On October 4th 2025, kurtjmac completed his fourteen and a half year long journey to walk to the Far Lands in Minecraft. The first to take on daunting challenge, it was a great moment to watch.
Kurtjmac is not the first to have reached it through walking in the Overworld, though. While there are hundreds of thousands of points on the Minecraft map Kurt reached first, throughout the years, people have taken on the mantle, and frankly blitzed it.
To me, this is not a failure of Kurt: but rather, a reflection of how the world around Far Lands or Bust (FLoB) has changed so dramatically.
This is what YouTube looked like when FLoB #1 (originally a regular episode of a Let’s Play series) was uploaded on March 6th, 2011.
OK, so I think the Internet Archive’s strange activity has made the recommended videos strange. At least they’re related to the videos the person was watching…
The earliest archive of the upload page looks like this:
It was March 28th, 2011 where he would officially convert the series from a Let’s Play, to an expedition to the Far Lands.
To put this all into perspective,
- Minecraft was at Beta 1.3 for the start of his adventure (he would stop upgrading after Minecraft Beta 1.7.3, as the Far Lands was fixed after this),
- Minecraft was 2 years into development, and would release version 1.0 at the end of the year,
- Roughly ~2 million copies of the game were sold at this time,
- Baby by Justin Bieber would be the most viewed video on the platform, with 481 million views,
We look to still have been in the Reply Girl era of the platform.
- YouTube still used Adobe Flash,
- Ray William Johnson was the most subscribed YouTuber at this time, with 3 million (!) subscribers,
- PewDiePie, who would later become the first and only gamer to take the top spot, had 8,000 subscribers at this time (his forgotten password main channel was ~20,000),
Outside of the worlds of YouTube & Minecraft,
- The Samsung Galaxy S2 was launched a month earlier,
- The iPhone 4 was the newest available iPhone at the time - the first iPhone with a front-facing camera, and the first one with FaceTime,
- Twitch was spun out of Justin.tv 3 months after the start of FLoB,
- Vine would be launched a year later, and died in 2016,
- Twitter would IPO a year later,
- Instagram was acquired by Facebook a year later, and WhatsApp 3 years later,
- Snapchat was launched in September of that year,
- Funkmaster Flex would preview Otis, the 2nd single from Jay-Z and Kanye’s Watch The Throne, a month later,
- Red by Taylor Swift was over a year and a half away,
- The Number #1 song in America was Lady Gaga’s Born This Way,
- The Number #1 song in the UK was Adele’s Someone Like You,
- Bin Laden would be killed 2 months later,
- We would still be years out from gay marriage being legalised across the United States,
Social media usage has sky rocketed. Phone ownership went from 35% of the population to 95%. Facebook, the deadest of social networks, went from 845 million DAU to 1.66 billion by 2019 (other than aggregation services like Statista, this data isn’t the easiest to find).
Twitch’s monthly hours watched in 2016 was 600,000. In 2025, it is 2.5 million, down from a peak of 3 million in 2021.
When Kurt started his adventure, YouTube was still not a firmly established full time job except for those at the top. The idea of spending all of your time in Minecraft was not only culturally strange, it was financially irresponsible. Remember: Minecraft,
When KilloCrazyMan dedicated 9 months to this feat, it was no longer a absurd thing to do. While he started before the pandemic, it would only enable him to dedicate more hours to the effort. These days, people are putting in multiple 11 hour shifts to speedrun the game. Throughout, he appears to abuse a boat exploit to go as fast as possible.
Kurt was doing a few hour long videos per week, along with occasional subathons where he would dedicate more time (even still, these were short compared to the competition). But more than that: Kurt took his time. The journey had multiple charity events, and raised over half a million for various organisations. Even on the stream where he planned to reach the Far Lands, he stopped multiple times to take pictures of unique generation, create monuments for milestones, and investigate spawners. And of course, his dog “Wolfie” was a constant companion to him throughout the entire adventure.
The end of Far Lands or Bust is meaningful to me because it feels like a relic from a bye-gone era. I’m sure there are smaller YouTubers continuing on this style, but mainstream internet culture seems to have moved along.
Whatever the case: well done, Kurt.