One decade later, Minecraft world generation is interesting again
dither8.xyz
dither8.xyz
One of my favorite game memories of all time was the first time I played Minecraft during the alpha days and immediately got lost in the world. For me, going into a 1.18 world and finding a giant mountain chain and then finding a cave on the peak of the mountain that falls all the way into a giant underground ocean at the bottom of the world in a huge cavern complete with underground vegetation… it brought me right back to that sense of exploration and wonder that I remember from the very first time I played Minecraft.
Also, I found this datapack (sort of like a mod but doesn’t require patching the game since the game natively supports loading datapack files) called Terralith [1] that extends the 1.18 worldgen with even more cool stuff. Wandering around the new 1.18-style mountains is incredible, and then stumbling across something the resembles Yellowstone National Park added by Terralith is even more incredible. It’s worth a try if you like just wandering around in Minecraft marveling at the scenery.
[1] https://www.planetminecraft.com/data-pack/terralith-overworl...
They target Bedrock for this, and I strongly suspect once it starts bringing in extra money they will essentially kill further Java edition development.
Then, by making Bedrock available to people who paid for Java, they would give a hassle-free way for players and modders to try it, and many will probably stick to the latest version.
I do hope, if this scenario comes about, the community will keep the Java version alive by maintaining feature parity, but there’re fundamental issues where some features might not be easily backported on Java due to performance limitations, plus community fragmentation as different modders try to backport same new features in different mutually incompatible ways.
It would be hassle free for vanilla players, but certainly not for modders. There are years of community support built around the Java version that would need to be moved to bedrock to make moving the modding scene hassle free.
Realms are obviously different because the two versions are incompatible.
The "Minecraft Pocket Edition" (MCPE) code that became Bedrock predates Microsoft's involvement by over three years. Bedrock is actually Microsoft's effort to unify versions, eliminating the separate legacy console editions and providing cross-play with PC, mobile, and other console users.
Java remains separate because the consoles will never run Java and the modding community that exists around the Java version just can't be replicated on the Bedrock codebase. If it weren't for mods I guarantee Java edition would be dead.
My biggest issue is the amount of friction when creating a new Microsoft account for a child. I have to walk through other parents in creating a MS account for themselves (if they don't have one), then how to make a child account with a username, then finding and ticking a bunch of checkboxes to allow online play, then launching Minecraft and signing in with the new child account. It's way too many steps with email verifications. It's >30 minutes. In just my circle there's several parents who gave up and sadly their kid can't play with their group of friends. People outside of tech don't have patience for that crap. This is all outside the fact that each console has their own form of friction in allowing kids to play online.
C'mon Microsoft, you can improve the new user process. Just make an optional in-game wizard asking parents a bunch of questions so kids can play ASAP. And if the issue is that it wouldn't fit in with the one-size-fits-all MS accounts used for everything else, then flag the "wizard-built" accounts as incomplete so parents can go through making a 360 account another day. Damn metrics.
For some reason they locked my completely unused Microsoft account, that was created for the sole purpose of migrating my Minecraft account to, due to "unusual behavior" (or "activity that violates our Microsoft Services Agreement" if you go by the error message instead of the corresponding knowledge base article).
The reasonable thing to do in such a case if of course to require users to "[verify] [they] are the account owner" by receiving an SMS verification code on an arbitrary phone number (they explicitly mention the possibility of "asking a trusted friend or family member" for this).
There's a trailer they made for a recent update that shows off some of the terrain results:
Like, it's perlin noise and a bunch of algorithms and it makes mountains and caves and overhangs that are all decorated and such and a river bleeding into a ravine that leads into a giant cave network.
Just yesterday I watched this fantastic explanation of how to generate realistically looking ocean surface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGEqaX4Y4bQ
The fantastic part about this video is just how little of actual physics you need to know to create convincing, complex waves. You can skip entire fluid dynamics and condense it to "water molecules move in circles when subjected to a wave".
Forget about Perlin noise, it is useful to getting something but it is IMO dead end if you are for realistic looking world. There isn't a way to fix it because, fundamentally, it is completely disconnected from how land features are created in real life. To get asymptotically to realism you have to start taking into account more and more of physics and passage of time and Perlin noise just completely ignores this.
To get realistic representation you need to build a little model that knows a little bit about how the features are created.
