Minecraft is one of the world’s most popular sandbox, or open world style video games, in which players may roam through a virtual world choosing how or when to approach objectives.

Most games in this genre, like Assassins Creed, Grand Theft Auto and others obviously take place on earth, as there are iconic buildings and specific earthly landscapes and/or specific time periods depicted, but where does Minecraft take place?

To have any basis of where Minecraft takes place we should probably figure out if it even takes place on earth.

To do this we first need to figure out the size of the planet.

In the games latest 1.8 release on the PC / Mac it is an estimated 3,000,000 (three million) blocks from 0,0 to the edge of all generated world.  We can confirm this by going in game and entering the player command “/worldborder set 700000000000.” you should see some text at the bottom of the screen, that goes something along the lines of [the number “700000000000” is too large, it must be less than “6000000”] the 6,000,000 (six million) means that 6,000,000 blocks wide is max world border.

Anything after this barrier are ghost blocks that have no meaning, and if you walk into them you’ll fall through into The Void, but unlike falling into The Void in generated land where you just die, here your game will crash due to a memory overload of trying to render blocks that don’t exist. Luckily for us Microsoft (man, I miss saying Mojang) has added a barrier a few blocks before this limit, so that that doesn’t happen.

If one Minecraft block is equal to one cubic meter, the Minecraft world is a 6,000,000 meter diameter sphere.

That is much larger than earth. Minecraft’s surface area is 11,309,700,000,000,000 (eleven quintillion three hundred and nine quadrillion seven hundred trillion) square kilometers!

So the Minecraft world is nearly 19 times larger that our sun at 609,000,000,000,000 (six hundred and nine Quadrillion) square kilometers. This is of course assuming that the world of Minecraft is a spherical planet, and not cubical like it is depicted in most animations showing the full Minecraft globe.

Is there a real life planet could possibly be close enough in size to compare to the Minecraft world?

Sadly no. Science has not discovered a planet that big or has a rotation of such speed, with one moon. The largest we know of is HAT-P-1, a gas giant in a distant star system that has a radius 1.38 times larger than Jupiter.

So we must assume that Minecraft is all an imaginary landscape, playable only in our dreams. This would explain why each world isn’t generated in the same way, and why you can make a working, factory quality tool, in a fraction of a second.  Why you can cut diamonds, iron, and gold and fuse them together without the use of special machinery.  Why you can cut down trees with nothing but your bare fists.