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Minecraft worlds are huge; supposedly, nearly 130 quadrillion blocks. (Zoom out a little on that site and you'll see it.) Anyways, I looked in the Save folder (C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming.minecraft\saves), and the world I'm currently playing in has a folder of the same name as my world. This folder is only 12 Mb. Does Minecraft really store 130 quadrillion blocks in 12 Mb, or is there some kind of insane level encoding going on? Even if there is crazy encoding ("Saving chunks", whatever that means) in the game itself, one does not simply fit 130 quadrillion blocks into well under one gigabyte of physical memory.

How does Minecraft store world data? As a programmer, I understand tilemaps that represent 1 or more blocks (in a 2D sense) per byte, and world data of that sort, but I can simply not wrap my mind around how 130 quadrillion blocks take up so little memory.

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check out the wiki on it minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Anvil_file_format chunks are explained here – ratchet freak Jun 15 '12 at 1:18

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There is not 130 quadrillion blocks in a typical world save. The world is generated as needed and only the areas that are generated are saved. This means you are only saving a handful of chunks. A chunk in Minecraft is an area 16 x 16 x world height blocks in size (currently 65536 blocks, previously 32768).

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But theoretically, you will eventually explore all 130 quadrillion blocks, right? Obviously that would take hundreds of hours, but never mind that. Would the level data in that case just be massive? – Lincoln Bergeson Jun 14 '12 at 23:01
@LincolnBergeson: Yep. But exploring the entire minecraft world isn't physically possible without some mod to speed you up or something in that vein. – Matthew Scharley Jun 14 '12 at 23:03
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@LincolnBergeson: Now you're getting into the realm of gamedev.SE. I'm not 100% on the internals, but I do know that Minecraft loads and unloads a certain number of chunks around you (10[?]), which is slightly further than you can see. That would take care of the lighting issues, etc. – Matthew Scharley Jun 14 '12 at 23:06
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@LincolnBergeson: A region is just another delineation of an area. You can think of it as a group of chunks, where a chunk is a group of blocks. Specifically, a region is a group of 16x16 chunks. – Matthew Scharley Jun 15 '12 at 1:55
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@LincolnBergeson - Just because nobody else addressed this quite this explicitly, YES the world file would be massive (measured in gigabytes if not terabytes) if you generated every possible chunk. However, there's no feasible way to do that in the game in a human lifetime. – Shinrai Jun 15 '12 at 14:26
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It is not 130 quadrillion because the sky limit is 42 blocks and the ground limit is 50 and the land limit is 136x2(both sides)do the math not 130 quadrillion (38841600 blocks)

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World size has changed several times over Minecrafts life, and 'limits' are only enforced by certain world generators. The numbers are large and irrelevant to the question, given the observed filesize. Also, 'air' is still a block: specifically, it's a lack of a block. That emptiness still needs to be stored in some format, and Minecraft does (air is block id 0). – Matthew Scharley Jun 15 '12 at 0:31

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