How I Lost My First Minecraft World

In 2010 I started out having no idea what Minecraft was, and then going into November I had the murkiest idea of what Minecraft Alpha was, going off of a G4TV article I found from September 28 of 2010, before shortly downloading and starting the game. In 2010 November 8th, I posted this image to Newgrounds:

That was my first Minecraft Alpha world, and my first world to be actual survival mode at all. The post implied that I was on my third real-world day of playing the game.

As you likely guessed, this story is going to get tragic. It's already bad enough that the image up there is a GIF file. It gets worse.

That is the first, last, and only screenshot from the actual game itself I have of that entire world. It is called DOS1 now. A world I've been aching for years to get back. And I didn't know shit about taking screenshots or indeed image formats back then, so I didn't have the forethought to make a PNG, and there wasn't even an F2 screenshot hotkey in Minecraft Alpha 1.0.X or 1.1.X versions.

Luckily for this world, I had a mapping tool in use all the time, and with it I cheated a lot. It's called Minutor, and it was a great program. Sometimes a version of it will only work in Minecraft Alpha, and it's definitely an old-version kind of map tool. I looked at the world DOS1 from a perfect top-down simulation in basic pixels relentlessly, going even through the underground to see dungeons and then ultimately fail to actually enter them. There's a set of pictures on my hard drive from Minutor when it had World 1/DOS1 open. You can actually see that Minutor screenshot on the website right now.

The Minutor images are my last hope of ever getting my world back. Again, notice that amazing view in the page's current background. That's a Minutor picture of DOS1.

Let's go back to G4TV. That article created a very mysterious and odd depiction of Minecraft Alpha inside my expectations. I went into the game thinking of it as being pretty cool, but also incorrectly having a few assumptions like thinking the monsters in the game were undefeatable and majorly oppressive menaces. Which, by some way of looking at it they sort of were... But they're not like the fucking Skifree monster. I genuinely thought they were beyond that threshold. It's not true of Minecraft Alpha. If it was, people would think Minecraft in 2010 was in a nightmare mode. Which could be worth doing as an Alpha modding experiment. It's basically been done in other versions anyway.

I got Minecraft Alpha, and let's just say I couldn't craft fences. Even though I didn't understand the game, I was basically instantly hooked. One of the first things I did was go into that huge vertical crevice in the mountain by the bay and get killed by what I historically misremembered to be a "white Creeper". The things non-lucidity can do...

Not understanding the game had a lot of effects for DOS1. I was admittedly kind of an idiot. The most iconic screw-up of mine was when I picked up a feather, and thought it was some kind of amazing power pointer - in the absence of mouseover item names - and so took it into my hands confidently like a magic weapon and started attacking mobs - quite likely the hostile ones as well - because I thought it did more damage than a Minecraft protagonist character's bare hands. I also failed to understand that you're supposed to actually right-click on boats to use them, and quite possibly got mad because I forgot - I knew it was a thing in the first place - that I was breaking blocks by holding down the mouse button. I can't prove it happened to myself now because of the forgetting. I realize that repeated clicking on blocks was a common noob mistake, but at least other people didn't go back to doing it after previously knowing the right way to click. I'd already been doing it the right way before.

Some of the things I did in that world were failing hilariously at crafting recipes, perhaps trying to mix dirt with sand, definitely not understanding the difference between cobblestone and stone; building a huge sky protrusion stairway, that I could never finish, possibly in part thanks to clouds; and run around in circles dying at night. I can't stress enough how nooby it was the way I expected to achieve something and not die out there, though I think rushing to my various bases slash mine hideouts was pretty fun.

In some versions of Minecraft, two things can apply. The first is a lack of spawn point altering. The second is a terribly important lack of a way to easily and legitimately skip the night time. There were no beds in Alpha, which meant both things at once for some reason.

One of the things I wanted to do was make a big underwater tunnel, and back then I didn't pull it off at all because I simply did not have the experience OR cognitive function. I also tried to build a long directionless over-ocean bridge which I thought would be "epic", and couldn't commit to that. There was no sneaking, nor did I know there was going to be sneaking in another version. At least I played with minecarts, even when I didn't know how to get the best out of them. I'm glad about that.

This world got messed up sometimes - not corrupted, I wouldn't say that. But incorrect chunks did appear where the world's original seed was in a fight with some random new invasive seed. If you don't know, these are NOT "chunk errors". I call them faultlines and I think that word would be good to see common use.

These faultlines were revealed in Minutor by the visibility of straight mountain edges, and they were even more obvious in-game. The background of this page displays a bit of that. Look on the right at those islands. Naturally I failed to understand that something about my world might be abnormal. I think my computer even overheated and crashed one time, because what happened after was a huge terrain "cube" appeared where my underground base used to be. At least I knew that one wasn't supposed to happen. Because I was more patient than I might expect of my past self, I made something good of the lemon the game gave me and carved the insides of that big "cube" to make a new in-terrain base. A base I really wish had inside screenshots today.

