Three Impossible Worlds

 Three Impossible Worlds is an examination of world generation, focused specifically on Minecraft. The project began as only imagining impossible worlds in the style of Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit and Acorn, thought experiments which would reveal the limitations and biases of the existing world generation system in Minecraft. As it turned out, some of the impossible worlds I had imagined for the project were actually achievable in Minecraft with the use of modding tools, Minecraft Forge in particular. I learned how to mod Minecraft and made three of the worlds (linked below). The first is an oreless world, one where there’s nothing to mine, stymieing the tech tree and technological advancement in the game. The next is a world that’s composed only of ore: this renders it basically inhospitable to player as there’s very little ground to stand on and monsters will spawn in the darkness around them. The final world is a megacity, composed of endless villages which all overlap and intersect with one another. It’s chaotic, and runs very slowly. For more analysis of these worlds, see the video above or the transcript of that video. The background music in the video is by C418, and is selected from music that they composed for Minecraft.

The three mods used in the video are available below. Note that all three require a Forge installation to work. The mods were develop for Minecraft version 1.18, and may not work properly on newer or older versions.