Minecraft tick speed explained

Every game, including Minecraft, runs at a certain pace. Its day-night cycle, NPC character routine and behavior, and constant environment changes occur at a certain pace. This pace is set by the developers in the form of tick speed. While tinkering with farms and contraptions in the block game, players must have heard or wondered about the tick and its speed.

This is a basic elaboration of what tick and tick speed mean in Minecraft.

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Tick speed in Minecraft: What it is, what a tick changes, and more

Tick is a game's programming loop

Every game is made up of hundreds of thousands of programming codes. Some of these codes take place once every game session or story, while some keep occurring every time. These programming code loops checks and updates the game as time passes.

In simple terms, every game with a weather system or a day-night cycle will complete a programming loop and then slightly change the time of day during another programming loop. When loads of these loops are combined, players experience smooth day and night or weather transitions.

This programming loop is essentially called a tick in Minecraft. Every tick checks every block, mob, item, and environment change going on around the player and changes it as per its condition.

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What is a tick speed

Minecraft has a constant tick speed which can be altered through commands (Image via Mojang Studios)

These programming loops or ticks happen quite quickly in Minecraft to ensure a smoother experience. The default ticks per second (TPS) or tick speed of a world is set to 20. This means that every second, 20 ticks are being processed by the game. This also means one entire in-game day takes 24,000 ticks or 20 real-life minutes to complete.

Tick speed will remain the same most of the time and will only decrease if a computer is unable to compute these ticks as quickly as the game demands. This will essentially make the game feel latent.

While this is a universal tick speed, the game also has chunk, random, scheduled, and redstone ticks. However, all these work in tandem with the game tick speed.

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How to alter tick speed

Tick speed can be altered from this command (Image via Mojang Studios)

Recently, Mojang added a method to alter tick speed with a /tick command. With this command, players can freeze, unfreeze, and change the rate of a tick. An example of a frozen tick is shown above, where six arrows are shot from a bow by the player, but since the tick is static, neither the mob nor the arrow is moving.

Tick speed can also be altered using the /tick rate command. If players set the tick speed to 100, they will notice that the mob movements, day-night cycle, and any block changes or world updates will occur faster.

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