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

Computers can’t really generate random numbers. The way it works is that you give a random number generator a seed number it spits out random numbers based on that seed. The seed is usually a number, but in a computer, everything is a number, and if you have a bit of text, there are a few ways to turn that into a number.

Edit: in response to your edit, the way seed values work, if you give a random number generator the same seed, it spits out the same numbers. So you don’t need to store the worlds. If the instructions for constructing a world randomly are the same and you give it the same starting seed value, it will always produce the same world.