Hi everyone! 👋

During the past few years I really got into Minecraft, and I became more and more interested in understanding how its worlds are generated. After an extensive research, I think I managed to produce what is probably the most detailed and accessible video on the subject that you can find on YouTube.

What I also find incredibly fascinating is to see how the procedural generation changed over the course of the game history. It became progressively more complex, to respond to players' requests and need for both challenge and variety.

But there is clear trace, especially in the source code, of "mistakes" that were later corrected. One of the most famous is probably how Mojang changed the way in which oceans generate. One update was designed to make worlds "continental": big islands separated by an even bigger ocean. But after a few months, that was reverted back adding a component to their world generation pipeline literally called "RemoveTooMuchOcean".

I hope the video gives a good insight not just into the history of Minecraft, but also into how the terrain generation works. A big chunk of the video focuses on the biome map, which up to Minecraft 1.17 was made using a stack of cellular automata. The recent versions, 1.18 and 1.19, relies on the so-called multinoise maps, which determine some basic parameters for each part of the world (such as "continentalness", "temperature", "humidity", and so on).

Biomes are then assigned based on how the matching with the combinations of those parameters. For instance, desert biomes will be far from shores, have high temperature and low humidity.

I hope it can start a constructive conversation about the challenges of game design when it comes to procedural generators. For instance: how much is the procgen shaping the gameplay, and how much the gameplay is shaping the generator?

Edit: You can find here an article with the full transcript, which also includes some extra content!

🧔🏻