Minecraft is a game full of mystery. Have we seen everything there is to see in it? Or are there still things left to be discovered…?
Transcript:
Are Minecraft worlds as off-putting to you as they are to me?
Don’t get me wrong, I think the worlds Minecraft can generate are beautiful at times. But there’s this undercurrent of… something. Something I can’t quite put into words. Almost like someone is… Hmm.
The worlds of Minecraft are incredibly unique and I’m gonna take you on a journey to see some of it’s nicest and weirdest areas. And perhaps some of it’s scary areas. Welcome to Video Game World Tours and this… is Minecraft.
The Overworld. It’s something we’re all intimately familiar with at this point. You spawn in after creating a new world and the first thing you do is survey the landscape. You look for trees, villages, caves. You start making plans.
A lot of what you come across will be mundane. A simple open field, a forest, a desert. It’s mostly analogous to what you’d see in the real world.
But occasionally, Minecraft throws a real curve ball.
A floating island, a village built along the side of a mountain, an overhang with a ton of monsters inside. A bizarre landmark stands out in an otherwise ordinary landscape. The game needs all those boring fields and deserts for these unconventional spots to stick out.
And those weird quirks in the terrain generation can often be inspiration.
At the beginning my most recent world, I came across this cave in the middle of an Ice River. Once I stepped foot inside, I was awestruck. This was my first time playing with the new cave generation in 1.18 and I loved just how much open space there was. I knew I had to build my base here.
You don’t find places like this in the real world. That’s what makes Minecraft worlds so interesting. 80% of the time they’re abstractions of what you’d see in real life, and 20% of the time it’s crazy stuff that couldn’t exist outside of a video game.
But also… there’s beauty in the mundane. A simple plains biome is still beautiful. It’s not as striking as a massive floating island, but if you catch it at just the right time of day, from just the right angle, you’ll be struck with this sense of appreciation. So many little systems working together to come up with this one-of-a-kind patch of land.
That’s really important to me. Each little area you come across is entirely unique. You might find some similar chunks in a world with another seed, but at the finest level, it’s still different.
Through that, each world is unique. A bunch of different randomly generated puzzle pieces are put together randomly and what you end up with is radically different from the next assemblage of blocks.
And yet there’s something… off-putting about the game’s expansiveness. It’s hard to put into words, really.
I’m reminded of the backrooms here. What sticks out to me about the idea of the backrooms is the fact that it’s practically infinite. You could wander around for years and find nothing. While Minecraft does have a world limit of 30 million blocks, that’s practically infinite for me. I could spend hundreds of hours just walking in game and nothing would change. The same biomes, the same villages, the game would generate the same stuff for me as I walk hundreds of thousands of blocks out from spawn.
I don’t know what it is, but it’s kinda weird imagining myself as a tiny little dot on a 30 million by 30 million block map wandering around aimlessly. Every 16 block chunk is unique on its own, but when compiled together, that uniqueness fades into the background as you walk through the hundredth taiga biome. You’re but a tiny part of a world much, much bigger than you.
(Interlude)
The Overworld is Minecraft’s identity. People build their houses there, their farms, their… everything. Mojang definitely haven’t been afraid to tweak it’s generation over the years, but somehow, it’s still maintained an identity. That of a world much like our own, but dialed up a bit.
We’ll take our next stop at the world below the world. The Nether
I don’t have a lot to say about the Nether really. The generation feels slightly different from the caves in the Overworld, which is nice. To me, the Nether is defined by its wide open areas with lava pools below. This is supposed to be a dangerous place for gameplay purposes, and it definitely feels like one.
(Interlude)
Our next stop is The End. This is probably the least visited dimension, but it still brings something unique to the game. The Overworld and the Nether have some grounding in reality. Forests kinda look like this, and the Nether is pretty much just a cave with lava at the bottom. But The End is alien. There’s floating islands, massive Obsidian pillars, strange cities built for angry teleporting boxes.
The absurdness of this place is emphasized by the method required to reach it. You have to craft special eyes from the drops of enemies. Then they’re placed in End Portal Frames, and when all 12 are placed, the portal to The End opens up.
Most of the game has been you crafting tools from wood and iron or building electrical devices, but this is ritualistic. Magical.
