How big is a chunk in Minecraft? Answered

If you’ve played Minecraft for a while, then you have probably heard terms such as world, seed, block, chunk, and others. While most are pretty 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 to find out more.

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What is the size of Chunks in Minecraft?

When you generate a new world in Minecraft, the game’s engine develops clusters of blocks that are 16 x 16 in diameter and 256 blocks in height (384 if you count the world’s foundation). This is what is referred to as a Chunk. If it was theoretically entirely composed of blocks (so with no empty spaces), they would be made out of a total of 65,536 blocks. 

Your Minecraft world is then procedurally generated out of these chunks, with 13 of them spanning each direction from the central Chunk which contains your spawn point. They are the game engine’s way of splitting up your world into manageable chunks — hence the name — for loading, processing, uploading, etc. That makes Chunks rather small in the grand scale of a Minecraft world, but they allow the game to run as efficiently as it does.

These chunks don’t really impact your gameplay much, but if you’re trying to min-max certain aspects of Minecraft, it is possible to use chunks to find out what rare resources have probabilities to spawn. For example, Diamonds and other rare finds have certain limited odds to appear within a single 16 x 16 Chunk of the world. But that only comes into play in worlds that have been progressed and mined out to such a degree that those calculations might become necessary.