Bedrock Edition Far Lands



The Far Lands were the area that formed the “edge" of the “infinite" map in PC versions prior to Beta 1.8. They are currently found in Pocket Edition (and, in all technicality, Windows 10 Edition).

Location
The Far Lands start to generate between ±12,550,821 and ±12,550,825 on any horizontal axis. Through customized worlds and using mods to re-enable their generation, this location can be changed by modifying the CoordinateScale.

The Far Lands do not generate on the vertical axis normally, although they will under extreme custom world conditions.

PC


Both areas of the Far Lands feature extremely strange terrain, although they are significantly different.

In both zones, any area beneath sea level, excluding regular caves, will be flooded with water. The Far Lands will generate biomes but most biomes will be indistinguishable except by the color of grass. Desert biomes will be covered in sand and snow-covered biomes will be covered with snow, excluding the very top of the map due to the height build limit. Trees will generate somewhat normally, but can only be found in the upper areas of the map due to the need for grass. However, if you open the debug screen, the biome will always claim that the biome is a forest.

Ores can be found up to their respective maximum heights just like in the normal world. Unfortunately, due to the flooding, everything except for coal is difficult, if not impossible, to acquire. In the solid areas of the Far Lands, normal caves will generate but will be limited and small. Along with the caves, dungeons (extremely rare) and lakes can be found in solid areas. Water and lava springs can be found out in the open and in caves.

Much of the open space in both areas is shrouded in darkness and thus hostile mobs run rampant, making the Far Lands as a whole incredibly dangerous. This is especially problematic in the Corner Far Lands due to its layered structure. The flooded zones are filled with squid.

Edge Far Lands
The boundary of the Far Lands' edge (that is, where it meets the regular map) looks like a solid wall, all the way to the top of the map (Y-coordinate 127) that is filled with gaping holes perpendicular to the edge. These holes are extremely long, perhaps infinite, and on the whole seem to change very little no matter how deep the player ventures. They can be blocked, either partially or completely, but such blockages are rare and temporary. This “wall of Swiss cheese" pattern continues beneath ground level, all the way to the bottom of the map, and seems to be partially caused by a large one-dimensional distortion in the map generator's output. This area is sometimes referred to as “the Loop".

The Edge Far Lands' average block composition: 36% stone, 25% air, 23% water, 10% dirt/grass block, 2% bedrock, and 4% others. (Based on a 14×14 chunk selection)

Corner Far Lands
At a corner, when two perpendicular Edge Far Lands sections meet, the Corner Far Lands begin to generate. Unlike the infinite-length holes in the Edge Far Lands, the Corner Far Lands contains more normal terrain. This terrain is "stacked" on top of itself to create a bizarre sandwich with layers of ground and air, which gives it its nickname, “The Stack". Each layer looks like a gigantic floating continent, hovering over the next layer, which is shadowed.

The majority of the generated world is Corner Far Lands, as the “normal" map (before ±12,550,821 mark) only makes the center of the world, and the Edge Far Lands only make its continued sides.

The number of layers isn't always the same, and varies between five to seven (fusing together and splitting every so often). Layers can be grouped into three categories: Sometimes, there are extremely tall pillars of gravel that stretch from the ground to the ceiling of a layer. Likewise, some of the beaches that collapse will create pillars of sand all the way down to the ground, despite there not being that much sand to begin with. The Corner Far Lands is also prone to having near-perfect diagonal lines being carved into the ceilings or floors of layers. If traced, these lines all intersect at the corner (X/Z ±12,550,821). This seems similar to how the Edge Far Lands have a consistent pattern along lines perpendicular to their edge, but is much less pronounced.
 * Top layer: This layer exists at the absolute top of the map. Occasionally there can be a lower area that isn't shadowed (this is technically a dry layer). The lower area is where a majority of the trees and passive mobs can be found, as the top layer receives almost all of the sunlight. Due to the lack of space the area at the absolute top can't have trees or mobs.
 * The top layer tends to light incorrectly in day-night transitions. This is because the sunlight calculation doesn't work when the entire chunk is blocked at Y-coordinate 128.
 * Dry layers: These generate slightly flatter than normal terrain and have grass, despite the darkness. At sea level massive floating beaches can be found, which will collapse if modified. Hostile mobs' spawn rate likely approaches the maximum due to being in the shadow of the top layer. Rarely, there are holes in the top layer that allow sunlight to reach these layers. Caves that have one of these layers as their “surface" can occasionally be carved out of dirt instead of stone. These layers have cave-like ceilings made out of stone, gravel and dirt.
 * Flooded layers: Like the dry layers, these generate somewhat flat terrain, but it is comprised primarily of stone. Sand and sandstone will show up down here, even up to 30 meters below sea level. Except for coal, all the ores can only be found in these layers.

