I think it’s safe to say that I’m a bit of a nerd in that I love reading up on research or doing research myself. I’ve gone through “research the thing!” phases, including tsunamis when I was 9 and sharks (especially whale sharks) when I was 12. Right now, I love to see math/physics/logic applied to fantastical fictions such as video games and TV to show how WILDLY inaccurate they are; then proceed to overthink and run with the idea to answer the question that asks in what conditions would this work in real life? Recently I thought “Hey, why don’t I try it myself? It’s a very specific obsession, and there’s so little material on it.” So I thought I’d start with something simple: I’ve always been a bit skeptical about accurate measurements in Minecraft.
The developers have stated that one block is equal to one cubic meter. One meter is equal to 3.28084 feet or 3 feet 3.4 inches, so one block is about 3.28084^3, or 35.314 feet cubed. (That’s a huge block right there.) Each block is, by default, 16x16x16 pixels. One pixel is 1/16 meters cubed, which is a volume of .000244 cm^3, and each pixel is about .0625 centimeters in height. That’s a lot of numbers, so I’ll sum it up – Each block is one meter cubed, or 35.3 feet cubed, and each pixel is .000244 centimeters cubed, or .0625 centimeters tall (.024 inch tall).
Let’s just take a moment now to realize that Minecraft Steve and almost every zombie, skeleton, witch, villager, and monster in the game are all two blocks tall (32 pixels) or about 6 feet 7 inches in height! However, Google contradicts this; it will tell one that Minecraft Steven is 6’1″, or 1.85 meters, but that would mean that each block is actually .925 meters tall, and each pixel would be .057 centimeters tall (as opposed to the .0625 centimeters). So which is right? Ever since the creation of the game, it’s been established that each block is one meter cubed, and that’s a nice round number, so let’s run with that for a moment.
If it was just Minecraft Steve who was 32 pixels, it wouldn’t really be notable that he’s actually very tall. But because this is the height of almost everything else in the game, it’s an epidemic. The average man’s height is 5 feet 10 inches, so everyone in Minecraft, living or dead, is nine inches taller than the average man today. Isn’t that a bit odd?
In the mid 1800s, the average man was 5 feet 5 inches, so we are going to do some math. 5 feet 5 inches is equal to 65 inches, and 5 feet 10 inches is 70 inches. 70 divided by 65 is equal to 1.077, or a 7.7% growth over 150 years. The equation for continuous exponential growth is A = Pe^rt, when r is the rate, t is the time in years, P is our original number (in that case, it’s in inches), and e is a constant. Let’s plug in the numbers.
81 inches is equal to 6 feet and 9 inches, so we’re looking at a world shortly before the twenty-fourth century, or in the late 2200s.
I think that’s an interesting idea to explore – Minecraft taking place in a post-apocalyptic world with the risen dead in the form of corpses and skeletons, and the small population that is left is scattered in the form of isolated villages or loners.
Despite this post-apocalyptic idea, the Minecraft world is surprising natural and city-free. Well, it takes about 20 years for a forest to regrow after a fire, so it isn’t much of a stretch to assume that in nearly three centuries the world could be a lush, green place. Sadly, I couldn’t find any research on how long it would take for a forest to replace a burned-down city, but it only took googling “abandoned towns” and scrolling through the pictures to realize that these un-burned towns are already being taken over by nature; trees bursting through the roofs of houses, plants overtaking the walls and rooms… A burned-down city would be even less in the the way for the plants to move in.
So let’s recap – Minecraft is a world which takes place nearly three centuries into our future, in which a unknown cause has burned down our cities and raised the dead (not to mention artificially grown our spiders to terrifying sizes), and the few people who have survived are forced to scatter and survive. Sounds like every dystopian franchise ever to me. No wonder it’s popular right now.
I know that sounds like a bit of a stretch, but the other option is that the blocks are actually .925 meters tall and have 79% the mass (.925^3 = .79m^3) of the assumed 1 meter cubed and Minecraft is just another world. (Yawn.)
P.S. Talk about a rabbit trail. I meant for this post to be about how large the rabbits in Minecraft were, based on pixel measurements. Oops. (Hint: they’re 3.3 feet long by 3.3 feet tall. The largest rabbit recorded in our world is 4 feet long and 55 pounds. The more you know!)
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