These folders contain the chunk files that hold the level's terrain and entities. The level folder may have up to 64 subfolders, each with up to 64 additional subfolders each. There is also a session.lock file to make sure only one Minecraft opens the level at once. The save format was used for all versions between inf-20100327 and Beta 1.2_02 inclusive, with the important exception of inf-20100624, which used a new save format which was immediately scrapped afterwards due to creating absolutely massive world files.Īn Alpha level is actually a single folder containing at least one file named level.dat. In Minecraft Beta 1.3, this format was superseded by the Region file format, where chunks are stored in groups of 32×32 in region files. The first version to use this format was Infdev 20100327. Alpha uses this technique, and both Beta and Minecraft 1.0 still use the general concept because of its success. In addition, terrain is only generated when it is within the drawing distance of the player's camera, significantly reducing save size, since most players will only be able to search a tiny fraction of the map in a reasonable time frame. Therefore, to reduce file size and memory usage, Notch decided to split the terrain into 16×128×16 chunks and store them on disk when not visible. Infdev introduced a new data storage challenge while under development: Terrain generated in infdev has the potential to be almost 235 petabytes, which is 240,640 terabytes, in size when stored in memory, due to the sheer size of the map (several times the surface area of the Earth). This feature is exclusive to Java Edition.

Minecraft anvil text format