While you’re exploring your Minecraft world the game is devoting a huge amount of resources to creating it around you. Generating these pieces ahead of time significantly decreases the resource load on your CPU while playing the game which leads to smoother game play with less lag. Read on as we show you how to prepopulate your world map for speedier play.
Why Do I Want To Do This?
As we’ve discussed in other Minecraft tutorials, Minecraft is a surprisingly resource intensive game. It might look simplistic on the surface, thanks to the low-resolution textures and blocky shapes, but under the hood there is a huge amount of calculations and rendering going on to generate and represent the world map as well as handle all the entities and related physics.
This lag while the game renders and displays new chunks is a real immersion killer and, if it lags so bad it locks your game up, a fun killer as well. Fortunately there’s a way to circumvent the waiting game. While there will always be overhead for the various in-game processes, generating new chunks is actually a process we can farm out, if you will, so that the heavy lifting is done when we’re not playing the game. The trick hinges on a clever little program calledMinecraft Land Generator, and there’s very little reason to not take advantage of it.This process is quite CPU intensive. When flying around in creative mode where chunks fill in rapidly to keep up even players on high end computers will see stuttering and lag; players on older computers will typically see their game grind to a complete halt and frame rates will drop into the single digits.
How Does It Work?
The principle behind Minecraft Land Generator is really simple when you dissect the process. Minecraft Land Generator is a helper application that, when paired with a world map and a compatible Minecraft server file, simulates the exploration of the map as if players were roaming it.
If you, the player, had to precisely and systematically canvas a 20,000 x 20,000 square grid in the game it would be terribly tedious and would take days worth of game play. On a newer computer, however, it takes Minecraft Land Generator an hour or two to complete the same task (and even on older computers you can simply leave it run overnight to achieve the same end). Further, once you do the initial run (be it an hour or twelve in length) the work is done and you don’t need to run it again unless you want to uniformly expand your world map again (say from 10,000 blocks on a side to 20,000 blocks on a side).
Minecraft Land Generator works so well, we can only report one downside to using it: increased world file size. Although every Minecraft map is essentially complete from the moment of world creation (remember the world seed + generation algorithm is like the DNA for the map) the world doesn’t actually exist as real hard drive consuming data until the player visits each new chunk and spawns the chunk generation.
As such a fresh map barely explored is around ~10MB or less in size to account for the first chunks and the support files but as the player explores it grows in size as the data for each chunk is written to the game file. By the time the map contains 5,000 x 5,000 blocks worth of chunks the game file will swell to around 600MB. Larger maps have larger file sizes (exponentially so); a 20,000 by 20,000 map has a game file that weighs in at a hefty 6GB.
That’s the only real trade off you’re making with Minecraft Land Generator. What you gain in increased load times and faster game play you pay for with disk space. Given how much chunk generation lags single player games (especially on lower end machines) and what a heavy processing burden it places on servers (where multiple players can be exploring in different directions and generating dozens of chunks a second) the tradeoff is more than worth it for most players and absolutely worth it if you’re running a server.
Using Minecraft Land Generator
Minecraft Land Generator (herein referred to as MLG for brevity) works absolutely flawlessly when you’ve properly configured it, but proper configuration can be a little bit tricky. Let’s walk through the installation process and configuration process to ensure you have a trouble free experience.
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