The Null Zone
The Null Zone, the void, the limit of ROBLOX’s render distance, the killer of GPU, whatever you call it, this is a place that resides in every ROBLOX game, no matter what.
Whether or not if you can reach it in whatever ROBLOX game you’re playing is a complicated question, but I assure you, with enough buggy physics (which is kind of just in ROBLOX’s nature,) you can get it done.
I’ve been to The Null Zone many times in my life, and I’m here to tell you everything I know about The Null Zone!
Here’s a short render, a great example of what this looks like, made by Stanislav Marchevsky. The object moves further away from the origin (the sphere in the background) and the object’s speed increases with time: (slight flashing lights warning)
First of all, let me say that a majority of my discoveries come from playing Build A Boat for Treasure, a ROBLOX game where you do just that. But, there’s a lot of mechanical parts to it, and the most reliable way to get in from there is using some sort of wheel or hinge, then utilising the ability to anchor some blocks but keeping others unanchored. If you then connect your character to these parts (either by using glue, seats, or other weird shenanigans such as cakes), you can easily fling yourself into the tearing void.
Lessons From The Void!
What I’ve learned from spending tons of time in The Null Zone, and from doing a little bit of research:
The first Wacky Physics Lesson From The Void!
To get to The Null Zone reliably, you need speed. Lots of speed. This isn’t too hard to get, since The Null Zone in the ROBLOX engine seems to change how momentum works, most likely because your coordinates are changing in a way that they are not meant to, most likely due to a rounding error (see below). Speed will build up forever, and you will usually end up going so fast that you will never fall down past the death plane (and even if you do, you might be going so fast that you fall through it, if that’s even possible.)
The Second Wacky Physics Lesson From The Void!
The Null Zone is actually the whole world. This is a complicated thought, so let me break it down. The further away that your player or camera gets from coordinate (0, 0, 0), the more extreme visual (and in some cases, physical) distortions will occur. People have described three stages of The Null Zone, first one just being the normal world, the second one being that everything goes red, and the last one being a buggy hell. This is false. There’s no red stage, it’s just a gradual transition into distortion. Some people say that the exact coordinate where this starts is one million studs away from the origin, but this is also false, as there’s no way to precisely calculate it without being a genius of computer science (which I am not, I’m just a silly little fella who makes spaghetti code)
The third Wacky Physics Lesson From The Void!
The Null Zone can actually be found in mostly all 3D game spaces! I have seen some really creative solutions to this issue—where you go too far out and the world begins to distort— like Outer Wilds, which apparently moves the worldspace around the player, rather than the player moving around the worldspace! I’ve heard that this has the opposite of the intended effect, though, where the world begins to distort rather than the player…
The fourth Wacky Physics Lesson From The Void!
You can walk into The Null Zone instead of being flung! This is interesting, since it cleared up a lot of misconceptions I had about The Null Zone. The first time that I’d actually walked into The Null Zone without needing to be flung came from a funny little game called DOORS. At door 60ish, there’s a secret doorway that, after getting a few items, you can enter a place called The Rooms, a nearly endless, quiet, and tense area (which frankly is significantly scarier than the base game) that seems to go on forever. There’s over 1000 doors to go through in there, and it can take a good 2 hours of walking (and hiding in lockers) ((and looking for flashlight batteries)) (((and looking for money))) to finally get through the thousandth door. During the last hundred or so rooms, I’d noticed that my arms, legs, the light from my flashlight, and even a bit of the walls, floors, and props were starting to distort, just like The Null Zone! By the end, I believe that it had also affected the models in my hotbar. After doing a genuine investigation of The Null Zone, I suppose it makes sense that you could just walk into it, but it seemed so impossible due to the sheer distance The Null Zone is from the origin.
The fifth Wacky Physics Lesson From The Void!
If you travel to The Null Zone by any sort of vehicle, the exact frame that you press space to dismount it, either you will gain so much speed that the vehicle falls behind instantly, you have no speed and the vehicle is moving too fast and it will disappear instantly, or the vehicle has gained so much speed while in The Null Zone that with one single collision with your character, which occurs as soon as you jump out of your seat, you gain an incomprehensible amount of speed and get flung away from the vehicle.
The sixth Wacky Physics Lesson From The Void!
Even if you’ve lost your speed (perhaps by anchoring a part that’s attached to your character) it’s still highly unlikely that you will fall though the death plane due to the extreme vertical distance you gained from the origin during your time in The Null Zone.
What’s going on?
Disclaimer
I do not understand most of the science side of this bug, although I have enough knowledge about Computer Science for this to be barely comprehensible. Most of the stuff past here is a bunch of stuff about binary code, computer processing, and math. If you’re not interested in that, then congratulations! 
You finished reading the post!
About Float Points
The Null Zone is actually a result of what’s called a Float Point Precision Error, something that I learned about 2 years ago, obviously while in The Null Zone.
Now, let’s break down that phrase. A “float point,” or just “float” is a value that is compatible with decimals, and usually will use decimals. Now, everything on a computer is stored in binary code, including numbers. The problem arises when you store the decimal in binary, since decimals sometimes do not have an exact binary value, therefore they cannot be reliably stored if there are too many decimals (so programmers will limit it to about 10 decimals, which is why mathematicians need supercomputers to compute exact digits of Pi).
The ever so lovely Jan Misali did a MUCH better job of explaining this, and I highly recommend that you watch this video for a better understanding:
What is a Float Point Precision Error?
Good question. I actually lied to you a bit, to simplify things. Take this example below from Floating-point arithmetic - Wikipedia :
In binary single-precision floating-point, this is represented as
s = 1.10010010000111111011011withe = 1. This has a decimal value of
3.1415927410125732421875,
whereas a more accurate approximation of the true value of π is
3.14159265358979323846264338327950...
You can see here how a mistake is made, where the value is not only rounded, but incorrectly rounded. Now, a Floating Point can be described as a number times a base to the power of a negative exponent, for example, 31415 x 10^-4 = 3.1415. Now, this is mostly just speculation, because a lot of this requires advanced knowledge of hardware, which I don’t have.
Summary
So, you have your basic coordinates, the Floating Point, right before it’s calculated. This coordinate is lacking a decimal. But once it has a decimal, it gets its special binary code. The issue with giving it a binary code is that when decoded, it is corrupted, rounded, and distorted, because decimals do not have a proper binary representation.
So, basically, floating points are broken as hell, but you need them for a certain precision. Hence, the “precision error.” Due to some fucky computer stuff, when you have a wacko insane binary code for a number, and your coordinates have exceeded a certain point, the visuals will distort. This also has something to do with polygons in 3D models, and how they render, but I don’t know anything about that stuff.
too long + didn't read + math sucks + science sucks + your magic is WEAK + you have ZERO renown + you should jump off stepstones NOW + no dodge reflex? + your clan is trash + arcane odyssey forum user
Anyways, that’s a lot of weird math shit that I don’t really care about, but, I can explain it in one sentence, to the simplest degree possible: combuter no like big number with decimal…
