Older versions of Minecraft had a similar issue. The block display started to get desynchronized with large enough coordinates, because their coordinates were relative to the world origin and not the player/camera position and truncation errors got large enough to have visible effects. (You can see them from most Far Lands videos.)

It should be noted that floating point is not really an issue for both Patriot and Minecraft. There would have been similar issues even when fixed integers of the same size, 24 and 32 bits respectively, were used. The real issue is that there were two values where one is much larger than another, and they were combined into a single variable without further consideration.