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How I nearly died on Minecraft’s title screenAlso I think I met the devil.
Also I think I met the devil.
As you may haveseen already, the hillside lake shown onMinecraft’s old title screen, which rotated slowly and blurrily between 2011 and 2018, has been located at last. The discovery of the world’sseedis a whole story in itself, about how a group of people managed to deduce a single location from among the 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 worlds possible in Minecraft. That’s about as many atoms as there are in a bee, for reference, making for a pretty daunting puzzle. But since the techniques used to solve it were so unspeakably clever that I could only understand them as literal sorcery, I am probably not the person to ham-fistedly relay that tale.
Yep, this image does a pretty artful job of showing just what can change in nine years.
Any good expedition needs parameters, so I set my rules before I embarked. From entering the world, I’d give myself three in-game days to find the location from the co-ordinates I’d written down, and build a home there with four walls, a door and a roof. I wouldn’t leave the area visible in the rotating panorama from the old title menu, I wouldn’t use creative mode (this turned out to be an easy rule to follow, as it didn’t exist in 1.7.3), and if I died, I’d delete the installation and never return. Having played Minecraft on and off for a decade, I figured that this all sounded like a pretty tame challenge.
It’s the little things that really stuck out. In recent years, I’ve gotten really used to water being full of fish and pretty, animated pond weed, but these lakes seemed eerily barren - expanses of sterile dirt with just the occasional, miserable-looking squid living in them.
I reached the location specified, and frowned, as I appeared to be looking at a generic, nondescript bit of countryside. But after turning ninety degrees to look at a different bit of equally nondescript countryside, something clicked. Some buried process in my brain - no doubt evolved for something actually useful back in the hellish savannahs of the late Pleistocene - knew exactly where I was, even without having to bring up my reference image to check. I was on the Minecraft title screen. It looked exactly as it always had, preserved like a mosquito in amber made of congealed maths, and it looked exactly how it should. Apart from one thing. As I took in the view, a single black sheep waddled into view right at the centre of my vision, and evoked 2016 horror movieThe Witcha little more than I felt comfortable with.
“Wouldst thou like to live… deliciously?”
That was when I hit my first big limitation.
Bollocks.
I’d forgotten that you couldn’t choose the alignment of log blocks in those days, so my plan to make pleasant, horizontal log walls was buggered. And with the lobotomised moans of zombies already filling the darkness, there was no time to come up with a plan B. So I followed the timeless first night playbook, and buried myself in a hole for the night. Soon after that, a storm started (weather had just been introduced to the game, after all) and continued all night as I dug a miserable, lightless cave with a wooden pickaxe. Since charcoal torches, ever the saviour of a coal-less first night, were still some way in the developmental future, I had to use a furnace as an impromptu lamp, wastefully burning wooden planks so I could see what I was doing. At last, in a stroke of Morisettian irony, I struck coal just as dawn broke.
♬ And who would’ve thought, it figurrrs ♬
Seconds, it took. Mere seconds.
I only survived getting jumped because things were so much easier to kill prior to the awkward sword-swing-timing mechanic introduced in Minecraft’s combat update. Even so, I’d been narrowed down to my last couple of hearts, to the point where even a minor fall might now spell the end of me. Forced to delay the construction of my walls even further, I had to go in search of food.
Black Philip, as the nearest animal to hand, was first for the chop. But alas, he had no chops for my thirst, as sheep just dropped wool in those days. With fish not having been invented yet, I sprinted off in search of a cow I saw on the horizon, but it did not drop any beef. Nor did the next cow, or the next, or the zombie that nearly ended my life as it blundered out from behind a tree in the middle of my hunt. The whole herd had not a single burger between them, and I began to remember just how few sources of food there used to be. There was nothing for it: I was going to have to punch loads of grass until I found some seeds, and build a panic farm.
Silver linings: the skeleton’s bones produced bonemeal so I could force-grow enough wheat to make a single loaf of bread straight away. Sure, it was fertilised with the ground remains of what was presumably a human, but needs must when the devil visits you as a sheep.
They also saved my life. Since it was quiet out, I decided to risk sneaking out of my hole to do a bit of night carpentry. But as soon as I got to work, I heard what sounded like a man aggressively drinking a milkshake right behind me, and all of a sudden a spider was right in my face. I ran downstairs and poked it to death from six feet away, then spent the rest of the night battling the stream of monsters that came after it.
I fucking hate the spider noise.
When day three, my final day, began, the rain had stopped at last. But a grim surprise awaited me.
“Wouldst thou like to see the world?”
Guess that’s why it’s called survival mode.
Minecraft was a more stressful experience in 2011, for sure. Certainly, it was way more limited as a construction toy. But part of me can’t help but think it was a better game.
If you want to have a go at homesteading in Minecraft’s history, you want to create a Beta 1.7.3 installation in the Minecraft launcher, and create a new world with the seed2151901553968352745. Then head to co-ordinatesX: 61 Y: 75 Z: -69, and look to your right. Let me know how you get on, and don’t anger Black Philip.
