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.

Spawning
Far Lands generate starting from ±12,550,821 on any horizontal axis. This is the point of 32bit integer overflow due to the smallest size minecraft can see being 1/171.103 of a block.

Structure


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.

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.

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 (because there's no space for the snow cover up there). 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 be 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.

In the Sky Dimension, the Far Lands are not half flooded with water and bedrock does not form at lower levels.

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 makes its continued sides.

The number of layers isn't always the same, and varies between five to seven. Layers can be grouped into three categories:
 * The 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.
 * The 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.
 * The 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.

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.

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)

The Nether


The Nether Far Lands are similar to Overworld Far Lands, except they generate with Nether features, such as lava ocean at Y=31.

In the Nether, the terrible lag associated with the Overworld Far Lands will not occur. This is because there are very few gravity-affected blocks in the Nether.

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.

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


 * The content of Far Lands in Pocket Edition is slightly different in biomes and structure.
 * One feature of the PE Far Lands is the Stripe Lands, a graphical bug.
 * In the Corner Far Lands, an extremely unusual grid pattern of grass blocks will appear instead of the ordinary “stack." Tall grass will spawn on these blocks. This results in a perfect three-dimensional array of grass blocks levitating high above the ocean.
 * Flying is the only way to navigate the Far Lands. Walking is impossible; the player will fall through the terrain and die.
 * Any movement causes chunks to jitter about incredibly.

Effects


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 ±500,000. 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.

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, 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.

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).

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.

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).


 * Gaps between chunks first begin to be noticeable at X/Z values above ±100,000. The selection box also experiences a lot more Z-fighting as it contracts (it can still rarely be found in the "normal" world).
 * At around X/Z ±700,000 "jitteriness" is experienced and the world starts to become glitchy and unplayable. Chunks are seen to vibrate rapidly.
 * Past X/Z: ±900,000 the world becomes completely unplayable and crashes are very frequent at this point.
 * Within the Stripe Lands, if one comes in contact with water, the player will be thrown into the Void.

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.
 * 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.
 * The Far Lands can cause a major decrease in FPS, freezing, and crashing, due to a high amount of internal errors, as well as the client having to deal with immense amounts of entities, both monsters and glitched sand/gravel entities. In addition, there is extra lag caused by the very high X/Z coordinates that the Far Lands exist at. This is also one of the main reasons that the Far Lands after X/Z ±32,000,000 would sometimes lag, despite the absence of any entities.
 * 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 read: "Check out the far lands!". Ironically, the splash was added to the game after the Far Lands were fixed.
 * In 1.8, sometimes there is a chance that you can see stationary lava outside the end generation zone, placed with even space between.
 * In Beta 1.7.3 and below:
 * At excessive X/Z values, the corner lands are all flat.
 * It is very dangerous to reach X/Z ±4,000,000,000 or higher, as the chances of crashing (assuming you have 64-bit Java) are extremely high, and get higher the farther you go.
 * If one makes it to X/Z ±34,359,738,368 (chunk offset limit), chunks will start getting overwritten. As a result, this is the end of chunk generation in Minecraft.
 * The highest 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, and might require unhooking the computer to restart as it freezes so much the power button does not even work. If teleported there, the screen will display completely black with no sun and oddly glowing clouds.