You can even go Dwarf Fortress direction and model processes that create various features of the world over time.
Edit, I think I found something nice (a cave) at -281, -15, 436, that's not something 1.18 generates by default I guess?
So you're basically stuck near spawn unless you want to spend much more time getting around.
A lot of surface iron was replaced with copper, which is useless, meaning progress is now slower than ever, and grinding becomes even more of a necessity. Generally, many of the items that now clutter the inventory are mostly useless, and the inventory needs constant attention.
Minecraft is a fantastic game that I have spent well over a thousand hours on over the last decade, with many more to come very likely. That being said, with the account transition to Microsoft/Xbox and this update that gives me personally the "Microsoft knows whats best for its users" vibes that I still distinctly remember from WLM and Skype, I am definitely less optimistic about the game's future than I was a few years ago. I do hope my caution proves to be unwarranted.
Previously, the time-optimal strategy to acquire iron and diamonds was to dig a hole deep into the earth and then bore straight paths. This was exceptionally grindy (fans would say zen, detractors would say tedious), but effective.
With 1.18, the optimal strategy is now to enter a cave and find the resources there. The holes in the ground that you dislike are entry points to that system, where many resources are available -- though at the risk of encounters with monsters.
So the transition is from a static grind to the new system based on cave exploration and risk. It's more dynamic and engaging, directly the opposite of your claim here. You mention iron, claiming that progress is slower, but in actuality it's significantly easier to acquire useful amounts of iron now. Jump into any random cave and it's all over the place. Sure, there's a lot of relatively useless copper too, but no one is forcing you to mine it. Just skip what you don't need and you don't need to manage it in your inventory.
Likewise, the new topology with increased heights means that rivers are significantly more important for exploring. You point out that it makes it more difficult to go from one peak to the next, which is accurate (though in my opinion you overstate the difficulty), but regardless it is quite easy to make long journeys if you follow the rivers and low terrain.
So yeah it's harder to go directly in a straight line than it was in before, but now you're paying attention to the terrain in the world and adapting your gameplay as a result. It just requires different navigation techniques. Like it or not, you're absolutely not stuck at spawn.
It's its own form of exploration, at least in the versions with fun cave generation: you always end up in some cave complex that you can then explore. But I'm happy to see that it's less needed now, because interesting caves are more commonly accessible from aboveground.
Doing that by digging down is not really feasible. There are two main routes.
In the village route, you spawn next do a village with a blacksmith. You get some iron or an iron pick from the blacksmith, kill the iron golem for the remaining iron, grab some wheat and then find a nearby lava pool or completable ruined portal. There are variations where you can trade with a villager for a bucket, but by then most speedrunners would have already reset.
The second and more typical modern route is using ocean. You locate a shipwreck which gives you iron and food. Then you find a ravine that has magma blocks (indicating there's lava underneath) and use that to build your portal. To my knowledge this isn't viable in 1.18's world gen though.
When speedrunners do go underground in the overworld, they'll usually try to find a cave first to find exposed iron and lava. Digging down is the last choice.
Everyone (including children) learns this method over time, be it by checking tutorials online, reading a wiki, or just naturally due to how simple and efficient it is.
You just had to mine straight down to y 8/13 (this changed in the new patch), make a long corridor and then just branch out of that corridor in lines.
No, and I don't think I have made any comment on the intention. I understand what they were going for. My point is specifically what you are saying: It massively changes the game play. If I wanted different game play I would play a different game. Every update so far, including the ones since MS takeover have felt like natural progression of the game to me. I enjoyed those updates and have lots of good things to say about them and the way they expanded the game.
This update feels to me like it should have been a different game, or a mod. That's the contrast I was trying to highlight with my comment.
It's worth noting I'm not claiming anything as a fact. I was stating my personal opinion and concern for the direction the game is headed in, relative to my own expectations, after a decade of playing Minecraft. I explained why I think that way, because we're on HN.
> The holes in the ground that you dislike are entry points to that system
Those existed before, just that covering them and getting the materials for it if you're not a fan of big craters and abysses in the ground wasn't a project of its own before.
> So the transition is from a static grind to the new system based on cave exploration and risk.
Cave exploration and mob bashing is still grinding. This will get old fast if you just want to get to it and build your base or whatever self assigned goal you have.
> It's more dynamic and engaging, directly the opposite of your claim here.
