Category:Terrain

A Terrain Discontinued Feature is a discontinued feature where the way in which Minecraft's terrain has generated is discontinued. For a Terrain Discontinued Feature to be truly discontinued in it's own right, it has to have no overlap with other categories, such as the blocks themselves being discontinued or invalid block configurations. These features are recognized due to their sheer scale and size, despite technically being replicable in survival without version changing.

Feature Validity

As players are technically able to replicate discontinued terrain simply by placing and breaking the blocks manually, any of the following constraints also have to be met for the terrain to be truly discontinued:

Low World Time

Terrain can be discontinued if the world time (the total number of ticks that have been processed since the world was created) is low enough that no player could have built the terrain manually. The exact amount of ticks at which terrain becomes no longer discontinued is generally incalculable, as faster methods to build terrain may always be found, but rough estimates can be made based on block mining times, and the volume of the affected area. World time also can't prove discontinuity if one has deleted the level.dat file in their world (such as what is done in world save insertion), as this resets the world time to 0 while keeping existing chunks.

Outside World Border

Terrain can be discontinued if it is outside the world border and could not have been placed before the world border prevented block placement, such as by including blocks added after a world border size change. While some blocks can be placed outside the world border in specific circumstances, the vast majority of terrain will still be shielded by the world border.

Regional/Local Difficulty

Terrain can be discontinued if the regional difficulty is low enough. Regional difficulty is calculated using world difficulty, moon phase, world daytime and the chunks inhabited time. If you account for world difficulty, moon phase and world daytime, you can calculate the minimum time spent with a player loading a specific chunk. It is important to note that before 1.13, flying machines could enter, load, and modify chunks without increasing the inhabited time, so only blocks that cannot be moved by flying machines could count before this point. Regional difficulty was also first introduced in 13w16a (1.6 snapshot), so this only can apply to discontinued terrain in versions since then.

Old Blending Chunks

When chunk blending was added in 21w39a (a 1.18 snapshot) to allow for a smooth transition between old terrain and new 1.18 terrain, a new line was added to the F3 debug screen that could appear when standing in old chunks. This is a discontinued feature of its own, which can place many old terrain features into a properly observable and provable feature.