Bedrock Edition distance effects

As the player travels far from the world origin in Bedrock Edition, the world starts to behave abnormally. This is mostly caused by precision loss of the 32-bit floating point numbers used for location.

First limits (X/Z ±0–65,536)
Bedrock Edition uses 32-bit floating points for many of its calculations, such as the player's position. When the player moves, the player changes position each tick, and this change is affected by floating point precision errors. At slow speeds/high coordinates, this change in position is considered negligible, meaning that the player does not move at all. The amount of precision error doubles at every power of 2.

Note that while the positions of the centers of entities are stored in NBT, the positions of the hitbox corners are stored in memory. If the player is crossing a power of 2, these corners may move at different speeds, thus changing the hitbox size. The hitbox size resets to 0.6 in certain situations, such as reloading the world, using the command, and others. However, the player can shrink to size 0, making it possible to fall through the edges of blocks and into the void.

There are several ways to slow the player’s movement, such as sneaking, status effects, using an item (e.g., drawing back a bow), or certain blocks (such as cobwebs). In addition, moving diagonally decreases the player’s speed on any given axis. Moving with a solid block in front at a slight diagonal causes the player to move sideways as slow as the player’s coordinates allow.

Jitter (X/Z ±131,072–524,288)
Eventually, some common forms of movement begin to glitch. In addition, blocks with detailed models begin to render incorrectly.

3D block model rendering errors (X/Z ±1,048,576–8,388,608)
Blocks are rendered based on their corners, whose coordinates are 32-bit floating point integers. Generally, these are multiples of $1/16$. Thus, most blocks render normally as long the floating points are accurate to the nearest sixteenth. This breaks at X/Z ±1,048,576 (220), and blocks continue to render incorrectly as the coordinates go even farther out.

In the RTX betas, the lighting is unaffected by floating-point precision errors, although block shapes themselves are incorrect.

In addition, many "normal" forms of movement become impossible.

Hard limits (X/Z ±12,550,821–2,147,483,648)
Here, the terrain and rendering fundamentally break down to the point where normal gameplay is completely impossible.

Stripe Lands


The Stripe Lands are an artifact of the game's rendering and block hitbox calculation, rather than a quirk relating directly to terrain generation. The Stripe Lands starts at X/Z ±16,777,216, under the same terrain effects as Nothingness and Skygrid. They exist because coordinates are off by up to a full meter, causing the blocks themselves (not just their corners) to appear in the wrong places.

Past X/Z: ±33,554,432 all blocks are rendered as two-dimensional, and the gap between valid blocks doubles to 1 out of four. This gap doubles again at every power of 2, and reaches 128 blocks wide at X/Z: ±1,073,741,824. This is the widest the gaps can be, since the game crashes near X/Z: ±2,147,483,648.

Vertical Limits
Like the X and Z axes, the game breaks at excessive Y coordinates. Since blocks cannot be placed above Y=255, block rendering glitches do not occur, but other effects do.

Many of these effects would occur at negative coordinates, but there is a barrier at Y -40. Beyond this entities can move only vertically using the "fall through the world" glitch, or teleporting below Y -40. Thus the barrier can be avoided by teleporting past X/Z ±8,388,608. In addition, all entities, except players in creative, disappear in the void.