Comment by efskap
1 day ago
I love how that became part of the "mythology" of Minecraft as the "Far Lands", where travelling far from the world origin made terrain generation and physics break down, subtly at first, and less so as you kept going.
It's like the paranormal trope of an expedition encountering things being disconcertingly "off" at first, and then eventually the laws of nature start breaking down as well. All because of float precision.
That makes me think of games where the story places the protagonist in a simulation, which is incredibly convenient for the real-world developers and authors. All the quirks and limitations of the real game (invisible barriers, fail on killing a story-critical NPC, etc.) can be blamed on issues in the fictional one.
For example, the Assassin's Creed series.
Was curious what this looked like so did a google.
From the wiki, far lands ("spongy walls of terrain") aren't caused by precision loss but integer overflow in the terrain generation.
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Far_Lands