Here is a helpful little page about me and my expedition to the Minecraft Far Lands. If you really want to know more, you should watch the videos on the Far Lands or Bust YouTube Channel where I do nothing other than talking about myself whilst playing video games!

If you're new to Far Lands or Bust the series was featured with an article in The New Yorker Online that serves as a nice introduction!

What are the Far Lands?

The worlds in Minecraft are randomly generated and, for most practical uses, nearly infinite. However, after extreme distances the code that defines the terrain generation fails, creating the broken landscape of the Far Lands at about 12,500km. They were first mentioned in a blog post written by the game's creator about Minecraft's terrain generation. This is the first instance of the term "Far Lands" as well. According to the Minecraft Wiki, walking to the Far Lands would possibly take about 820 hours from the center of the map in a completely flat world. Minecraft 1.8: Unfortunately, the Far Lands were removed from the game when the new terrain generation code was released in an update on September 12th, 2011. Fear not, fellow Farlanders! I will continue the expedition in Minecraft Beta 1.7.3 for as long as I must!

How far have you walked so far? Press F3!

To keep my journey a bit of a mystery for myself and viewers, I will only ever press F3, which displays the player's coordinates in Minecraft, when we reach certain charity fundraiser goals or other major milestones. I have only officially pressed F3 in Far Lands or Bust six times: Once on November 12th, 2011; August 12th, 2012; March 1st, 2014; May 31st, 2015; January 7th, 2017; and finally, August 31st, 2019. At the end of that most recent FLoB-ATHON Weekin 2019 we discovered that I was 3,857,848 blocks in the furthest 'Z' coordinate, the equivalent of 3,857-kilometers from spawn! Amazing, yes, but it means we are still only 30.7% of the way to reaching the Far Lands located at 12,550,820 meters! They don't call them "far" for nothing! INDEED!

Why does the screen shake/wiggle when you walk?

A frequent question indeed! The simple (and perhaps incorrect) answer is that this effect is caused by floating-point precision errors from being so far from 0,0 on the map. The world terrain is updating at a different rate than my player location, which causes my view and in-game entities to jitter. The most obvious evidence of this is how far offset the block selection bounding box is to the actual block I have selected in the game. This was first noticed in the Far Lands or Bust world as early as the first F3 livestream, prior to reaching 292,202. On April 8, 2015 during Episode 470, we noticed that the terrain jitter doubled, meaning we passed a significant floating-point boundary! Given the rarity of the event, I turned back to find the exact block that the coordinate rollover occurred so that we could mark the area and do some science. Many Farlanders correctly calculated the boundary to be at the 2,097,152 coordinate, the next floating-point change won't be until we double the distance!

Why are you walking to the Far Lands?

I began my YouTube series as a standard Minecraft Let's Play, where I built a settlement, searched for resources and explored the area around my spawn point. After a while I grew impatient and in the 11th episode of the series decided to pack some essential supplies and head West with the goal of reaching these mysterious Far Lands. I vowed to make my attempt for the Far Lands without the aid of any mods or cheats. Along my way I take note of the interesting geography of Minecraft, sometimes get into trouble and answer questions from my YouTube channel subscribers. Now, I have also decided to utilize the popularity of my expedition and turn it into a fundraiser for charity!

What are your computer specs?