"Minecraft is one of the most popular games out right now. It's a simple game where you play in a randomly generated world made of cubes." - Jackson Evans, 8th grade
Minecraft is one of the most popular games out right now. It's a simple game where you play in a randomly generated world made of cubes. In Minecraft, the sky's the limit with what you can build, from pixel art of troll faces to castles to entire computers.
| However the feature in this game that most gamers take for granted is the world generation software. When a world is created, a computer algorithm generates a set of data called noise. This is not the noise that you can hear, noise is a set of data created by a computer algorithm that is translated into a black and white texture. |  Image of perlin noise |
There are several types of noise. Some of the most commonly used types of noise include: Perlin, OpenSimplex, Voronoi, and White noise.
Minecraft’s world generation uses a type of noise known as perlin noise. Perlin noise is a type of gradient noise that uses an algorithm that has a pseudo-random appearance, yet all of its details are the same size.
| Minecraft at its simplest terms uses Perlin noise in two ways. The first way it’s used is for the terrain, like hills, mountains, and lakes. This perlin noise for the terrain is two dimensional, meaning it's flat. In this case, the brighter an area of perlin noise is, the taller the hill. |  Hills generated by Perlin noise |
| The second way it is used is in caves. The main difference in this case is that the Perlin noise is generated as a 3 dimensional texture, meaning every position has its own “slice.” When Minecraft generates caves, it fills everything underground with a big block of stone that spans across the whole world. Then the perlin noise is generated. If a block in an area on the noise texture is black, that block gets replaced with air. This creates caves. |  A minecraft cave system |
With all that said, you have the basics of Minecraft world generation. It is far more complicated than what was in this article, especially now that the 1.18 update came out which has completely revamped the world generation.