Are We There Yet?

Around ten years ago a Youtuber by the name of Kurt J. Mac began a walk-a-thon for charity.  What made this particular fundraising drive unique was having it take place in Minecraft.  The goal was (and still is) to reach the "Farlands", a strange place that only appears in older beta versions of Minecraft when over 12 million blocks from the initial spawn point.  The terrain there takes on some very strange shapes due to floating point precision errors (caused by mathematical rounding) that result in blocks not aligning the way they normally should.  Of course, nobody has ever been to the Farlands without using hacks/mods because of their extreme distance from where the game begins.  Kurt is the first to make the journey within the limitations set by the game.  

The version of Minecraft Kurt plays is the last beta version of the game to feature the Farlands before they were patched out.  He never plays off-camera so his entire trek has been documented via VODs uploaded to Youtube or (more recently) streamed on Twitch.  Needless to say, it has been quite the trip.  In real life, during the last decade Kurt has moved out-of-state twice and grown an impressive beard.  In-game, he picked up a traveling companion in the form of a domesticated wolf named "Wolfie" and erected a number of monuments to mark his progress.  He has never died, but at one point was knocked down to a half-of-a-heart of health.  Recently, the charity aspect of the journey has been put on pause although it managed to raise over half-a-million USD for children's hospitals and animal shelters.  So why bringing all this up now?

The pace of Kurt's advance has always been best described as "slow, but steady."  However, starting in April 2023 he made a revision to his methods.  In particular, he decided to introduce an initiative in which he would walk 3 minutes for every Twitch subscription (with donations and gifts working similarly).  The result has been a rather explosive boost in forward movement.  It's possible Kurt was hard-up for cash.  He has never been an especially popular online personality.  Nonetheless, he has an annual tradition called "FLoB-a-thon" at the end of which he pushes the "F3" button on his keyboard.  Doing this in Minecraft brings up a debug overlay which shows (among other things) the location of the player's character in terms of XYZ coordinates.  As of May 16th, 2023, he has gone well beyond the halfway mark at just under 7.4 million blocks from spawn.  Even though he has a considerable distance to go, there's a noticeable jitter as a result of the ever-increasing errors that cause the creation of the Farlands.  This block offset grows more extreme at certain intervals, the next of which is at the 8 million mark.  Strange and disorienting as it is to stare at in-game, I highly doubt it will discourage him...after all the name of the series is "Farlands or Bust!"