The World is Flat
One man’s journey to the end of Minecraft.
DAY ONE
The sun rises over the ocean. I spend my first morning collecting wood for tools and a simple boat. By midday I am sailing east into the unknown. The sun is already starting to sink in the West before I see land.
For as long as I have played three-dimensional games, I have had a fascination with Over There. As a kid playing Doom, I would spend hours scrounging around for secret doors, convinced I could somehow walk to the grey-scale pixelated mountains of Phobos. Many years later, I would stand on the coast of Grand Theft Auto’s San Andreas and dream about crossing the ocean to a rest-of-the-world that existed in my mind, but nowhere in the game itself.
When I first heard of Minecraft, it wasn’t the ability to build whatever I wished that captured my attention. It was the fact that there would always be something on the other side of the ocean. Minecraft’s worlds are not just open; they are endless—as you travel further, more generates, forever and ever. Further, they are generated procedurally. Somewhere in the game’s code is an algorithm that takes the millions of cubes of Minecraft’s terrain and shapes them into mountains, plains, forests, oceans, caverns, and waterfalls. Every Minecraft world will be similar, but no two will be the same. You could walk forever and never stumble upon the same landscape twice.
So I decided I would. I generated a new world and started to walk East, to the dawn, to see what I could see.