The Corner Far Lands' average block composition: 40% stone, 16% air, 28% water, 10% dirt/grass, 2% bedrock, and 4% others. (Based on a 14×14 chunk selection)

Far Sky
Due to the then-128 block altitude limit, no Far Lands-esque terrain can generate at excessive respective y values. However, changing the Height Scale to excessive levels (around 134217728) will indeed generate Far Lands all the way down below the current build height limit in modern versions of Minecraft. Mods are not needed for this. Monoliths theoretically can generate up to these.

Sky Intersections
The sky far lands can mix theoretically with both the corner and edge far lands, giving two more new types of far lands (and as such 16 different far lands areas per world). The content of these intersections appears to vary throughout worlds, with some being completely, blank, some completely solid, and some generating like regular far lands material.

Pocket Edition
The Pocket Edition Far Lands are different from the PC Far Lands, specifically:


 * In the Corner Far Lands, far lands with negative Z, and past the normal positive Z Far Lands, an extremely unusual and intimidating grid pattern of grass blocks will appear instead of the ordinary stack/loop. Tall grass and trees will generate on these blocks. This results in a perfect three-dimensional array of grass blocks levitating high above the ocean.
 * The content of the Far Lands in Pocket Edition is slightly different in biomes and structure in positive coordinates.
 * In negative X coordinates, the Far Lands are completely ocean.
 * Generated structure will generate in ocean and will have very deep foundation to bedrock.
 * Desert well, dungeon, abandoned mineshaft, Woodland mansion, jungle temple, and fossil is generated structure that can't generate in here.
 * Strangely if igloo generated, it will generate underwater on bedrock layer, replacing bottom bedrock layer by stone brick, and has magenta bed.
 * The positive edge lands tend to have much more of a repetitive structure than the galaxy ripple effect on the PC version, especially so nearer the corner lands.
 * Flying and swimming are the only ways to navigate the Far Lands. Travelling by foot is impossible as the terrain is made up of ghost chunks.
 * Any movement causes chunks to jitter about incredibly.
 * One feature of the distant PE Far Lands is the Stripe Lands, a graphical bug that depicts a one visible-one invisible block pattern. The Stripe Lands starts at X/Z ±16,777,216, only generating water, bedrock and ice (frozen oceans), and grass on flat worlds.
 * Sand and gravel don't fall from generating in Pocket Edition. This results in relatively stable performance.
 * In new worlds generated in 1.0, the Far Lands ceiling remains affected by the old world height, and as a result trees can grow on the ceiling (although terrain cannot generate above it). Old worlds before 1.0 are not affected, however walking into new generation does spawn trees and such.

In the Windows 10 Edition, the traditional Far Lands do not generate at all, leaving bedrock, ocean, and in the Nether and End, skygrids.

Dimensions
The Far Lands of the Nether, End, and would-be Sky Dimension share characteristics of the overworld Far Lands, although with some differences.

The Nether


The Nether Far Lands are similar to the Overworld Far Lands, except generated with Nether terrain features, with a lava ocean at Y=31.

In the Nether, the terrible lag associated with the Overworld Far Lands will not occur; most of the Nether is already dark enough for spawns in the first place, and there are less gravity-affected blocks (no sand, and gravel is rare).

If a Nether portal is created in the Far Lands of the Overworld, entering will cause a teleportation to normal Nether, as X/Z 32,000,000, the limit at which block physics and lighting cease to function, divided by 8 (as 1 block in the nether corresponds to 8 blocks in the Overworld), is X/Z 4,000,000, within the limits of X/Z 12,550,820, where the distortion starts. Conversely, a Nether Portal built in the Nether Far Lands will not function, as even at the limit of 12,550,820 blocks as the beginning of the Far Lands would cause the player to come out at X/Z 100,406,560, far past X/Z 32,000,000.

The Far Lands will not generate above the bedrock ceiling for obvious reasons, even if the Far Lands are modded into a more recent version.

The End
Far Lands have never existed in the End in the desktop version without mods, due to the fact that the end dimension was added after the removal of the cause of the far lands. Nonetheless, they are available in the Pocket Edition. They are not of much interest, being made of almost exclusively end stone, and appear a bit more squashed and stretched horizontally than the overworld lands. Micro-end islands still generate inside the Far Lands, even after they dissipate. Since there is no signature liquid of the End, they just generate down to a dry void; similarly, there is no bedrock floor.

