Minecraft wiki entry for After_Beta_1.8, associated text: The Far Lands generate because of an integer overflow error within Minecraft. The noise generator that draws Minecraft's height map increases by 171.103 for every block, causing an integer overflow at approximately ±12550824 (sometimes ±12550821.) Multiplying the aforementioned numbers results in the 32-bit signed integer max value, which when overflowed, results in an extreme noise seed.