On Minecraft, how is it possible that during a map creation, you can just scramble letters, numbers and symbols as a seed and still have a random map as a result?

Question

My real question is, how is it possible on programming context?

Like, typing “dioasdjklasdknlvioj3e40435905$%” randomly on the seed input, start the map and have a still totally randomly generated world.

And by that, i actually mean how can that be possible if Minecraft wasn’t complex to program, as far as i know.

EDIT: Forgot to add, there is also a more than a sixtillion (Or even far, far more) of character combinations (Incluiding quantity of characters). All of them, if you change a single character in any place, generates you a random map. The slightlest change, and your map is completely different.

Where i am going is… how is it possible that such a small game like Minecraft could have an infinite number of randomly generated maps if it just weights a few Gigabytes (Or even Megabytes) on your PC?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Should there be a lake here? (Dice roll) I guess not. How about a hill? (Dice roll). Hill it is. How high? (Dice roll). Should there be trees? (Dice roll). And so on until it’s a full map. Of course I’m oversimplifying, the actual thing will be much more clever, but that’s general idea.

That string of characters (the seed) represents an infinite sequence of dice roll results. It doesn’t directly encode them, but rather it’s a parameter to an algorithm that forever spits out numbers that are indistinguishable from true randoms. Same seed, same sequence of randoms, slightly different seed, completely different sequence.