Interestingly, if the Far Lands were modded back into the game before PC 1.9, the End far lands would generate obsidian pillars everywhere on this landmass; end cities and chorus is generated as expected in more recent versions.

The End Far Lands are cut off at y=128, although structures still generate on top.

Sky Dimension
The Sky Dimension similarly has no trademark liquid and will generate no water/lava, and also no bedrock will generate. They appear squashed similarly to those of the End.

The sky dimension far lands will appear just like the end far lands, but with overworld features.

Pre-Far Lands (X/Z: ±524,288 - ±12,550,820)
There are many effects that will be noticed after traveling millions of blocks away from the center of the map. The very first effect that will be noticed is the jumpy or stuttering movement of the map, which isn't directly related to the Far Lands themselves but instead to floating-point precision errors. This jumpy movement is notable even at an X/Z of ±524,288. The intensity of such glitches doubles every time the player passes a coordinate that is a power of two (e.g 2,097,152 or 4,194,304).

'Early' Far Lands (X/Z: ±12,550,821 - ±32,000,000)
Players will experience extreme framerate drops and very high CPU usage, which will continue until Minecraft freezes completely. The framerate drops do not occur in multiplayer servers, though it will, depending on the server computer's RAM, make the server itself lag. In both singleplayer and multiplayer, the intense lag that is characteristic of the Far Lands is caused by massive numbers of falling sand or gravel entities. This in turn is caused (like most of the rest of the Far Lands' strange effects) by more floating-point precision errors, and will worsen as the player reaches X/Z: ±32,000,000 (Beyond X/Z of ±32,000,000 chunks are treated as permanently nonexistent, and will not generate, even though they may appear to. This value is hardcoded in the source code of Minecraft, meaning that it cannot be changed without editing the source files.) Weather is not affected by the Far Lands directly but is by their terrain. Lightning bolts that hit surfaces at the top of the map (Y-coordinate 127) will be invisible and will not cause fire. The particles created when rain hits these surfaces will be black instead of blue. Snow will not accumulate on these surfaces either (because there's no space).

Fake Chunks (X/Z: >±32,000,000)
As the player journeys even deeper into the Far Lands, the effects worsen to the point where the game is unplayable. At X/Z ±32,000,000, block physics stop functioning correctly. Lighting doesn't work and the blocks, although they appear to be there, aren't solid. If the player tries to walk on these blocks, he or she will fall into the Void. At excessive X/Z positions (depends on the operating system, but usually occurs between X/Z: ±500,000,000 and ±2,000,000,000), world renderer no longer works, or takes incredibly long times and uses most, if not all CPU usage. It then becomes almost impossible to close Minecraft without a task manager. The stuttering movement effect, caused by the floating-point precision error, will worsens so much at one point, that the terrain around the player will appear to "follow" the player as the player moves along the axis, and would then change drastically. At X/Z: ±2,147,483,647 (the maximum 32-bit integer), surface textures are no longer rendered, giving way to an empty sky. However, chunks are still generated. Note that only 64-bit machines can pass this point.

At X/Z: ±25,769,803,804, clouds will disappear, leaving the void only.

Vertical effects (Y: <-2,147,483,647)
In Beta 1.7.3, as the player falls below Y -2,147,483,647, the darkness of being in the void disappears. Instead of darkness, the void now looks like an empty world. It has a sky, a sun, and a moon, and they are all visible depending on the time of day. Despite this, the player will still receive damage from the void.

Map editors
When viewing the Far Lands in a 3D Minecraft map editor, you will encounter errors. In MCEdit, the selection cubes start to distort and the map distorts when viewing. In addition when rotating your view around a selected area, blocks will not be lined up right and will change how poorly lined up they are randomly, making the whole world seem to shake like a machine about to rattle itself to pieces.

Previous versions
In Infdev, although the Far Lands existed, many of the side effects didn't. However, fire particles and doors would act strange. There was no stuttering movement, and beyond X/Z ±32,000,000, the blocks would simply not render. Walking off the edge would cause the player to become stuck in a glitched position, unable to escape.

In Indev (the release of January 30, 2010), the flat land bordering the map stops rendering at X/Z ±2,111. If the player steps onto the blocks beyond X/Z ±262,148, the game crashes.

It has been confirmed that in Alpha v1.1.2, the blocks would not render beyond X/Z ±32,000,000, like older Infdev versions. The fake chunks started appearing in Alpha 1.2.0.

In previous versions of the game, if you teleport as high as you possibly can, you are sent to a Y-Axis of 3.4x1038. In this zone, you float without a purpose, and dropped items will slide with what appears to be no friction before suddenly stopping after about 20 blocks. It has been reported that the X and Z-Axis sometimes flicker randomly in this zone. The memory pie chart also sometimes randomly jumps to 100% undefined memory usage, and then disappears upon re-entering the debug menu.

