Where Does Minecraft End?

A quest to the edge of an endless world can feel like an eternal glitch.

The YouTuber Kurt J. Mac is currently on an impossible mission. He is trying to reach the end of Minecraft.

To clarify, he is not trying to get to “the End,” the final level where you do battle with a big dragon and win the game. That’s been done by many.

Rather, he has vowed to walk to the furthest reaches of Minecraft’s cubic wild to a strange and transcendental place once dubbed “the Far Lands,” now mostly known as “the world boundary” or “the edge of the world.”

In some ways, it is not dissimilar from the center of a black hole, or the once lawless frontier town of Deadwood, South Dakota. It is a place where the rules that govern the rest of the world break down.

Minecraft, perhaps the most important and successful game of this century, is endless. Unlike the real world, where you will eventually loop back around to the same spot if you travel long enough and stay the course, Minecraft is programmed to go on forever and ever.

At least, that was the initial plan.

However, the system it is built upon has trouble keeping up with the demands of eternity. If you wander far enough from your starting point, the source code will eventually malfunction, and the game ceases to run correctly.

It becomes “buggier and buggier the further you are out,” the game’s designer Markus Persson, a.k.a. Notch, wrote in a Tumblr post.

These mysteries have attracted at least one rubberneck on a digital pilgrimage.

One reason that walking to Minecraft’s outer rim is so interesting is simple. The distance is absurd.

So far, Mac has been walking for over three and a half years, and if he keeps up his pace of playing on average for an hour and 15 minutes a week, his estimated date of arrival will be sometime in the year 2036.

Between now and then, he will cross over interminable miles of mountain ranges, rectangular oceans, tree lines, and lakes.

There is a pastoral charm to Minecraft’s scenery, complete with bleating sheep, but this unprecedented act of virtual tourism is more than exploration for exploration’s sake. In a roundabout way, it is also an exploration of technology itself.