The accuracy score of this one would probably be a lot higher than pulling that sentence out alone would lead one to believe.
replyWhat is the issue? You can still download the world files, but it would be inconvenient to store them in Minecraft's unoptimal format.
reply"The largest available Minecraft world" implies we're talking about one world. Then "totaling 15TB" implies the world is 15TB large which would be incredibly impressive and potentially involve multiple shards of minecraft servers stitched together. But 15TB of world files means there's multiple copies of the same data. Still impressive but not the same as a single 15TB world.
replyThe only redundant part of this snapshot is the second 512k^2 snapshot of the overworld. The End and Nether snapshots are still meaningful. Excluding the 512k^2 snapshot, the size would be around 12TB.
replyAnd the actual size of the 2b2t world is likely much larger than 15TB. The data for this project is stored in a highly compressed form, much more efficient than the game's standard file format.
Microsoft can probably scale Minecraft up to support infinitely large sized worlds if they want to. Minecraft lazy loads the world in chunks so you there's no real limitation (aside from machine digit sizes)
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