How Exactly Does Minecraft World Generation Work?

Mohit Varikuti
2 min readApr 17, 2022

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The seemingly endless variety of worlds in the upcoming No Mans Sky would not be possible without procedural generation. When it comes to PC games, procedural generation is used to automatically generate worlds and features without developers needing to create them. Procedural generation is widely used in games such as Minecraft, Terraria or No Mans Sky, which are based on open worlds where players are free to explore and interact. As mentioned earlier, this can be used in machine learning to create datasets that cover areas that are difficult or expensive to cover with conventional real-world data collection.

In video games using procedural world generation, the seed value for the map is a (relatively) short number or text string used to procedurally generate the game world (“map”). When you start Minecraft, a 64-bit random number called a Seed is generated (or chosen by the player), which is used to create the world. When you create a new world in Minecraft, you can choose to create your own world by entering a seed used by the world generator.

If you don’t specify a seed value when creating a new world, Minecraft will use a random seed value. If a player wants to use a specific seed to create a specific Minecraft world, they must do so before the world is created, as it cannot be changed later. Different seeds will create different worlds, and if you use the same seed, you will always get the same result (at least in the same version of Minecraft, since the details of terrain generation change from version to version). A special algorithm generates by randomly assigning values ​​known as Minecraft seed codes or simply Minecraft seed values.

If numbers were also used in Minecraft’s initial code, a special algorithm could create a staggering 281 trillion different worlds. This difference is because the Minecraft world generator can only recognize 4 billion words, so only Minecraft source code will be generated for those words. With these Minecraft seeds, 4 billion theoretical worlds can be created using just words. A seed is associated with a specific world, and can have different numbers to define it, as the possibilities for creating Minecraft worlds are nearly limitless.

Other biome tweaks take its infinite replay value to a whole other level. Landscape generation in Minecraft really takes place on two different levels: a separate “piece” and the world as a whole. Then, as you explore the world of Minecraft, new fragments will be generated around you, creating the illusion of a vast, seamless world. You can see new land being created as you move around the world.

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Mohit Varikuti
Mohit Varikuti

Written by Mohit Varikuti

Im some random highschooler on the internet who likes to write about AI and tech and stuff. Leave a follow if u like my stuff I really appreciate it!

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