Short answer. The border sits just under 30 million blocks from spawn in every direction, making the world about 60 million blocks across. That is not something 2b2t configured. It is vanilla Minecraft’s default, which is also the largest border the game permits. It has been reached in all three dimensions, and as of April 2025 all four Nether highways run to it in obsidian.
The number
Precisely, the border is 29,999,984 blocks from the centre, giving a world 59,999,968 blocks across. Everyone rounds it to 30 million out and 60 million across, and that is fine in conversation.
The area works out to roughly 3.6 billion square kilometres, around seven times the surface of the Earth.
It is not a 2b2t setting
This gets stated wrongly a lot, so it is worth being clear. Minecraft’s default world border is 59,999,968 blocks across, and that same number is the maximum the game allows you to set. Since the default and the ceiling are identical, no server can have a bigger border, and a server sitting at that number has simply left it alone. Those two numbers have only matched exactly since 1.17, in 2021; before that you could set a slightly larger 60,000,000.
Two things confirm 2b2t left it alone. Its own modifications page lists every change it makes to vanilla behaviour, from mob spawning to phantoms to the spawn radius, and there is no world border entry. And the number matches the vanilla default to the block, which a deliberately chosen border would be unlikely to do.
The owner has set a border before, shrinking an April Fools’ map to 400 by 400 blocks in 2017, but that was a separate temporary world rather than this one.
One historical note: a configurable world border only arrived in Minecraft 1.8, in 2014. Before that the edge of the world behaved differently, which is worth keeping in mind when reading about the players who got out there in 2013.
Who got there first
Names and dates below come from the community wiki’s world border page and its timeline.
Overworld. Somebody got there in 2011 through a backdoor, which is known only indirectly: chunks dated to 2011 have turned up out on the -X axis. Nobody knows who.
The first arrival anyone can name is Pyrobyte and iTristan on 7 December 2013, also by backdoor rather than travel. They left a bedrock platform beyond the border with signs on it, reading in part “It’s the end of the world!” The diggers who arrived the hard way in 2017 found those signs waiting, and took a book from the platform.
Reaching it legitimately took until 2017, and it happened one axis at a time:
| Direction | Reached | By |
|---|---|---|
| +X | 26 March 2017 | The +X digging group |
| +Z | 9 June 2017 | The +Z diggers |
| -Z | 7 August 2017 | gRiNdLoRd, who flew under the Nether floor for about ten hours |
| -X | 22 December 2017 | The -X diggers, who built a Christmas tree when they arrived |
Nether. First reached by ThebesAndSound in April 2018, using a boat exploit, arriving at the positive corner. The first arrival by actually mining there came on 12 May 2021.
End. Armorsmith reached the negative corner on 17 August 2017 after roughly a week of packet-flying, and founded a base there.
What is actually out there
Terrain, and then a translucent wall you cannot pass. Beyond it you take damage. That is the whole mechanic.
What makes it interesting is what people built. There was a base at the +X border called Point Nemo, founded within days of the 2017 arrival and griefed almost immediately, then griefed again, then lavacast into oblivion. A Christmas tree at the -X border. Monuments at the corners, one with an underground room and a chair for each of the diggers who made it. And a ring road, dug in July 2021, running the square perimeter in the Nether at coordinate 3,750,000, connecting the axis monuments and the corners to one another. Because Nether distances are an eighth of Overworld ones, that perimeter is a job a group can finish. The Overworld equivalent would be eight times longer.
The Far Lands are not there. They were a terrain generation artefact about 12 million blocks out in very old versions, and they were removed from Minecraft long before anyone on 2b2t got close. There is no evidence they were ever generated on this map.
The highways got there in 2025
For most of the server’s life, travelling to the border meant a long trip through unpaved tunnel or open Nether. That changed recently, and it is the most under-reported thing on this page.
An obsidian highway now runs from spawn to the Overworld border along all four cardinal axes in the Nether. They were finished one at a time: east in July 2021, then west in February 2025, north later that same month, and south on 26 April 2025, which completed the set.
Worth knowing what “the border” means for a Nether highway. Because the Nether is eight times smaller, the Overworld border corresponds to Nether coordinate 3,750,000. The Nether’s own border is separately out at 30 million Nether blocks. Both have been reached; they are different journeys.