And to avoid disasters when playing  old worlds in Minecraft 1.18,   there is some clever blending going on. This  helps the new chunks to seamlessly integrate   with the surrounding landscape and biomes. But what really makes the difference is that   Minecraft 1.18 uses a completely new  algorithm to generate its biome maps.  

And this can be seen quite clearly when  we compare them to older versions built   using the layer stack we have seen before. And even more important is the fact that now   biomes are–to a certain extent–3D! This allows  underground caves to have their own biomes,  

As the much anticipated lush caves do. And this plays an important role in the new   cave system too. On top of carving its caves using  Perlin worms, Minecraft 1.18 introduces three   new types of caves: cheese caves, spaghetti caves  and noodle caves. Yes, you heard that right.  

They all generate the same way: applying  a threshold to a 3D perlin noise map   to decide which underground areas are going  to be carved out of the solid stone. And just   by seeding these noise maps with different  parameters, they can produce large caves,  

Long tunnels, or a fine network of interconnected  passageways. Cheese, spaghetti and noodles.   And there is also a new feature  that creates pillars inside caves.   The update also ties the cave generation with  a new ore distribution, which is supposed to   encourage digging and exploration. So I know what you’re going to ask.  

How does Minecraft 1.18 actually work?   Well… it’s complicated. And also, given how  recent it is, it might be a bit premature   to go into the details of a system that  is still subject to fixes and changes.  

But just to quench your thirst, the biome and  terrain are now even more linked together.   If before the landscape was modulated by its  biome, now they both depend on a 3D climate map.   Each quarter-chunk–an area of 4x4x4 blocks–gets  five climate parameters from a noise map:  

Temperature, humidity, continentalness,  erosion and weirdness.   Besides the first obvious two, continentalness  controls how far a region is from the coast,   and erosion dictates how flat or mountainous  the terrain should be. The last one, weirdness,   determines biome variants. Each biome is defined by   its own ideal temperature, humidity,  continentalness, erosion and weirdness.  

With each quarter-chunk assigned to the biome  that most closely matches those five parameters.   A standard desert, for instance, will have  high temperature, continentalness and erosion,   while low humidity and weirdness. All regions  matching those parameters will become deserts.   It is very curious that this new  system works in a similar way  

To Alpha 1.2.0, but with 5 parameters–or 6  if you include the depth–instead of just 2.   There are obviously so many more features  that make Minecraft the charming game   that it is today. And almost every  one comes with its own noise map.  

The new version includes over 50  of them just for the terrain.   No documentary about world generation  would ever be complete without mentioning   the amazing community that is actively  conducting research on and with Minecraft.   From the thousands who used distributed computing  platforms to find the seed of a lost world from  

A single image, to the team who discovered the  tallest cactus–which, by the way, is 33 blocks!   And how could we not mention The Generative  Design in Minecraft Competition, which every   year challenges its contestants to push the  procedural generation to its very limits.  

In the end, What has made Minecraft so  appealing–and what keeps people coming back to   it–is that all of its rewarding complexity emerges  from the interaction of very simple mechanics.   And this is true not just for its gameplay,  but for its world generation as well.  

And condensing over 10 years of that into a  single video was …definitely a challenging task!   But I hope watching this video was as  entertaining as it was for me making it.   And maybe–just maybe–I hope it helped you  see your good ol’ worlds with new eyes.