[strken]

I was responding to the "literally how Minecraft works" part rather than the discussion further back.

That being said, world generation is a bit like a toybox, or a backdrop to a play in a theatre. Minecraft's world gen isn't worthless, and so improving the backdrop is worth discussing. The differences in the output of implementations matter a lot (to me, at least) and I think Minecraft would be much less compelling if the world was generated using a 3d implementation of Wang tiles. "A few tens of hours" is a lot of content.

Would Minecraft be even more compelling with neural networks doing some of the content creation? I think it might. Would that totally replace the need for human input and invalidate everything players build? No, but that doesn't make it worthless.

[hammyhavoc]

Perhaps!

But a few tens of hours is very little versus the quite literally thousands of hours spent running a server for 8 years and using plugins on it. Truth be told, I think even if a Minecraft world was literally a blank base plate and it was digital collaborative LEGO, it still would have been a hit.

I guess the thing with Minecraft is that it was many different things to different people. Some people loved "Hunger Games" style worlds/modes on servers, others like single player mods, or even just vanilla Minecraft.