How big is a Minecraft world?

Minecraft players since the game's early inception have scoured their worlds and have built far and wide, but how big are their worlds really? Is there any end to the terrain generated in a given seed?

The answer is somewhat complex, but the simple answer is that Minecraft's world generation mechanism is capable of creating a world limited only by hardware constraints. From a spawn point, a Minecraft world stretches for roughly 30 million blocks in each direction for a size of 60 million meters if measured in real-world terms.

The world border prohibits players from exceeding a set limit in their world, though if that were removed, players could feasibly continue on until their machine crashed from inadequate memory.

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Minecraft: A world's size in perspective

The world border, in many cases, is used to keep players from extending too far into their Minecraft world (Image via Mojang)

To put Minecraft's world further into perspective, a world equating to the size of 60 million meters would be approximately the size of the planet Neptune, which is crazy to think about for a simple video game.

Without the world border, worlds have theoretically stretched as far as 34 billion blocks from spawn, though traversing this far in vanilla Minecraft would be nigh impossible due to a player's hardware limitations.

Furthermore, by altering Minecraft's code, players have been able to reach theoretical distances where the world's coordinate readout reached infinity, despite Minecraft not being truly capable of creating an infinite world.

In times past, Minecraft maps were limited by the Far Lands, which were a generation error that created large barriers of land that were impassable by traditional means. However, as of Minecraft: Java Edition version 1.8 beta, the Far Lands have allegedly been fixed, and players can now travel even farther.

Bedrock, Pocket, and Education editions of the game are still limited by the Far Lands, though this may change in the future.

Minecraft's world generation isn't infinite, but it does create enough physical blocks for players to interact with that they would never run out of feasible room to craft, build, dig, and mine to their heart's content. Technology may limit players from a truly limitless experience, but we're only human, and an infinite gameplay experience would take many more lifetimes than we have to enjoy to its fullest.

For what it provides, Minecraft worlds are still incredibly expansive and allow for more than enough room to enjoy the play experience for years to come.