Minecraft has always been a game of near-limitless potential. With its endless worlds to explore - both player-made and randomly generated - there's never any shortage of things to do and see in the Mojang-developed blockbuster survival sim. However, there's always been one world that has remained elusive to Minecraft players - and it's been staring them in the face for years.
Over on Reddit, a brave group of Minecraft researches announced that they've finally found the seed for the game's title screen. Specifically, the panorama that players were met with upon opening up Minecraft between 2011 and 2018. Given that this was the title screen for the game for most of its run, it's become one of the most iconic images that fans associate with the title.
"Everyone should be familiar with this world. It's the one that always appeared on Minecraft's main menu (title-screen), blurred and slowly rotating around," Reddit user Tomlacko explained. "It first appeared in 2011 for Minecraft Beta 1.8 and stayed for many years, until it was only recently replaced in 1.13 and every version after that."
So how did the community find it? How did they even know that it was out there to be found in the first place? It's all thanks to a collaborative research project called Minecraft@Home, which borrows the power of people's idle computers to scan the game's numerous worlds and environments for specific landmarks.
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In what the project described as a "sheer stroke of luck", the program returned a result in just 24 hours - that's approximately 93 days of processing time at a total of 54.5 exaFLOPs compressed into the space of a day thanks to the 137 users who contributed 181 hosts with 231 GPUs.
To see it with your own eyes, you'll need the following information:
Version: Beta 1.7.3
Coordinates: X=61.48~, Y=75, Z=-68.73~
Seed: 2151901553968352745 or 8091867987493326313
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You can also take a look at the video comparison below (or via this link) to see that the seed in question is indeed the exact same spot as Minecraft's iconic starting screen.
There's so much about this that fills me with joy. The passion and creativity of everyone involved to have ever had the drive to make this happen in the first place is just... fantastic. On top of that, I adore the idea that this world that Minecraft players spent the better part of a decade staring at is just now being explored for the first time. Truly, it's a game that never stops giving.
Featured Image Credit: Microsoft