Worlds Are Finite
There’s a common, running misconception in Minecraft that the world is limitless and will continue to generate for as the player explores.
This rumor came to be because of the way Minecraft manipulates memory. In Minecraft, only recently used chunks are rendered. However, Notch himself dispelled all of this in a post to his Tumblr in 2011. There, he wrote the following:
“First of all, let me clarify some things about the ‘infinite’ maps: They’re not infinite, but there’s no hard limit either. It’ll just get buggier and buggier the further out you are. Terrain is generated, saved and loaded, and (kind of) rendered in chunks of 16×16×128 blocks. These chunks have an offset value that is a 32-bit integer, roughly in the range negative two billion to positive two billion.”
Notch continues, explaining the consequences of this:
“If you go outside that range (about 25% of the distance from where you are now to the sun), loading and saving chunks will start overwriting old chunks. At a 16th of that distance, things that use integers for block positions, such as using items and pathfinding, will start overflowing and acting weird.”
In simpler terms, Minecraft will begin acting very strangely to the point that it becomes unplayable.
