There’s a place in Minecraft called the Far Lands. It’s the point where the game’s code, which builds each world procedurally, starts to collapse under the weight of its own sums, breaks apart and glitches out.
The New Yorker has a great interview with Kurt J. Mac, a man who is trying to walk to this point, the end of Minecraft’s world. He started his quest in March 2011, and is still going.
The sad/amazing part is that we know how far away the Far Lands are, at least in Kurt’s build of the game (newer versions of the game have had the “feature” removed). From the point at which you start your game, they’re 12,000km away. In his three years of walking, Kurt has travelled 700km. He’s…got some walking ahead of him.
He’ll never get there, but that’s not the point. The point is the journey, which he’s documenting on YouTube (and raising money for charity with!) as a sort of wandering podcast, each one not just a story of his travels, but an example of the crazy stories that can come out of playing Minecraft.
A JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE WORLD (OF MINECRAFT) [New Yorker]
Comments
12 responses to “A Man Has Spent Three Years Trying To Walk To The End Of Minecraft”
I used to watch this guy a while back… I figured that I’d just stop watching until he gets closer to his goal. I guess that’s gonna take a while.
Probably something like this:
http://pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/Questions/figures/edge_world.jpg
Run, Forest.
I think the point that he is raising for charity was skimmed over. The Far Lands or Bust (FLoB) series has raised much more than expected with every season. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in total
Yeah, with the casual way it was mentioned, I expected him to have only raised a few hundred at the most. But according to his latest video, he’s on $169,000 for season 4 alone.
There are FOUR seasons of this? And hundreds of thousands in charity donations? Well. The charity part, sure… people watch Desert Bus. But four seasons? Jesus WHY?
The guy must have a voice like the lovechild of Barry White and Ron Perlman who folks would pay to hear read the phone book.
(Edit: It just struck me that we are NOT too far away from a future in which people genuinely will not know what a phone book was.)
He so listens to this on a loop
“He’ll never get there, but that’s not the point. ”
Why won’t he get there? Because it will take so long? Because the game will break before he gets there? I don’t play Minecraft so can someone elaborate…?
Well ‘never’ is really exaggerated imo.
At the current speed it would take him about 48,4 years to reach the end.
12.000km – 700km already walked = 11.300km
11.300km / 233,33 km/year = 48 years
Sooo… he will get there. Eventually.
How many java updates has he done so far?
At his current rate of progress, it would take 52 years to get to the Far Lands, and 137 years to get to the actual edge of the map beyond that.
Ended up getting beaten to the comment :P.
Zeno said so.