Minecraft has exploded in popularity over the last several years, skyrocketing to success and becoming one of the most successful video games ever. During this process, the game went through many different versions, which has given rise to a community of Minecraft archivists. These fans have spent years gathering and archiving previous builds of Minecraft, and now they've discovered a rare build that was thought to be lost.
Earlier today, Twitter user lunasorcery created a lengthy thread focusing on how she recently found a piece of Minecraft history: Alpha build 1.1.1. This was an early alpha version of the game that, thanks to a game-breaking bug, was only available to download for three hours and 25 minutes on September 18, 2010. The build originated from one of the secret updates early Minecraft was known for, so-called because they were released without warning. Modern Minecraft updates like the upcoming Cliffs and Caves update have more of a standard procedure.
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Alpha 1.1.1 was thought lost until recently, when someone noticed that lunasorcery tweeted about the Minecraft update when it launched over 10 years ago. They contacted her, and she agreed to go through an old laptop back-up. After a few false starts, she found a complete build of Alpha 1.1.1 on an external hard drive. She posted her findings to the Discord server of Omniarchive, a group dedicated to saving and archiving the history of Minecraft, where the news was received with excitement.
Based on the file's timestamps, it appears that lunasorcery downloaded the file less than 90 seconds before Alpha 1.1.2 released, which replaced Alpha 1.1.1 and fixed the bug which caused the whole screen to become grey. She narrowly beat the odds and preserved a valuable piece of video game history.
The Twitter user also found several additional Minecraft builds in her back-ups, though only one of them was considered noteworthy by Omniarchive. This second build is a .jar file of c0.29_01, a rare build that Omniarchive previously only encountered in a modified state. Archivists now possess a clean, unmodified copy of it, which isn't quite as earth-shaking as the discovery of Alpha 1.1.1., but is still a good find. Minecraft mods have become increasingly ubiquitous over the years, including some mods which were officially added to Minecraft, so finding an unmodified version of an already rare build can be very difficult. At the end, lunasorcery concludes saying gamers should never delete anything, and as a result of the Twitter thread several other Minecraft builds thought to be lost have since been discovered.
Minecraft is available now on Mobile, PC, PlayStation 4, Switch, and Xbox One.