For example, how does an infinitely randomized world like Minecraft manage to generate me an identical world to my friend with just a handful of numbers that they send me?
In: Technology
I saw a lot of answers here that address what a seed is and what “random” means in terms of the world of computers and these are all good answers. However, I wanted to give a bit of a game development perspective.
What Minecraft does is Procedural Generation, which means there is a set of instructions that use some input to generate some parts of the world. So there are some general guidelines that the game uses around biomes and what can be in those biomes as well as under/around that kind of make Minecraft worlds what they are. It uses this seed (random or not) to make these decisions.
To make it overly simplified. If your seed is “1234” then there may be a procedural step in where to start the desert biome, because the seed is 1234 the biome starts in a particular place, but if it were “1235” it would be completely different. It does this for every decision, where to place mobs/trees/water/minerals almost everything, and it procedurally narrows this down using this seed number to make these decisions. That’s why the world can be the same using the same seed, but you can’t manipulate the seed to make minute changes. And that’s also why it feels so “random.”
Short version, there is a set of rules that generate the world. It uses the random “seed” to make all the decisions to generate it. The rules and steps are always the same, but the seed is what changes and makes things random. This also allows the same seed to have the same outcome.
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