It doesn’t matter if you’re an experienced Minecraft player or if you’ve just bought the game. Every time we create a new world or start a new server, our characters start in the same place: The Overworld. True, you might spawn in different unique biomes in the Overworld, but it’s still the same dimension. Whether you start high in the mountains, in the middle of a snowy taiga, stuck in a dense jungle, or maybe even on a small piece of land in the middle of the ocean, you are still in the Overworld. It is the dimension where most of the players spend a huge majority of their time.
Creation of the Overworld
The Overworld is the only dimension that is created when you start up your new world for the first time. Every other dimension (The End and The Nether) in the game is created at the moment you enter it for the first time.
Every time you create a new world it is generated in the form of a randomly generated seed. You might have already seen some posts online about the best Minecraft seeds, such as this one, or maybe this one! When you start your world, you can decide to type in the seed you’ve found online beforehand, or you can just leave the space blank, and the game will generate a completely random world. Although your spawn point is different from game to game, it will always be relatively close to the coordinates (0,0), if we don’t take height into account.
The Overworld, just like the other dimensions, is divided into chunks. Chunks are 16x384x16 sections of terrain. The specific number of 384 comes from the fact, that the build limit in the game goes from bedrock at the bottom at -64 coordinate, all the way to the upper build limit at 320 blocks.
The Overworld is basically infinite, if you decide to run in any direction you should never reach the end. But there are some limitations in the Java Edition, notably somewhere around the coordinate 30,000,000 in any direction.
The Environment
The Overworld is a very complex dimension with an incredible variety of features and biomes. It is divided in various biomes. Biomes determine the basic characteristics of the terrain within it. The best way to imagine it is if you think about real life. You may think of the Sahara Desert as a biome, just like you may consider the Amazon rainforest would be considered a jungle biome. The biome you are in when playing Minecraft determines which blocks compose the surface. It is also crucial to the wildlife that spawns in the area, both plants and animals. The biome can also affect the weather in the area, as you can’t really expect it to snow in the desert.
There are a ton of structures that can be found in the Overworld, a lot of them are based on the biome that you are currently in. Again, you could think of an example, where you couldn’t really find an Ocean Monument in the middle of a jungle. The exact structures that spawn in the Overworld are unique from one seed to another and are very dependent on the biome that they spawn in. Even villages that spawn in virtually any biome are different from biome to biome.
The Overworld is the only dimension that mimics the day and night cycle of our real-life Earth. During the day the Sun is out and serves as a powerful light source, but when it gets dark hostile mobs spawn outside and actively attack you if you come too close to them. Luckily you may skip the night-time of the cycle by simply getting yourself a bed and sleeping in it.
Final Thoughts
The Overworld is a beautiful place, but it can also be dangerous at times. While it provides you with everything you could possibly need to survive, you can also find things that will make you lose all of your progress if you are not careful enough. It is the dimension we all start our playthrough in, except if you decide to use some special mods to make your game even more unique.
But even though the Overworld is so vast and majestic with tons of different biomes, it doesn’t take away from the other dimensions that we have in the game. Both The Nether and The End bring their own beauty to the game, although I feel like the developers should definitely take a look at The End and rework it, just like they did The Nether a couple of years back.
