7 Facts You (Probably) Didn’t Know About Minecraft

The “Minceraft” Typo

If you’ve ever played Minecraft, you know that the title screen has a personality of its own.

However, what you might not know is that one of the many Easter eggs tossed into Minecraft is to actually misspell its own name on this screen.

In Java Edition version 1.0.0, Markus “Notch” Persson added a 0.01% chance for the title screen to display text reading “Minceraft” instead of “Minecraft”.

Seven years ago, Persson took to Reddit to talk about this Easter egg in a post titled “Minceraft, a Post-Mortem“. In it, Persson writes the following:

“So, a while ago, I did some intentionally obscure code in the title screen to switch two letters around, making it say ‘Minceraft’ (old running gag, there’s even a ‘Minceraft’ mockup t-shirt design we did) instead of ‘Minecraft’ on every 10,000th game launch or so, and nobody found it! I was so happy about that, I finally knew something about the game the players didn’t know.”

After explaining how the Easter egg was discovered, which you can read about in his post, Persson closes with, “I’m impressed and relieved you found it. I won’t comment on it outside of this subreddit.”

Worlds Are Finite

There’s a common, running misconception in Minecraft that the world is limitless and will continue to generate for as the player explores.

This rumor came to be because of the way Minecraft manipulates memory. In Minecraft, only recently used chunks are rendered. However, Notch himself dispelled all of this in a post to his Tumblr in 2011. There, he wrote the following:

“First of all, let me clarify some things about the ‘infinite’ maps: They’re not infinite, but there’s no hard limit either. It’ll just get buggier and buggier the further out you are. Terrain is generated, saved and loaded, and (kind of) rendered in chunks of 16×16×128 blocks. These chunks have an offset value that is a 32-bit integer, roughly in the range negative two billion to positive two billion.”

Notch continues, explaining the consequences of this:

“If you go outside that range (about 25% of the distance from where you are now to the sun), loading and saving chunks will start overwriting old chunks. At a 16th of that distance, things that use integers for block positions, such as using items and pathfinding, will start overflowing and acting weird.”

In simpler terms, Minecraft will begin acting very strangely to the point that it becomes unplayable.

Creepers Were an Accident

Sometimes, the most interesting and beloved part of a video game comes as a complete accident. In Street Fighter, this was the story of combos. In Minecraft, there are creepers.

In a short excerpt before the release of 2012’s Minecraft: The Story of Mojang documentary, Notch revealed that creepers were only born as a result of a coding error.

“The creepers were a mistake,” he said in the since-deleted clip. “I don’t have any modeling programs to do the models, I just write them in code, and I accidentally made [creepers] tall, instead of long, so it was like a tall thing with four little feet—and that became the creeper, as opposed to a pig.”

Who knew that Minecraft’s most iconic mob type was actually supposed to just be a pig?

Notch’s “For Sale” Tweet

On September 15, 2014, Microsoft announced that they had reached an agreement on a $2.5 billion deal to purchase Mojang—and with it, Minecraft.

Interestingly enough, this entire deal started with a frustrated tweet from the game’s creator, Notch.

Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig.

— notch (@notch) June 17, 2014

Less than three months later, the game changed hands and is still today owned by one of the world’s largest tech companies.

Minecraft Had Other Names

Although “Minecraft” isn’t the most original name, being a combination of two of the game’s fundamental mechanics, its original name was much worse.

Minecraft was originally dubbed “Cave Game” by its creator, Markus “Notch” Persson. Although it’s quite common for projects in developments to go by short and succinct code names, this one was very… straightforward.

Persson went on to finally rename Cave Game to “Minecraft: Order of the Stone”, which sounds like a bizarre Lord of the Rings spinoff, and eventually shortened it to the title we know and love today.

Enderman (Kind of) Speak English

Endermen, a mob type based on the Slenderman copypasta, are one of the creepiest things to ever come from Minecraft. Learning more about their language makes them even stranger.

Before Minecraft’s 2013 Music Update, endermen used the same sound effect as the zombie as a placeholder. Then, in Beta 1.9, the zombie sounds for enderman were removed.

On November 13, 2011, endermen received their own audio scheme. This featured a long moan, which would be overlaid with static when triggered hostile by the player. These aren’t just any noises though—they’re actually someone saying “Hi,” and “What’s up?” in reverse and with added distortion.

Minecraft Was Created in Six Days

Some believe that our universe was created in six days. Well, Minecraft’s actually was!

Minecraft’s success story is one that comes unprecedented in many ways. One of the most impressive facts about it is that it went from an idea to release in just six days.

Markus “Notch” Persson began working on Minecraft as the launch project for his new company, Mojang AB, on May 10, 2009. Intended to be a simple sandbox game that offers free and organic exploration, Minecraft’s alpha version was quickly finished on May 16. The next day, Minecraft was publicly released as what is now Minecraft Classic.