Around the Block: The Void

Wow. We did it. Over the last four years, we’ve written about almost every single biome in the game. What a long, strange trip it’s been! I'm not gonna lie – my feet hurt a little!        

We’ve explored plains, sunflower plains, badlands, eroded badlands, meadows, mushroom fields, savannas and windswept savannas. We’ve roamed through forests, birch forests, dark forests, flower forests, windswept forests, cherry groves, jungles, sparse jungles, bamboo jungles, wooded badlands, and taigas of all kinds – snowy, old-growth, and even old-growth pine.

We’ve waded through swamps, mangrove swamps, rivers, frozen rivers, beaches, snowy beaches, and stony shores. We’ve sailed across warm oceans, lukewarm oceans, deep lukewarm oceans, cold oceans, deep cold oceans, and skidded out of control across the surface of frozen oceans.

We’ve experienced temperature extremes in deserts, desert lakes, tundras, ice spikes, snowy slopes, jagged peaks, windswept hills, and frozen peaks, and spelunked through lush caves, dripstone caves, and the deep dark.

We’ve even crossed dimensions – popping through an obsidian portal to the Nether wastes, basalt deltas, soul sand valleys, crimson forest, and warped forest, and journeying to the End highlands and small End islands.  

So, where is left to go?

Well, we don’t rule out bringing this column back occasionally in the future as Mojang Studios’ top cartographers keeps discovering new biomes in new updates. But in the meantime, there’s only one place left to explore. I’m talking about the space below the world – the chasm where you’ll find yourself falling if you somehow break your way through bedrock, through the bottom of the Nether, or if you take a wrong step in the End. A place with no blocks, no light, no plants or animals, and no hope of escape. The void.

It’s in this silence, this absence, that our curiosity meets its limits. The void is a reminder of the uncharted, the unknown that lies beyond the edges of every map, which watches, waits, and welcomes us with open arms.

The void is the end of Around The Block. But perhaps it’s where a new adventure begins?