In The End, you’re exposed to the void. In both the Overworld and the Nether, bedrock lies at the bottom of the world. But in The End, there’s nothingness. If you fall below Y 0, you take damage until you die.
It’s a dangerous place, perhaps even more dangerous than the Nether.
But it also feels non-hostile.
The Nether is dangerous AND hostile. There’s a ton of mobs out to kill you on sight.
Enderman, the mob you’ll see the most in The End, is passive. Well, it’s passive until you look at it in the eye. At which point it attempts to beat you to death.
But the fact it’s passive until you lock eyes with it is interesting. It’s like they don’t care about you walking around as long as you play by their rules.
(Interlude)
That’s the final dimension in the game, but I still have a ton more to talk about.
When making a world, you can tell the game to generate everything in a certain way. What I showed towards the beginning of the video was the baseline.
And this… is Amplified.
I love… the idea of Amplified.
I think the mountains going up to build limit are beautiful. The sheer scale of everything compared to normal generation is breathtaking. What would be a simple hill in a normal world is a massive mountain in Amplified. Just flying around one of these worlds and soaking in everything is a blast.
But none of that matters if it’s not fun to play in.
I like exploring Amplified worlds in Creative because I can fly around. With simple walking and jumping in Survival, just getting from one place to another is cumbersome. Thankfully Elytra exist, so you could fly around, but that’s a late-game feature. Up until that point, you’re gonna be scaling hundred block tall mountains on foot.
While these worlds are a nightmare to play in Survival, they’re fun to just explore for the sake of it.
(Interlude)
Another unique terrain generation setting is Superflat.
This is the unsettling aspect of Minecraft cranked up to 13. Not only is the world practically infinite. It’s 100% flat. Three dirt blocks, bedrock, and then the void. That’s all there is. Villages will generate if you let them, but I disabled them here. This is a perfectly flat plane going on for tens of millions of blocks.
At least in a normal world, chunks are generated randomly the further you go out. Each spot contains some random set of blocks in a random order.
Here, it’s always the same 4 layers.
It’s even more bizarre if you dig through those layers and are able to see them all at once. Those 4 layers are like a sheet of paper stretching out as far as the eye can see. There’s no support in any way, it’s just floating in the vast nothingness of space.
(Interlude)
Our last stop is a special one. It’s one not even available in the current version. We’re taking a trip into decade’s past to discover what Minecraft was like back then. Because while the Minecraft of then is similar in a lot of ways to the Minecraft of today, there’s still some key distinctions.
Most noticeably is the textures.
The grass is way more saturated than the grass of today. Leaves pop out at you. Everything’s a lot more colorful.
And that was key to early Minecraft. Even in the earliest version available on the Minecraft launcher, the grass was still a bright, eye-burning, neon green. They eventually moderated the saturation of the texture in later versions, but when people think about Minecraft back in the day, they think of that grass texture.
Early Minecraft was mysterious. It’s hard to say, but I imagine a lot of people back in the day had to lower the render distance to get the game running well. And when you do that, this ominous fog takes over.
You go from happy little adventure game to Silent Hill. It’s bizarre how one little setting can completely change the atmosphere of a game. Something could be waiting for you just out of render distance and you wouldn’t know until you’re practically face to face with it.
Early on in the game’s lifespan, people didn’t know what to expect. Yeah, development had mostly been focused on light-hearted adventure stuff, but what if Notch snuck in a spooky creature? What if he added some being that follows you around that never interacts with you? That’s something he totally could have done and not told anyone.
Minecraft back in the day was a hotbed for “haunted game”-type creepypastas. And what made those so successful back then, is that the game was small. Like I said, this was a thing a single developer could just sneak in.
Nowadays, if someone tried to say some ominous mob called… I unno, Boney Bradley, was following them around, people would instantly dismiss it. There’s like a billion people playing the game and nobody else has reported seeing Boney Bradley, nobody has datamined Boney Bradley from the files, and Mojang adding Boney Bradley in the first place just doesn’t match the direction the game had been going up to that point.
But back in the day, it was the wild west. There weren’t as many people to poke their noses into the game files to look for secrets and people didn’t know what to expect.
Your imagination ran hogwild.
(Interlude)
If you wanna see me talk some more about Minecraft, check out this video I did on Redstone. It’s a system that’s easy to learn but hard to master, and I think it’s brilliant. See you on the next Video Game World Tours.