That is entirely subjective.
> You point out that it makes it more difficult to go from one peak to the next, which is accurate (though in my opinion you overstate the difficulty)
That wasn't my claim, no. I said it is now more difficult to see directly from the water, because the landscape is raised so much relatively the water. Overcoming that is just tedious, not difficult, because you have to get out of the boat every so often to get a view of the landscape.
For me it is comparable to amplified maps no longer being opt-in, basically. It's fun for a change, but not the game experience I am looking for most of the time. Now I no longer get to pick unless I stick with old versions, which of course sucks for online play.
I'm not a big Minecraft player, but I'm pretty sure the time-optimal strategy for getting diamonds consistently was to set up a deliberate mine topology which is mathematically efficient, not just dig forward in straight lines. AFAIK diamond mining was the only thing that couldn't be automated; for iron the time-optimal way is to construct an iron farm, i.e. engineering, not grinding.
Does 1.18 change things? I'm trying to keep an open mind, trying to convince myself that the new ore distribution adds nuance to my opening moves. When that conviction fails, I look for other things that hold promise. Something that I've toyed around with doing in the past is creating a Zork-esque underground empire, but have always held back on those plans since the old cave networks were bland and cramped. Yet the new underground biomes make such a project more appealing.
Edit: They == Mojang/Microsoft
I have decompiled it and will make my own fork at that point.
I still use this launcher which was made explicitly when I reported some obscure GSON bug a few years back and it will probably work for a long time:
While I agree with you in principal, the truth is that if you don't update the launcher it doesn't break - and if you do update the launcher it also doesn't break, it just requires you to complete an account migration.
https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Ore?file=1-18-ore-distribu...
We did not find the world "riddled with holes," though, and gaps in Minecraft have always been easy to traverse by simply placing blocks.
1.18 ore distribution sucks. Going caving virtually requires full armor due to mobs, but now to get full armor you need to go caving (or get extremely lucky).
I do agree with you on inventory clutter, but that has been a problem for as long as I have played the game (since about 2010? I don't remember which version). I am disappointed that they have delayed the introduction of the bundle.
I much prefer the Minetest game NodeCore, which is playable with 8 inventory slots (the small HUD bar is all you get, because the game shuns all modal UI except a hints system for figuring out crafting and other gameplay mechanics without using a guide to see whole recipes, which are considered spoilers) and makes the fancy terrain more navigable by letting you scale cliffs and even climb overhangs without placing or mining anything.
[1]: https://veloren.net/ the game is still under development but it has been playable for more than a year now.
If you add all that, though, you might there might be some glitches (roads passing through buildings..) but that's part of the fun.
[1] https://wiki.minetest.net/Map_generator
[2] https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=27374
[3] https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=18529
This is such a meme by now, I have to assume it's an inside joke. Even games mention that they're "written in Rust" in the first sentence in their official presentation, what other programming language communities does this? Why would anyone except other Rust programmers care?
It’s definitely weird for end-user software to promote itself based on internal implementation details, but it’s by no means a rust-exclusive phenomenon.
Otherwise I mostly only see this when it’s “for developers by developers”
1) The player community and the dev community are not distinct: we involve players in the development process and actively encourage them to become contributors.
2) There are many people that are interested in working with Rust, and it's often a big pull factor for new contributors.
3) Veloren is by far the biggest public domain game written in Rust: it's a good demonstration of what the language can do and how it performs at scale (Veloren's game server scaled up to a 48-thread machine with 181 players online in the same world during the last release party: not many games, let alone voxel games, can manage these numbers). We want to encourage other game developers to consider using it too.
https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/lod-level-of-de...
I'm personally not fond of the (pretty crude) lod view, especially because of the moiré in it.
And at this point they are clearly looking for contributors much more than for players, that's why all the documentation you'll find is targeting the former.
Documentation and marketing material require a lit of work, and doing so continuously against a fast-moving target is a enormous effort.
The game is extremely open-ended: there is no overarching objective, and you are free to interact with the world as you please. For most players, this means a combination of exploring, crafting, conquering challenges (dungeons, caves, etc.), finding rare items, and socialising with other players.
The game is 100% free so you have no reason not to jump in and give it a go if you're curious!
> How is it similar to Dwarf Fortress?