Pocket Edition effects
In Pocket Edition, the playable range is smaller than that of PC, because of the usage of 32-bit floating-point numbers (as opposed to 64-bit on PC). Many of the anomalous terrain-related effects do not occur on the Windows 10 edition, instead just being ocean.


 * Extremely minor jitteriness can be first experienced at X/Z±16,384.
 * At X/Z: ±524,288 "jitteriness" is experienced and the further the player travels, the world gradually starts to become glitchy and unplayable.
 * Past X/Z: ±1,048,576, the jitteriness becomes considerably unbearable, and crashes are very frequent at this point on low-end devices.
 * At X/Z: ±4,194,304, the blocks' hit detection becomes glitched and can be only hit from behind or in front, as a result; entities less then 1.2 meters wide will fall through. It will occur for the player randomly, however.
 * Beyond X/Z: ±8,388,608, the above becomes worse as it affects the entire terrain (except water which still functions), making the chunks from this point onward ghost chunks.
 * The terrain erroring initiates at X/Z ±12,550,820 as in PC.
 * Between X/Z: ±12,561,029 and X/Z: ±12,758,546 the Far Lands begin to take on a thinner "shredded" appearance, before fading out. What generates from there to the beginning of the Stripe Lands (X/Z: ±16,777,216) is just ocean, with a floor of bedrock. The bedrock generates in a pattern identical to how it normally generates underground. Biomes will still be there; swamp will darken the water and cold biomes will generate ice on the top layer of the water. Generated structures, such as villages, witch huts, and jungle temples, will still generate here. Large blocks of land will eventually phase out to become long thin strips and eventually dotted arrays of floating blocks resembling a 1-dimensional cross section of the skygrid.
 * Beyond X/Z ±33,554,432 water is no longer rendered, and becomes non-solid. Only one block face is rendered, thus blocks appear to be two-dimensional.
 * Generated structures like villages and ice spikes may continue to generate as far up to X/Z: ±134,217,728, however they appear two-dimensional at this distance. In the Windows 10 edition there is no limit to how far out structures can generate, and can be seen at distances of over 2 billion blocks.
 * At every power of two in the Stripe Lands, gaps between rendered blocks increase. At X/Z ±1,073,741,824, blocks stop rendering entirely. The map is invisible from this point onward.
 * Near X/Z: ±2,147,483,647, the game freezes and crashes. However, not all devices are able to reach this point.
 * Blocks that are not full (stairs, fences, etc.) will appear as full blocks, usually stretched out.
 * At very large X/Z coordinates, the player can only move horizontally or vertically unless they sprint-fly, and has to hold down directional keys before moving.
 * Caves generated close to the Far Lands will sometimes have an edgy "zipper" consistency, with sometimes only every second block being hollowed out.

Cause
The terrain is generated based on 16 octaves of Perlin noise. Each noise generator takes floating-point inputs and uses those to interpolate between noise values at whole numbers. It does so by:


 * 1) casting to a 32-bit integer, where Java rounds toward zero and handles overflow by picking the closest representable value;
 * 2) subtracting one if the integer is greater than the original input, to always round down;
 * 3) subtracting that integer from the original input to get a remainder in the interval [0, 1) suitable for interpolation.

It covers an interval of [−231, 231) without causing any problems. The problem is that many of the octaves cover a scale much smaller than a block, with up to 171.103 noise units per block. Indeed, 231≈171.103×12,550,824.053. Once this value is exceeded, the integer will always be 231−1, picking the same noise values on that axis every time. This is the reason for those long unchanging tunnels in the Edge Far Lands, and plains in the Corner Far Lands.

At the positive end the remainder starts out relatively small but usually much larger than 1, and grows by 171.103 per block. At the negative end, the remainder starts at −232. This value is then adjusted by ((6x−15)x+10)x3 for quintic interpolation. Even one block in at the positive end, this is already around 1011. The negative end starts all the way around −1049! For the Corner Far Lands, multiply the values of both edges. When interpolation (really extrapolation) is attempted with values as large as these, it produces similarly large output. That output completely dwarfs all other terms that would normally give the terrain its shape, instead effectively only passing the sign of this one noise function through.

It was fixed by taking the remainder of the input divided by 224. Noise repeats every 28 units anyway, so it has no side effects. But it does prevent the overflow. By removing these instructions, the Far Lands can be returned to current versions of the game.

