How far can you see in Minecraft compared to real life?

Key Takeaways

hello youtube i'm few productions and welcome back to another awesome minecraft video please leave a like right now for some more videos in the near future i've been loving the new minecraft updates recently and i cannot get enough of them so i'm definitely on the minecraft grind again so leave a like and subscribe anyway since i've been grinding the craft so much lately i had a really weird thought experiment idea for minecraft now the thought was obviously in real life there's only so much distance that you can kind of see only so many miles in the distance that are visible i was wondering how does that compare in minecraft is minecraft's render distance realistic to real life and i'm going to answer that question today now i was wondering if anyone's actually really going to be interested in a type of video like this so let me know if you like these type of videos in the comments below and let me know if the answer actually surprises you anyways this is actually a really cool looking world this is like some really crazy terrain generation i didn't even expect that i'm getting distracted uh let's let's get to the actual video so we're gonna start off with the basics if you go on to the settings tab of minecraft bedrock this is where you're gonna find your render distance tab minecraft bedrock edition has the largest render distance it's bigger than the java one now this is simply because it's coded in c plus which is faster than uh java which is what minecraft java edition is obviously coded in but that's a story for another day all you have to know is that minecraft bedrock has the largest render distance so in the original minecraft you know minecraft 1.0 on the java edition and beyond the highest render distance was 16 chunks which is this now you might think well what is a chunk in minecraft well a chunk in minecraft is 16 blocks so this right here would be your typical average minecraft chunk now if you looked at your render distance into a straight line from this point all the way down to that point it would be 16 of these little chunks from that way to that way as well and then everything else would be filled in in between so that means there's eight eight eight and eight and then everything else filled in to make a nice little circle kind of around your player the next thing you're thinking is how are we going to convert these chunks into uh kind of real world chunks how do we measure that and convert the units well notch himself once stated that one block is about a meter so how many american feet is a meter well if you look it up on google one meter is about 3.2 feet so this will give us our first distance 3.2 times 16 is about 51 feet so this little chunk right here is about 51 by 51 feet and of course we have to do the whole 16 chunks but we have to keep in mind that the distance that we can see in a straight line is only eight chunks not 16 16 accounts for this entire strip so we will do 51 times eight to give us our eight chunks that we can see in a straight line that gives us about 400 feet so on the typical minecraft 16 chunks far render distance you can see about 400 feet in the distance now let's compare that to the real world so as you guys can see here we are in google earth of all things to show you what 400 feet looks like so here we can see the eiffel tower in paris france now i'm going to show you what 400 feet from the eiffel tower looks like so google earth uses meters 400 feet is about 122 meters so if you were standing uh looking at the eiffel tower that would be the end of your render distance right there in real life believe it or not yeah that is all you get in your typical minecraft render distance but minecraft render distance remember is not limited to just 16 chunks but yeah this is the typical 16 chunk one let's go ahead and see what the farthest render distance is for minecraft oh and by the way if you want a direct comparison here you go it actually looks pretty similar which is crazy now the maximum render distance that we can have in minecraft at least for my computer is to take it all the way to 80 chunks now it's going to stress my computer out a little bit but it's going to take a little bit to load in this is quite a bit farther well there you have it that is my maximum render distance of about 80 chunks that little point right there that was 16 chunks so let's see if this compares to how far you can see in the real world we're going to do the same exact math to calculate in fact i can probably just have alexa do it for me alexa what's 40 times 16 40 times 16 is 640. so what you're seeing there is about 640 blocks from right below me all the way to the end it doesn't really look like it but believe it or not it is in this way it's the same exact thing remember i'm on remember this is only 40 chunks from here to the end anyways let's see what 640 meters is for the eiffel tower so here we are where the eiffel tower is again it's actually about the distance from the eiffel tower all the way to the murph pikes yeah sorry i completely butchered that anyways yeah that's about the 80 chunk render distance believe it or not let's see what that looks like in first person and here we go it looks like that so yeah as you guys can see that's the 80 chunk render distance it doesn't look similar at all 80 trunks of minecraft looks a lot bigger than 80 chunks in real life so to speak i think we can safely say that your maximum render distance so to speak in the real world is nowhere close to minecraft's actual render distance but it's cool to see this little example now how far and how many chunks would it take in minecraft to see just like the real world this website live science put it really well for us the earth's surface curves out of sight at a distance of three miles or five kilometers but our visual acuity actually extends far beyond the horizon if earth was flat just like minecraft is flat you could perceive bright lights hundreds of miles distant but i guess you could even see a candle flame flickering up to 30 miles but we're gonna use this 3.1 miles because that's all you can really see on real earth let's see what 3.1 miles is in meters so it's about 5 000 meters um that's 5000 blocks we need a 312 chunk render distance or a little bit more than three times the max render distance i'm allowed on this computer so there you have it no minecraft is not even close to how far we can perceive in real life but it's good to know that you always have a knife's view of the eiffel tower wherever you are in minecraft and since minecraft structures are far smaller than structures in mountains and stuff in real life it feels a lot bigger and it still feels like an expansive awesome world anyways this was quite a fun little video to make let me know if you liked it or if you learned something or if the answer surprised you i'm mavi productions thank you for watching and i will see you guys in the next video goodbye