Minecraft is so complex that it’s sometimes hard to know what is a bug and what is not.

Here’s the logic of the game:

• If you fall from height, you receive fall damage.
• If you fall from height but you’re in a boat, there’s no fall damage.
• If you fall from height and you’re in a boat, but you fall from a distance of 12, 13, 49, 51, 111, 114, 198, 202, 310 or 315 blocks, there is fall damage and you die.

The first is common in games.

The second is – I believe! – a former bug that was grandfathered in as a design decision: people got used to it, started relying on it, and it became “too big to fix.” The retroactive explanation became that the boat is your shield and takes all the fall damage, which is a very Hollywood action movie way of looking at the world.

So, only the third one is a bug… obviously.

But why those specific numbers? Here’s a 16-minute video by Matt Parker at Stand-up Maths that tries to answer it:

It’s an interesting video because it’s lighter on bug causes discussion, but heavier on math – and the moment you realize those numbers above are not random at all and coalesce into a nice formula, is genuinely a pretty fun moment.

I thought this was interesting, and a little contribution to a larger debate about how hard it is to even agree what a bug really is (which I previously briefly talked about).