Blocks of the week: Bedrock

Iron is strong. Diamonds are even stronger. However, our block of the week is the toughest of them all. Indeed, we’re discussing bedrock, a fundamental material known among players of Minecraft PE.

Bedrock lies at the bottom of the Overworld and also appears on the surface and beneath in the Nether dimension MCPE. It was introduced on the tenth day of Minecraft’s development – May 20, 2009 – just three days after the game was first released to the public. This block predates water, lava, ores, and logs, although dirt, grass, and stone are even older.

You may have noticed that if you ever tried to dig down to the world’s bottom, this foundation is unbreakable in survival mode. Without exploiting glitches or bugs, you would wear out countless diamond pickaxes before making a dent in its rocky surface. In creative mode, however, you enjoy the freedom to break it without limits.

The block has undergone several changes throughout the game’s evolution. At one point during early development, it would turn into lava after being exposed to sunlight for some time. For a long period, visibility would decrease at the bottom of the world, with fiery dust particles falling around it. But today, bedrock simply sits there, marking the boundaries of the playable area and preventing players from falling into the endless void below.

In the real world, what geologists refer to as bedrock resembles the rock layer found in Minecraft Pocket Edition—it’s a term for compacted rock lying beneath the surface soil. Real-world bedrock is solid yet quite erodible, and most large buildings are anchored to bedrock through structures called “foundations.”

Across various locations worldwide, such as Sandside Bay in Caithness, Scotland, shown in the image above, bedrock can be seen protruding above the surface in what is termed “exposure,” where layers of soil above reveal bedrock underneath. New bedrock continuously forms under the ocean and erodes where tectonic plates meet.

Instead of an infinite void, the Earth’s core is so hot that rock melts into magma, which sometimes seeps through volcanoes. At the very center, the pressure is immense, creating a super-dense core of solid iron. Correctly speaking, if Earth’s core were part of Minecraft PE, it would consist of iron blocks.

This massive chunk of iron at the planet’s center is why Earth possesses a magnetic field and why magnetic compasses point north. This raises the question of how compasses function in Minecraft PE when the center of that world is merely an endless void. No one knows the answer, but if you ask me, it likely has something to do with endermen…