How big is a chunk in Minecraft? Answered

If you’ve played Minecraft for a while, you’ve probably heard terms like world, seed, block, chunk, and others. While most are self-explanatory, the term “chunk” can be a bit of a mystery. Chunks represent the basic building blocks of a generated Minecraft world. If you’re wondering what that means and how big those chunks are, read on for more information.

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What is the size of the chunks in Minecraft?

When you spawn a new world in Minecraft, the game engine develops groups of blocks that are 16 x 16 in diameter and 256 blocks tall (384 if you count the world foundation). This is what is known as a chunk. If theoretically it were made up entirely of blocks (that is, without empty spaces), they would be made up of a total of 65,536 blocks.

Your Minecraft world is then procedurally generated from these shards, with 13 of them spanning each direction from the center shard containing your spawn point. They are the game engine’s way of dividing your world into manageable parts, hence the name, to load, render, load, etc. That makes the parts pretty small on the grand scale of a Minecraft world, but they allow the game to run as efficiently as it does.

These shards don’t really affect your gameplay much, but if you’re trying to minimize certain aspects of Minecraft as much as possible, it’s possible to use shards to find out what rare resources are likely to spawn. For example, diamonds and other rare finds have some limited chances of appearing within a single 16 x 16 fragment of the world. But that only comes into play on worlds that have progressed and mined to such an extent that such calculations may become necessary.

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