Veloren has an open procedural world with a history generation system. Although work on the history simulation is still very much ongoing, the world already more cohesive than those of many other voxel games. Our end goal is a world that feels as rich and as complex as that of Dwarf Fortress. Whether we end up succeeding is still to be determined!
> How is it similar to Minecraft?
Veloren is a voxel game, so... cubes and open-world exploration. Not much more to say about this one.
Perlin noise is cool, but why not try to fully simulate plate tectonics, weather patterns, drainage? It would go a long way if deserts were in the rainshadow of mountain ranges, islands corresponded to real volcanic activity, etc.
I guess there is a limit to what you can do with the chunk-by-chunk approach, but I think a certain type of minecraft player stays basically put within a couple dozen chunks. Having worlds "load" on exploration would be a worthwhile tradeoff.
I get that this is a hard, but it is interesting, and it's a problem that would captivate an intelligent developer. They have like a million dollars, why not?
"Real" is an interesting concept. Any such simulation couldn't really be based on Earth geophysics. Who wants to spend months crossing the steppes? Real magma isn't something you find by accident. Real tunnels can collapse. And so on. So these intelligent developers will need to create a new system of geophysics.
I've read that Dwarf Fortress uses a process more like what you describe.
There are games for nuclear war and pandemics that are fun and educational about the globe-spanning dynamics of those catastrophes. There are also games like Universal Paperclips that provide an intuition for the exponential dynamics of complex systems.
Seems like there should be a way to fuse these concepts around climate change.
I wouldn't say so. With the increased mountain height I'd argue the terrain is more realistic than ever, and not boring.
> In the b1.8 update [September 2011], the terrain generator was subject to a rewrite aimed to make the code simpler, and make the terrain more realistic. ... at the time it caused quite a controversy, a thread on the Minecraft Forums decried the new terrain as "boring".
What does "realistic" mean to you? Are you looking at it like a geologist? If we follow rland's idea to completion, Minecraft players should look for kimberlite pipes to find diamonds, etc.
I'm certain some people would love virtual prospecting like this. But I strongly doubt the game would be as popular.
I'd say if you compare the first two set of screenshots. It is more realistic since you don't get as crazy land formations. But falls short of creating significant mountain ranges to compensate, making it less realistic in a way.
The first image, 2011, makes me think of tower carst formations, like Ao Phang Nga National Park or the Li River. It's indeed a "crazy land formation" in that most of the planet is not like that. But well within what a more physics based model might generate.
The second image, 2021, makes me wonder what's going on. How did that concavity appear in the bottom left? Was it limestone? Sandstone, like NM's Natural Amphitheater or CO's Cliff Palace? How is the top of the concavity supported, given that it appears to carry a lot of earth?
What is the geological connection to the ridge above it? How is the ridge supported? It appears highly eroded. Where did the scree go? (Shouldn't some have filled in the exposed concavity?) Why is the transition from light-colored to green so clearly delineated?
In the real-world, large cave systems are rare, and walkable ones even less common. But they are also part of what make Minecraft fun.
So yes, I think a more realistic (in the physics sense) would be less fun than what Minecraft does. (Excepting, perhaps, a small number of more geophysically inclined players.)
Also frequently when using things like peeling noise is to use different scale and resolution of the noise itself. While on smallest scale there might be 1 noise value per minecraft block. You can can also use a different scale in that 1 noise value is used per 10x10 minecraft chunk (16x16 blocks?)
Also not sure how familiar you are with noise generation like perrin but things have slopes to them and isn't just completely random per point. So even without seeing generated data. You can infer a little bit about the next value depending on the intensity and resolution.
Lastly, you can just not use noise at all and just place things at given coordinates and make the game incorporate them into the proc gen at chunk time. E.g. you want a city always at 1000,1000 coordinate far away from 0 0. When you get near you can apply smoothing filters in and around the 1000 1000 position thru various math and layering systems so no matter the proc gen at that point. City can be there and it not look completely out of place.
Sure you do. When you want to apply tectonics to a chunk, it's easy to calculate (and cache) the pre-tectonics version of all the neighbors.
The problem isn't effects that need to know about their neighborhood, it's effects that need detailed info from 50 chunks away.
As another comment mentions, dwarf fortress does do all of this though. I don't think this would work in minecraft though, I think minecraft needs a mix of terrain types near each other to be most interesting, and tectonic plates would spread it out.
