Tell me more ×
Game Development Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professional and independent game developers. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote -1 down vote favorite

Before Minecraft Beta 1.8, when you reached about x:3000000 y:3000000, the terrain generator would freak out and begin generating broken scary land. What went on in the MC code to provoke this? Why didn't it just completely stop generating? Why does the game still break at locations very far from spawn? What is the cause of this game breaking bug?

share|improve this question
4  
Notch wrote about this himself in Terrain generation, Part 1. He wasn't actually aware of what caused it, and according to the Minecraft Wiki page on the Far Lands the fix was entirely by accident. – Jonathan Hobbs Sep 18 '12 at 4:54
1  
Is this more than just a trivia question? Or are you experiencing/trying to avoid something similar with your terrain generation code? – Byte56 Sep 18 '12 at 5:01
@JonathanHobbs, your comment is the answer, you could post it as an answer and get upvote for it. – BobSort Sep 18 '12 at 9:27
@BobSort No it isn't. I was just saying Notch doesn't know, which isn't answering what happens. Someone else might've dug into the code and found out exactly what was happening. – Jonathan Hobbs Sep 18 '12 at 10:07

closed as not a real question by Byte56, Trevor Powell, Tetrad♦ Sep 19 '12 at 16:10

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

up vote 3 down vote

Why does the game still break at locations very far from spawn?

Everything has a limit, especially the numbers on a computer. Assuming he uses floating point numbers in most places, the precision at that point would be very low. My calculations say that it's about 0.25: http://ideone.com/xD7Tm

the terrain generator would freak out and begin generating broken scary land

My guess is that position properties were added in the seed value, making it break a lot of calculations along the way.

share|improve this answer

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.