Nine years after it first popped up in the background of the game’s main menu screen, some Minecraft players think they’ve finally found the exact same world in the game itself.
Some members of the Minecraft@Home team made the discovery over the weekend, using volunteers’ idle computers to help crunch numbers in the name of research. Finding this world was only one of a number of projects they’re looking into—another is finding the game’s tallest cactus, currently standing at 22 blocks—and by using so many PCs they were able to take 93 days of processing time and crunch it down to 24 hours’ work.
And so having only decided to start looking on July 14, by early Saturday morning, the 18th of July 2020, they’re pretty damn sure they found it.
I’d always just assumed it was placeholder art, something Mojang whipped up as set-dressing, but of course it would have been so much easier to just take a shot of a seeded world.
The world can be found here if you want to check it out yourself:
Version: Beta 1.7.3
Coordinates: X=61.48~, Y=75, Z=-68.73~
Seed: 2151901553968352745 OR 8091867987493326313
I should add that while the blurry background shot was added to the game’s title screen back in 2011, it was taken out of the game only recently.