If you generate a noise function that dictates where the "plates" are, then the location of the "plates" is already predetermined from the construction of the function. Then the output of that function could be used to alter the mountain/terrain functions.
Thus, no need to pregenerate everything. You pregenerate all of the functions in advance, but not all of the outputs.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmtyQOKKmrMVaKuRXz02jbQ
I'm not entirely sure how the jigsaw system (the subsystem the game uses for building villages and bastions from a large palette of pre-builts using a set of rules and connectors) integrates with the custom world generator options, but that would seem the best bet for it in a vanilla game.
The problem with an "official" player creations is both vetting them and the social backlash because you didn't pick little Timmy's shack. As well as the disjointedness of theme that could occur with a player's playstyle.
I play a modpack. Create: Above & Beyond, they've added a bunch of new random structures to the game, but they're all within a similar theme of quasi-medieval for the surface structures, and a few of the underground ones stray a bit more modern.
Similar idea without neural networks:
https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse
I'm surprised no one applied this idea to Minecraft yet. There's even a 3D version:
They've spoken recently about one of their intentions for Survival is for the world to be a blank slate for players own creations. Adding more and richer structures detracts from that. There's also the part where it's still a game that needs balancing, and just importing arbitrary structures and resources detracts from Survival.
There is the marketplace which has community servers/worlds/levels that showcase what other people have built. I think that's the right level for this.
Otherwise, stuff like this is perfect for the data pack ecosystem they created.
I think the whole field of world generation is awesome. Perlin noise, and the concepts of "smooth noise" that have come from it, and the clever ways people have found to layer noise and use it to map biomes and heights, and spawn locations, etc. And then, even more impressively, with games like No Man's Sky, you have this concept applied to spherical geometry. I just think it's all so cool.
Incidentally, his (Sean Murray, creator of No Man's Sky) is the best talk I've ever seen on the topic:
Some elements of Factorio were inspired by Minecraft. I think Minecraft could now use some inspiration from Factorio.
I'm playing the "Create: Above & Beyond" pack.
There is grind, the pack gives you a goal (build rocket, go to moon), but how you get there is up to you and the automation isn't quite so arcane as vanilla, and doesn't rely on "magic blocks" (Where you plonk down a single block and it magically does all the things) instead relying on you making a machine/factory line from multiple blocks.
I like many aspects of bedrock edition, most related to performance. I want a gregtech-like experience in bedrock so badly that I'd go as far as making it myself. I just wish the command interface wasn't so janky. When I've done test blocks and interactions in the past I've run into limitations that would prevent my vision. This was maybe 18 months ago, so I don't think much has changed yet.
In bedrock minecraft commands must be used to update these states. This is where my understanding started to fall apart.
Create mod by itself is fine as it is imo, no extra stuff required.
A lot of recent packs give you a quest book to guide your progress and push you into the different mods slowly. You get maybe 70-80% through one mod's tech tree and then you're pushed to start on another section before you can progress into that last 20%. The Project Ozone series does a REALLY good job of making sure the different mods balance each other and interact in a way that feels good.
> you end up with a billion items
Yeah that gets bad. Most packs have some sort of inventory organization system (basically a computer you can stick all your items into with no organization and then search them up later) to help alleviate that.
It's a pack with one goal (build rocket, goto moon), that puts you in the SANDBOX that is the core of minecraft and says, "here are the tools, here's a bit of guidance on what you should automate to progress, but figure it out from tools at hand and have fun in your own way".
The mods are from different authors, but all the recipes have been tweaked and tuned to integrate with each other and provide a cohesive progression curve. Even the textures have been tweaked to make the pack visually cohesive.
As an example, the "auto-crafter" block could be powered by chorus fruit, which means the player would not have access to it until after beating the Ender Dragon. That would also mean that truly automating crafting would also require an automated chorus fruit farm, which would give the system a minimum space requirement.
I'm excited for mappers that can now build 1-1 scale recreations of real and fantasy locations like everest (~4000m from the base), minas tirith (300m), barad-dur (1400m), courisant senate building (600m), etc.
I hope they once again push for a revival of modding multiplayer servers, although that is most likely a pipe dream because of the Bukkit DMCA issues in 2013-2014 :(.
Spigot/Paper are bukkit-compatible and you can load modpacks from the spigot.org site, or even bukkit.org, which is still operational to this day.
