Java Edition distance effects

This feature is exclusive to Java Edition.

 

In Java Edition, certain game mechanics start to break down as the player's distance from the center of the world increases.

Vanilla bounds (X/Y/Z ±0–29,999,984)

Horizontal effects

World

• The End's generation is completely absent in repeating concentric rings centered on the world.^[1]
• Temperature distribution breaks at high distances,^[2] which can be easily noticed with the creation of snow and ice in mountains appearing blockier due to both world generation and subsequent regeneration from snowfall or freezing.

Sounds

• Many break down slightly.^[3]
  • Becomes considerably more pronounced beyond vanilla bounds at 2²⁸ (268,435,456) blocks.

Vertical effects

Entities

• Entities are immune to damage above 2²³ (8,388,608) blocks on the Y axis.^[4]

Rendering

• Rain and snow jitter and appear distorted at large heights.^[5]
• Lighting stops working beyond ±2,048 blocks on the Y axis, causing all entities (including the player) to appear completely black.^[6]

Beyond the vanilla world boundary (X/Y/Z ±29,999,984–2,147,483,647)

The contents of this section are not supported by Mojang Studios or the Minecraft Wiki.

Horizontal distances beyond 30 million blocks cannot be reached without modifications to the game's code.

Vertical distances beyond 20 million blocks cannot be reached with the /teleport command; they can only be reached by using external programs (e.g. NBT editors), or by modifying the game's code to remove this limitation.

Horizontal effects

Coordinates	Effects	Example
X/Z ±33,554,432 (±225)	Coordinates of all entities are slices of 134,217,728 (1⁄134,217,728 blocks). Lighting breaks down.[verify] All blocks appear completely black and are unaffected by sky and block light (light-emitting blocks may create a local area of light in its block space, but this cannot extend). As a result, hostile mob spawning is extremely common, cave ambience sounds can play, and mushrooms can spawn naturally. By opening the debug screen on these areas, the light level reported is always 0. It is effectively mandatory to use the night vision effect to facilitate any reasonable exploration beyond this point. This can be fixed by switching the data type to 64-bit floats in the lighting engine's algorithms. The game crashes if the player teleports a few blocks before this point, but the game still works when teleporting anywhere after that.
X/Z ±268,435,456 (±228)	Coordinates of all entities are slices of 16,777,216 (1⁄16,777,216 blocks). Many sounds stop working 16 blocks beyond this point.
X/Z ±1,073,741,824 (±230)	Coordinates of all entities are slices of 4,194,304 (1⁄4,194,304 blocks). Villages stop generating correctly. The only part which generates is the meeting point, sometimes with accompanying villagers; every other part is missing. Some villages can generate several blocks in the air or underground. Ancient cities stop generating correctly. The only part which generates is the center point; every other part is missing. Pillager outposts can generate several blocks in the air, without any scarecrows or jails. Bastion remnants generate as a near perfect cube, sometimes with entrances blocked by walls. The player can easily get stuck in the positive sides of blocks. This does not stop fall damage if the player gets stuck while falling. Almost all mobs can suffocate if pushed into the positive sides of blocks. All entities, including the player, can easily go through the world border on the positive coordinates. Loading a world saved at this distance may result in a very large amount of mobs spawning, which can cause the game to freeze or crash.
X/Z ±2,147,483,647 (±231 − 1)*	The game crashes if a chunk is loaded beyond this point without directly modifying the game to use 64-bit floats and/or long integers. The world renderer stops working 147 blocks beyond this point, allowing the player to get stuck, lightning stops working entirely, and clouds in fast graphics are stretched, while fancy cloud rendering still works normally. It is advisable to set the world border to at least several hundred blocks before this limit and make sure not to teleport past this.

Beyond the 32-bit limit (X/Y/Z ±2,147,483,648–9,223,372,036,854,775,807)

The contents of this section are not supported by Mojang Studios or the Minecraft Wiki.

The standard format for doubles dedicates 52 bits to the fraction, as opposed to the 23 bits used by the 32-bit float. As a result, beyond 2³⁰ (1,073,741,824) blocks, the player would only be off by (2³⁰) / (2⁵²) = 1/2²² = ¹⁄_4194304 blocks, which is absolutely indistinguishable from the distance back at spawn. This is around equivalent to the precision of 2 to 4 blocks out on Bedrock Edition.

Each doubling, however, indeed halves the precision used, up to a point where every single element of the game ends up breaking down.

Horizontal distances beyond the 32-bit integer limit (X/Z ±2,147,483,647) cannot be reached without substantial modifications to the game's code.

64-bit precision loss

Minecraft: Java Edition uses 64-bit floating point precision for entity positions and other calculations. Several mechanics which do not break down within vanilla bounds break down at very high distances similarly to Bedrock Edition.

Horizontal effects

Vertical effects

Coordinates	Effects	Example
Y ±2,147,483,648 (±231)	The game freezes beyond this point if third-person view is activated. Rain and snow stop rendering entirely.
Y ±281,474,970,710,656 (248)	Beyond this point, the skybox starts flashing between blue and purple colors when the player's camera moves. This effect becomes more intense at higher Y coordinates.
Y ±4,503,599,627,370,496 (±252)	Flying upwards or downwards in Creative becomes impossible.[8]
Y ±36,028,797,018,963,968 (±255)	Falling downwards becomes impossible.[8] Beyond this point, the game crashes if the player points their camera at a vertical 40-degree angle.
Y ±36,893,488,147,419,103,232	The stripes in the world border's texture become completely vertical, instead of diagonal.

