THE TOP STORY
MINECRAFT archivists finally uncover the rarest known build of the game
A rare digital treasure rediscovered.
One woman’s habit of never deleting files may have made her a legend in the Minecraft archival scene, after it was discovered she was still holding onto an ultra-rare piece of the game’s history.
In 2010, Minecraft was still in alpha, updating on an almost weekly basis as the game found its feet. One of these builds, Alpha 1.1.1, added fishing rods and ducking, but also came with a nasty bug that crashed the game with a gray screen. A mere 3.25 hours later, that issue would be remedied by Alpha 1.1.2. Between its brief lifespan and buggy release, the previous patch was all but forgotten. Not so by Minecraft’s archival scene though. Blocky historians have spent years trying to account for every part of Minecraft’s development history, and Alpha 1.1.1 was one pain point. Few people downloaded it, fewer still kept it around given its crashing habit.
Fortunately, coder Luna (@lunasorcery) wasn’t in the habit of deleting broken old game downloads. “Used to play Minecraft quite a bit on my old laptop,” Luna wrote on Twitter back in June. “My data organizing wasn’t great at the time so it wasn’t uncommon for me to have a mess of multiple versions sitting about in my downloads folder.
“In 2011 I got my first desktop computer, and never really played anything on that laptop again. In the years following, I wiped and reinstalled the laptop’s OS multiple times—but, in the interests of not losing personal data, I took a backup of the user profiles first.”
SOME VERIFICATION WITH THE MODS LATER, AND IT WAS SETTLED
RARE FORM
Luna’s Twitter thread explained that, for Minecraft archival group Omniarchive, 1.1.1 was treated as a kind of holy grail. Miraculous, then, that one of their number happened to stumble upon a tweet she made in 2010 that simply read “oooooohhhhhhh Minecraft update!”. The timestamp on that tweet lined up exactly within the period the elusive patch would have been available.
The first person to DM Luna about the tweet was met with silence (she writes that she may have “just having a bad day”). But months later, a second notification prompted her to plug in an old USB hard drive and give it a look. Lo and behold, there were several Minecraft builds, one of which matched the time of release for 1.1.1. A little digging in the files later, and she’d confirmed it. “I posted in the Omniarchive [discord server], and it would be an understatement to say that a few people noticed.”
Some verification with the mods later, and it was settled. This was the elusive build. The server “exploded”, years of effort trying to uncover this rare build coming together with an incidental tweet. Luna’s files even had another, slightly less rare build—another treasure that may have been lost to time if not for a remarkably persistent hard drive. Moral of the story: Never delete anything.
Nat Clayton