100 unoctogentillion blocks deep. A crazy Minecraft experiment that reveals the scale of the Void

We love exploring the unexpected in games, especially in ones that give us total freedom, like Minecraft. Someone even managed to reach the Far Lands after nearly 15 years of walking. Pushing the game’s limits (or straight-up breaking them) is kind of our thing. In Minecraft, one of the deadliest places you can find is the Void, that seemingly endless nothing under the world. Once you fall past the edge, you start taking “void damage,” eventually wiping you and everything you’re carrying. But how deep does it really go? And could we make it even deeper, maybe even infinite?

TL;DR: That’s deep

In Minecraft, the Void begins below Y = -64 and hits you with 4 hearts of damage every half-second. Even creative mode players can’t survive if they fall too far, around Y = -80 will do you in.

YouTuber Spds decided to investigate what’s really going on at the deepest levels of the Void, and the results are insane. When teleporting 200 million blocks down, they noticed that void damage completely stopped, even though they kept falling. Even at the 32-bit integer limit (about 2.1 billion blocks), the fall continued with no damage.

To push further, Spds figured out a way to set the teleport limit to “basically infinity” using the calculation 1.0 divided by 0.0. At the 64-bit integer limit (a 20-digit number), the game’s physics completely broke: they stopped falling, the sky turned into a chaotic mass of colorful glitches, and the third-person camera got all distorted.

It's nice and voidy out there.Source: YouTube @spdsyt

Trying to go even deeper crashed the game, since Minecraft can’t handle numbers past the 64-bit limit. But teleporting up into the sky allowed Spds to reach the largest number that could be entered in the chat: 100 unoctogentillion (that’s a 1 followed by 248 zeros). This is theorized as the maximum possible height and depth in Minecraft, making the world’s vertical size “10 duo septuagintillion times larger than the observable universe.”

While the game crashes before you can actually reach this ultimate depth, the number itself represent the absolute computational limit of Minecraft. So yes, there is a limit, but I don’t think anyone expected it to be this gentilliony large.

Minecraft

November 18, 2011

Rate It!

• Overview
• Guide

• games trivia
• Minecraft (franchise)