Stripe Lands

As 52 bits are dedicated to the fraction in the double format rather than 23 in the single format, after 2⁵³ or 9,007,199,254,740,992 blocks out, precision breaks to consider only every second block, and so on. The rendering breaks down in an effectively identical manner to Bedrock Edition and yields the famous Stripe Lands as a result.

Fluids break down differently from blocks; while block rendering breaks down to form the usual stripes, fluids instead stretch to the size of the precision loss, with the initiation of the Stripe Lands causing each liquid to become two blocks long, then four at the next doubling, and so on.

In older versions, beyond 2⁵⁴ blocks, the world would render similarly to the Slice Lands of Bedrock Edition, in newer versions (starting from around 1.12, or even earlier), the world renders stripes with a larger distance between them instead.

In modern versions of Java Edition (1.14 and later) the game freezes when the Stripe Lands are rendered, so a Stripe Lands rendering fix is required to traverse further.

Beyond the 64-bit limit (X/Y/Z ±9,223,372,036,854,775,808–2¹⁰²⁴)

The contents of this section are not supported by Mojang Studios or the Minecraft Wiki.

Beyond the 64-bit integer limit, the precision loss becomes greater by every passing exponent of two that is passed.

Vertical effects

• Entity positions lose precision when the player passes every exponent of two.
• The skybox flashing continues until 2¹⁰²⁴.
• The player cannot surpass 2¹⁰²⁴ on the Y axis as that is the position limit for 64-bit floats. This cannot be surpassed without a rework of the game's coordinate system.^[8]

Analysis

Due to precision loss becoming more extreme at greater distances, features affected at it behave different depending on how far out they are.

Rain/snow rendering

First affected bracket:
First affected version: Unspecified Classic
Last affected version: Indev 2010-02-14

Second affected bracket:
First affected version: Alpha v1.0.4
Last affected version: Alpha v1.1.2_01

Third affected bracket:
First affected version: Beta 1.6.5
Still affects the current release (1.21.10) and snapshot (1.21.11-rc2)
Suspected to affect as far back as Beta 1.5, but cannot be reasonably tested due to crashes
Note: This affects both rain and snow, but this can only be seen with rain in versions prior to 1.7.2 because temperature did not change with height in these versions.

16,384 - 262,143 blocks

Beyond this point on the Y axis one can start to see the first signs of snow/rain jittering. Up to 65,535 blocks. this can only be reasonably seen with snowflakes with a mainly horizontal trajectory, as vertical traveling snowflakes are moving at a speed where travel still appears mostly smooth. Beyond 65,536 and especially 131,072 blocks, the effect becomes very obvious for almost all snow.

262,144 - 2,147,483,647 blocks

The first signs of geometrical distortion in the snow itself can be seen. Very little non-misshapen snow is present beyond here, and most of it has transformed into either lone rectangles, or the odd paired rectangles similar in shape to a pause button.

Deformity progresses after every power of two surpassed from this point. Past 16,777,216 blocks, snow becomes a near unrecognizable pattern of suspended vertical lines.

2,147,483,648+ blocks

Beyond this point, snow stops rendering. The sky itself still renders correctly. When the player goes below the 32-bit integer limit, rain appears for an unknown reason.

Sound positioning errors

Become very severe beyond 2²⁸ (268,435,456) blocks, where many sounds are simply no longer audible at all.

Temperature distribution breakdown

First affected version: 16w02a
Still affects the current release (1.21.10) and snapshot (1.21.11-rc2)

16,777,216 - 33,554,431 blocks

As snowfall/rainfall is handled on a per-block basis, the effects of precision loss here can only be seen once precision itself can no longer represent blocks (integers) individually.

Beyond this point, while perhaps not immediately obvious (especially due to the vertical variation in almost all biomes where this effect can be seen), the patterns resulting from snow landing on surfaces become much more angular than before, being commonly composed of large rectangles, thin lines and lone dots which are either filled with snow or have it completely absent. This is similarly true of water, with ice corresponding to cold blocks and water to warmer blocks.

As temperature varies with height, in order to properly see the effects of this, it is strongly recommended to build a flat plane for snow to accumulate on instead, or to generate a Superflat world with snow/ice set to generate with it as it would naturally. A modified Tunneler's Dream preset set to generate 94 layers of black concrete (Looking At Block should say 93 for the top concrete layer) is ideal for this case, providing a roughly 50/50 density of snowy and clear blocks, with black providing maximum contrast.

Teleporting to 16,777,216 on both axes should show four quadrants - one with normal looking snow/ice generation, and three with far more angular features due to the precision loss exceeding a full block. During times of precipitation, it can be seen that the blocky patterns of snow/ice match up with the weather directly above - snowy areas have snowfall where areas with no snow cover have rain. This is obviously true anywhere and is unrelated to precision loss, but (especially in the case of already-generated worlds) this can be used to prove that the precision loss lies with temperature calculation and is not merely a world generation issue disjoint from it.

• 
  An example of snow generated correctly near the spawn point.
• 
  An example of snow generated at high distances. Notice the differing consistency composed of squares and lines.
• 
  Snow generated in an extreme hills biome in 1.8, showing intended behavior.
• 
  The exact same area as generated in 1.9, showing the newly broken generation.

33,554,432+ blocks

Beyond this point, temperature calculation becomes very broken depending of the axes where this position has been exceeded. If beyond this point on one axis, the terrain has clearly visible "stripes" of snow in mountain biomes. If beyond this point on both axes, snowy areas have square shapes covering several blocks (especially beyond 67,108,864 blocks). These effects can only be seen on modded versions, since terrain does not generate beyond 30,000,000 blocks in vanilla.

Historical effects

Due to the incredibly large amount of documentation on effects in older versions of the game, all such content has been relocated to /Historical effects.

Gallery

Stripe Lands

References

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