I still minutely but strongly remember the diamonds I found in that world. I spent a lot of time underground and I don't think I realized how beautiful the experience I was having was. Which makes it all the sadder when you get to the part where I say how the world got deleted.

The events that occurred when I deleted the world are murky and unclear. All I know is that I put the world in Alpha 1.2 after much installation difficulty, I deleted the world, and I shouldn't have ever deleted it. Looking back right at this second I can't help but wonder if it was an accident. I don't remember deleting the world even close to as well as I remember my time playing it.

Once I finally got Minecraft Alpha 1.2 set up, and sorted out a portal, I arranged to spend my first minutes inside The Nether.

I thought it was creepy as fuck.

I remember the "blurry zombie pigmen" on soul sand and some of the tone. I wish I could see a picture of my face as it was when I saw my first Ghast. I had seen pictures before, barely, and I knew Ghasts were real and in the game, but I never made sure to get an idea of what actual size they were, and I had this incorrect imagined notion that they were really small. I was not expecting them to be more than 64 cubic meters big.

Now, in the present, Ghasts are one of my all-time favourite Minecraft mobs. You should know that. But back in 2010 or 2011, I think what happened was that they really pissed me off. My Nether portal spawn in the DOS1 world was marred with an absolute volley of non-stop explosions, because Ghasts spawn heaps in Minecraft Alpha 1.2.0 to Alpha 1.2.6 a lot of the time, and I had an unlucky portal location. The artillery was so extreme, I believe I died by falling through a hole in the ground, into either a death by fall damage or a death by lava. Saying this now, I think it was most likely fall damage.

I tried to make things good with The Nether, and I have a faded moment in my memories of standing in a carved out base, with maybe a zombie pigman standing around. I must have been attacked by those too at one point, though I don't remember. I believe I tried to play with extra portals in other parts of the lava realm too, but if there was a way to save my experience with The Nether or not get so hung up on The Nether by just avoiding it, that never occurred to me.

If memory serves correctly, I didn't stop at Alpha 1.2. I think I even took DOS1 into Minecraft Beta, and threw an egg.

I don't know the absolute true reason DOS1 died. But I don't have it now. The leading theory was that I ragequit and killed it off. I think I was mad because of what the Ghasts did. No matter what the reason was, I miss this world, I don't have it now, and I want it back. Even if I only get the world seed out of a level.dat file, that would be sweet reunion enough.

Some people don't understand this at first, but you can actually get a world seed number out of a Minecraft Alpha world. It doesn't matter too much if the world creation screen doesn't have a seed field. The game's code needs a seed number. It wouldn't generate procedural terrain without it. You can even create a new Minecraft Alpha world with a specific seed of your own choosing, if you have NBTexplorer and the savvy experience to manipulate it.

This is where things take a turn for the hopeful and where it starts to look like I can get DOS1 back some day.

It may be a long, complicated process that takes years, and it may come without any of the player-built structures, and even though faultline chunks that so defined parts of DOS1 won't be back... I can still celebrate for months if I get the seed back. You see, there's an organization called Minecraft@Home, and though I've not talked to any of them for years, they are responsible for helping me make these:

In order, those are the regular chunk borders and the population chunk borders. For cracking the Minecraft Alpha seed, that GIF of the world at the top is useless. Too low-quality. Which is horrible to realize, because if I'd saved it as a PNG, Minecraft@Home would probably have been able to use the mere clouds in the sky to give me the seed within minutes. I'm not joking. I got the images above this paragraph from the official chatrooms in January 2021. I knew it was an insignificant seed on the grander stage, and a bogus request, but I really appreciated the time spent and the help.

My Minutor screenshot is the key to salvaging the seed of my lost 2010 Minecraft Alpha world. Something I still have yet to finish. One of the main main guys in that server told me that with those Minutor images, the seed was "100% crackable". I was also told that Minutor runs a very simple algorithm for deciding what shade of colour each block was depending on their elevation and what was adjacent to that block. Yet one guy still kept on insisting that trying to crack the seed using a set of Minecraft Alpha world constructions was "crazy", even though Minutor clearly does not work on other Minecraft versions and I'd said so more than once. I think I'd done everything short of using a theatre of sock puppets to explain to him why using Minecraft Alpha was the only known way to speak of that any sort of mimickry of Minutor's 2010 trees could be built. I believe what I was trying to do, with some assistance, was called Tree Cracking. It didn't work in the end.

I've given up on talking to the Minecraft@Home server, but the positive effects of interacting with Minecraft@Home have been done. That server was kind of a posting-troll-images, not-recognizing-why-Edward-was-using-Minecraft-Alpha-to-build-trees, terrible-suggestions hellhole, but it showed me that something in Minecraft seeds so impressive and uplifting can be done. And some of the Zoomer tech shit that went on in their work was genuinely incredible. My plan since leaving is to simply wait for the technology to become more widely available.

Since you read through or scrolled down a lot through that, you deserve a bonus to end this blog. Here is a deliberate faultlining experiment I did by taking copies of DOS1 and one other Minecraft Alpha world and merging them with simple chaotic file copying.

When I stare at these I really have a moment.