Brick pyramids, an obscure feature in Minecraft’s Infdev (Infinite Development) period, played a crucial role in shaping the game’s structure generation. These pyramid structures were introduced as a testing ground to understand how Minecraft structures would operate in the future.
Unlike the elaborate structures like villages, temples, and shipwrecks we now see in Minecraft, brick pyramids had a simpler generation style. These structures consisted entirely of brick blocks and would generate randomly on top of existing terrain, sometimes even clipping through it.
Brick pyramids did not have any interior rooms or loot chests. They were massive compact areas made entirely of bricks. Interestingly, brick pyramids were fixed to generate at specific coordinates in every world seed, usually around 500 blocks southeast of the world spawn. These pyramids were 127×127 blocks in dimension and approximately 64 blocks high.
During the Infdev phase, players could not craft ordinary brick blocks, making brick pyramids the only way to obtain them. A single brick pyramid contained around 344,000 brick blocks, which equated to over 5,200 stacks of bricks.
The shape of brick pyramids varied due to the game’s height limit. Some pyramids had their tips sheared off since they reached the maximum in-game height. However, Mojang addressed this issue in later versions of Infdev.
Although brick pyramids were eventually removed from the game, they played a vital role in the development of Minecraft’s world generation code. The data collected from these structures and the Infdev phase as a whole assisted Mojang in rewriting and improving the game’s code, ultimately leading to the diverse range of structures we see in Minecraft today.
Without the introduction of brick pyramids in 2010, the process of generating structures in Minecraft might have taken much longer. As a result, Mojang’s masterpiece would not have had the abundance of structures it boasts today.
Sources:
– [Minecraft Wiki – Infdev](https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Java_Edition_Infdev)
– [CalebIsSalty – Brick Pyramid Generation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYKvIaDWNy4)
– [AntVenom – Minecraft Feature Overview – Brick Pyramids](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFtH5QbXWko)
– [AntVenom – Brick Pyramids Retrospective](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv4jZAZXLMk)
– [GameSpot – Minecraft’s Brick Pyramids](https://www.gamespot.com/articles/infdev-hell-exploring-minecrafts-hell-mode-pyramid/1100-6490808/)