Source: I run several instances myself and I help develop a server management tool for it: https://craftycontrol.com/
I forgot this, but that's actually why I stopped playing it. I was in uni around 2007-08 and realised it was using a serious amount of my time and energy. I just quit cold turkey back then. I've barely played any video games since this point, in fact.
What I loved about Minecraft initially was the exploration. I got into it during the beta (I think) when there was no mini-map or any "lifelines" you expect from a normal game. One thing that was possible was to go down into cave system, run out of torches, fall somewhere and just be trapped in the dark. The game was so simple there was a very real fear of losing your save file because you got trapped in a cave forever.
Are there any other games that have real stakes in them like the early Minecraft versions?
The first public version of Minecraft came out in May 2009.
I'm sure players would pay to access it if it worked.
https://www.spigotmc.org/wiki/about-bungeecord/
And as others have already mentioned, WorldQL is an effort to transparently replicate and shard the world without even requiring "world hopping"
Bravo, nu-Mojang.
I wonder if this new update adds similar generation again?
Mob spawn light rules are unchanged and don't match up with the RT front end, but that rarely matters.
Guessing you could let the saved game or the player pick which world generation algorithm to use and you need to keep the code for the old and new generator around? It's probably less of a big deal for e.g. rouge-like games are over for good in a few hours, but not for games like Minecraft.
You mean Bedrock supports consoles.
Java supports Mac and Linux, so it's also multiplatform. Just different platforms.
i used PC because in the parent comment PC was used as well.
Desktop is also not ideal because it runs on Laptops as well.
Both support windows, but only Java supports other open platforms (where you can install external software, like Linux and Mac PCs, or others OSes/HW architectures).
Bedrock is only published on closed platforms (games consoles, mostly, and app stores) and windows.
Java is the only edition that supports mods.
The android version of bedrock is also unofficially playable on Linux.
And now we're having a massive celebration because... Microsoft added caves? What a joke. Caves are among the oldest of inventions in human history.
Where's the factory biome with weird machinery and pipes running around? Where's the dead biome thick with fog and populated with graves and zombies? Where's the airship biome that floats high above in the sky and takes building effort to get to?
There's so much creative potential, totally unrealized, for decades. Minecraft never went anywhere. It will die the moment a more imaginative clone pops on the market. It might by Hytale, or something else.
They seem to go on forever.
> Always remember to back up your old save files before loading them into the newest version of the game. With the new changes to world generation, Mojang say that new chunks generated in worlds you bring forward to 1.18 should better blend with the existing terrain in your save file. So long to big flat chunk borders in old worlds!
As for integration.
This time round instead of the "harsh" borders we've gotten before (where new and old chunks meet, often resulting in sheer cliffs due to height differences) the borders will be blended and smoothed.
Your old chunks will also be upgraded, the bedrock that was at Y0-5 will turn into the deepslate block, and you get the full 0 to -64 Y generated underneath.
Ethoslab, a youtuber with a very old world save, is on 1.18 now, and they've got one of the new lush caves in the new negative Y generation under their base.
I have a genuine question as I’m very naive to Minecraft. I see a lot of time / thought / energy dedicated to making things in Minecraft and can’t help but feel it’s a bit of a waste of time. I think I feel this way because I don’t know much about Minecraft or the community. Other than for pleasure (which is a plenty good enough reason on its own) is there any value generated here? People can obviously do what they like with their time but I would much rather spend my precious hours working on something to add to the real world.
I've found positive outcomes from playing the game as well, beyond gaming: for example it helped me realize that you can have a lot of things (in game: build materials) but it doesn't mean anything if you don't use them (in game: build something!). It also helped me reconnect with old friends (we play together in our server, hop into a voice channel sometimes and we also share unrelated stuff outside the game). I know it helped some people get through the pandemic.
It's also a good motivation for kids (and grown-ups!) to learn basic server administration, plugin development, community moderation, and some people also like to fiddle with textures as well.
The game is a creativity source, very much like Lego bricks. The things you do in-game may not have much value, but I'd say it yields great results in the players :)
Also, what is "the real world"? At this point, considering how massively popular Minecraft is, Minecraft __is__ an extension of the real world at this point. It's very unlikely that we will ever lose Minecraft to history. Commit the worldsave to a repo and that world is as good as the real world.