There are several factors making things slightly more complicated:


 * Noise is only sampled every four blocks and linearly interpolated in between. This is why when 12,550,824 is affected by the bug, it reaches out three more blocks to 12,550,821.
 * Each noise generator picks a random offset in [0, 256) to add to its input. This will usually move the boundary under 12,550,824, starting the Far Lands at 12,550,821. With a few seeds it might not, putting the start at 12,550,825. Very rarely, if the boundary is just barely within 12,550,824, the first couple blocks of the Far Lands might look somewhat normal. The southern and eastern Far Lands do this independently of one another. At the negative end, the Far Lands always start at block coordinate −12,550,825, with the positive edge of those blocks at −12,550,824.
 * There are actually two sets of noise generators, which are blended together based on another noise generator. This is responsible for relatively smooth alternation between two sets of tunnels or plains. Occasionally, one of the noise generators starts generating the Far Lands before the other because it uses a different offset, producing an incongruous boundary.
 * A second set of the Far Lands starts around ±25,101,648, where another octave overflows. There is no visible change because the original Far Lands dwarf them like everything else.
 * In customized worlds, Coordinate Scale and Height Scale are both set to 684.412 by default, which is 171.103*4. Modifying this number will change the area where the Far Lands would be. Thus, doubling the default Coordinate and Height Scale (1368.824) will cause the Far Lands to generate twice as close (X/Y/Z 6,275,412).
 * On the Y axis, due to the build height limit, changing the Height Scale won't have any effect unless one puts it up much higher.

Trivia

 * There is a chance of walking into a "bad chunk" that has such corrupt and unreadable data that it will cause huge lag spikes and possibly crash the game.
 * In Release 1.6.2 for 64-bit machines, the limit of how high up you can teleport is +4,599,999,999,999,999 blocks high. Prior to Beta 1.8, you could teleport up to the limit for 64-bit machines.
 * When at the Far Lands, fences either have a thin wall collision box on one side, or no collision with mobs or the player.
 * Even though Beta 1.6 made it impossible to place solid blocks at layer 128, the Far Lands' flat "ceiling" still gets generated there.
 * Because of the debates over renaming endermen to "Far Landers," Notch jokingly suggested to rename the Far Lands to The End instead. This then became the name for the dimension where the Ender Dragon resides.
 * Minecarts with chests will sometimes appear in phantom chunks, but as entities, they fall into the void shortly after they are generated.
 * One of the random splashes reads: "Check out the far lands!". Ironically, the splash was added to the game after the Far Lands were fixed.
 * In Beta 1.7.3 and below:
 * At excessive X/Z values, the corner lands are all flat.
 * At every power of two after 225, a terrain glitch causes the area around the spawn to generate for a few chunks before generating distorted terrain again. This is the only occurrence where trees generate beyond X/Z: ±32,000,000, the limit at which block physics fail to function correctly and lighting ceases to work. This will continue until X/Z: ±2,147,483,647 (the point where world renderer stops working and surface textures fail to generate).
 * At X/Z: ±2,147,483,647, which is the highest point reachable by 32-bit machines, world renderer stops working completely, ending terrain generation in Minecraft. Things using 32-bit integers will overflow at this distance, causing the game to crash. Chunks will still generate, but there will be nothing inside them other than air. The map will stop generating surface textures past this point.
 * At around and after X/Z: ±2,147,483,648, clouds become severely stretched out in one direction (Fast graphics only, Fancy graphics clouds are not affected by the Far Lands).
 * It is very dangerous to reach X/Z ±4,294,967,296 or higher, as the chances of crashing (assuming you have 64-bit Java) are extremely high, and get higher the further you go.
 * Between X/Z: ±25,769,803,000 and X/Z: ±25,769,804,000 clouds stop rendering (Varies between maps, but they disappear somewhere in between these distances. Does not apply for fast graphics clouds).
 * If one makes it to X/Z ±34,359,738,368 (235; chunk offset limit), chunks will start getting overwritten. As a result, this is the end of chunk generation in Minecraft. As soon as this limit is approached, the game will freeze and crash, resulting in an Out of memory screen. However in some cases the player may be able to move past this limit for a few seconds before Minecraft crashes.
 * The highest signed value for 64-bit machines is X/Z ±9,223,372,036,854,775,807. However, despite this being the limit any machine can go, it may not be possible to reach anywhere near this point, since the vast majority of people experience instant client freeze, followed by the client crashing. In some cases, it is possible to teleport to it.
 * In the fourth episode of Minecraft: Story Mode, Jesse and his/her group visit the Far Lands, in which a secret lab is located. The character Ivor describes the Far Lands as "a happy accident", and "nature's way of keeping life interesting". The bizarre terrain is featured and observed by the characters, although understandably, the glitches associated with it aren't present.