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Far Lands or Bust
Far Lands or Bust (abbreviated FLoB) is an online video series created by Kurt J. Mac in which he plays the video game Minecraft. The series depicts his journey to the "Far Lands", a distant area of a Minecraft world in which the terrain generation does not function correctly, creating a warped landscape.[1][2] Kurt has been travelling since March 2011 and, as of 2024, is expected to reach his destination some time in 2025. The show also holds the Guinness World Record for the longest journey in Minecraft.[3][4] Episodes of Far Lands or Bust typically act as a sort of podcast, with the game providing a backing track while Kurt discusses recent events in his life, news and science. The show also encourages viewers to donate to charity to reach fundraising goals.[4] This charity was originally Child's Play, for which the show raised over $400,000.[5][6] From 2018 to 2019 the charity was Direct Relief.[7] Beginning in 2020 the charity is the Progressive Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), from which Kurt adopted his own dog, Juno, in 2017.[8] On August 30, 2020, Kurt announced he would no longer be using PAWS as his charity, mostly due to complications with their donation system, instead switching the charity to the Equal Justice Initiative.[9] Format The Far LandsMinecraft is a sandbox video game which places players in a 3D procedurally generated world. As a player walks in any direction, the game generates terrain ahead of them, creating (in theory) a virtually infinite world for the player to explore.[2] However, due to computational limits in earlier versions of the game, at a distance of roughly 12,550,821 blocks from the center of the world the terrain generation algorithm behaves unexpectedly, creating a sudden warped landscape.[10] Markus Persson, the original developer of Minecraft, commented that "Walking that far will take a very long time. Besides, the bugs add mystery and charisma to the Far Lands."[1] The name "Far Lands" was adopted by the community to refer to this area. Persson also said it would be "impossible to reach the Far Lands" and Kurt took that as a challenge.[11] Due to changes to the game's code, recent versions of the game do not contain the same error, and terrain continues to generate normally at distances up to 30,000 kilometres (19,000 mi) from the center of the world.[2] Kurt has continued to record his series in version Beta 1.7.3,[12] the latest version of the game in which the Far Lands are still present.[13] Persson estimated in 2014 that walking to the Far Lands would take approximately 800 hours.[14] Even further out (32 million blocks), the game fails to check for collision, leading the player to fall through the map to their death. Over 30 legitimate journeys to the Far Lands have been verified as of October 2023.[15] About 1/3 have been completed (some using a 1/8th shortcut through the Nether dimension), 1/3 are in progress, and 1/3 have become inactive (including one death, TinfoilChef[16]). For example, in August 2022, this goal was reached by MysticalMidget, after 2,500 hours of walking.[13] F3 monumentsIn the game, a debug screen can be opened by pressing F3, which displays the player's current coordinates in the world, plus the biome.[17] In Kurt's journey to the Far Lands, he only presses F3 once the season's charity donations goal has been met to wrap up the season. Additionally, he builds a monument to commemorate the occasion. An exception to this was when he crossed a point where the floating-point error grew from two texture pixels to four. On August 8, 2020, Kurt witnessed an increase in the floating-point error jitter during a live stream (listed as episode 793.5). Kurt pressed F3 in the next episode, 794, to confirm he'd hit the milestone of 4,194,304 blocks. He built a monument to mark the point.[18] The next time this occurred was April 16, 2024, during that year's FLoB-a-thon, when he noticed the jitter increase again after 8,388,608 blocks of total progress.[19]
CompletionSeason 11 saw Kurt increase the completion percentage from 58.93% to 78.60%, suggesting that Season 12 could see another 20% of progress made towards his journey. That would put him at about 99% of the way towards the Far Lands at the end of FLoB-a-thon 2025. An estimate by professional Minecraft builder MegaMinerDL in July 2024 calculated that Kurt could in fact reach the Far Lands in a mere 80 days.[21] References
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