Road to Minecraft 1.0, Day 0: Indev

Friday.
Real date: 29 August 2025
Time machine: 26 March 2010
Recorded playtime: 2 hours, 45 minutes 

Well, it was very, very late last night, and I decided I still wanted to play some more Minecraft before I went to bed. I loaded up the Indev world and ended up playing for quite a while longer.

This time, I had the presence of mind to take screenshots and video while I was actively playing, rather than trying to go back and take a few while writing the post. Thank goodness for Xbox Game DVR (which of course didn't exist 15 years ago); it made this process quite painless. It will be a while yet until the game gets a built-in screenshot feature.

So, what was my complete experience in Indev like?

Firstly, I would like to say that I never bothered to try to build anything in this world. There are relatively few materials to choose from, tool durability is ridiculously low (Diamond tools are only about twice as durable as iron, which is itself about half as durable as it is today. In other words, diamond tools only last as long as modern iron tools!), and I know this version is a dead end, anyway. Maybe one day I will come back and do something more interesting, because honestly I do enjoy the very rudimentary world generation and limited resources in their own right.

I actually finally got a bit sick of calm1, calm2, and calm3 while playing this, because they are still the only songs at this point, and they play constantly.

(The screenshots are not necessarily presented in order of occurrence.)

Speaking of rudimentary, here is finally a taste of the overworld:

The infinite sea surrounding an Indev island type world.

Very simple, short, rough terrain generation. No mountains here!

As you can clearly see, there's really not a lot going on here, and even at the largest setting, it's quite small. The area of this map is 512x512 blocks, and 64 blocks tall:

Demonstration of the world height.

 

512x512 blocks in area is only 32x32 chunks. For reference, the maximum render distance in modern vanilla Minecraft: Java Edition is 32 chunks, which means you could stand on one side of the world and the opposite side would remain loaded. That isn't very big at all.

64 blocks tall is crazy! That's half the maximum height of an Infdev, Alpha, or Beta world, and one-fourth the height of an Anvil-format world (release 1.2 and later)! No wonder there aren't mountains. There's not room! 

If you modify the settings in any way from what I chose, at least one dimension shrinks. A small square world is only 128x128x64, a medium square world 256x256x64. A long huge world is 1024x256x64, while a deep huge world is 256x256x256. All of the shapes of each size are the same total number of blocks: a small world is 1,048,576 blocks, a medium world is 4,194,304 blocks, and a huge world is 16,777,216 blocks.

Basically, none of these are particularly large. I find this quite interesting, honestly, as custom server software for Minecraft Classic 0.30 was perfectly capable of serving up 1024x1024x1024 worlds. They took a while to load, but the client could handle them (albeit at unplayable framerates).

A 1024x1024x1024 mountainous world generated in a local MCGalaxy server. Notice 13 FPS.

I guess the problem here is that the renderer is always rendering every single block (of which there are 1,073,741,824, including air blocks). Notch could have optimized his renderer to the point that Indev would've easily supported worlds of this size, but then again, his lighting engine was so bad that the game probably would've just lagged even worse when the sun started to go down... Plus, he always intended for the game to eventually have infinite worlds.

Anyway, back to Indev. While I had MCEdit open, I took a peek underground to show you just how insane cave generation is:

That's a lot of tiny winding tunnels.

 For comparison, this is a peek underground in an Alpha 1.1.2_01 world:

A little more familiar.

Firstly, MCEdit is actually rendering the lighting. I'm unsure if that means lighting isn't saved in Indev worlds or if that's just a difference in format implementation on MCEdit's part. But what we're here for is the caves. They're a lot more spread out, more consistent in size, smoother shapes, and there's also less of the weird phenomenon of multiple massive caverns being right next to each other. Here are a couple screenshots of those sorts of caves:

Just really weird big open spaces that are hard to light up. They're semifrequently flooded, too. 

Moving along, there is a very annoying bug (or maybe it's just a design oversight) in Indev where the daylight cycle causes so many chunk updates that your framerate halves or worse, and also lighting won't update when you break or place blocks. Here's an example:

Silly me, I let the darkness escape by mining that block.

The solution to this problem is just to pause the game and wait for it to sort itself out, but you end up having to do that every couple of seconds...

Placed a torch, no light emitted. I paused the game.

About 10 seconds later, the light appears, and my framerate is back to normal.

You can see the chunk updates counter spike up to ridiculous values when this happens, and that's your indicator.

Additionally, blocks not directly in view of skylight don't get updated until the sunrise or sunset is complete: 

My windows are way too bright. They darkened once the sun fully set.

A couple weird little glowing spots while the sun is still setting.

I didn't get video of this happening, but when you're mining in a cave, sometimes there's a random one-block gap right below the block you mine, and you fall into a hole and have to build yourself back out. It's pretty jarring when it happens.

Oh right, weird thing, the tips of arrows are iron ingots rather than flint. That would be annoying and expensive if it weren't for the fact that iron and gold are both nearly as plentiful as coal in this version. Not even diamonds were particularly hard to come by.

A vein of 5 diamonds I found early on.

An insane amount of iron.

The video clip is of me mining a comical amount of gold that I found in one place, all in a line.

Another interesting thing: falling blocks don't exist yet, but sand and gravel are still affected by gravity. The result:

It basically just teleports to the ground. Still helps with the same situations, though.

I think I'm done talking for the most part, but I have a couple more clips to share.

Firstly, some night time combat:

Here is an example of the absolutely stellar AI this game features:

And finally, some surprise cave combat: 

That's pretty much all the Indev I've got in me, I think. I may revisit this world later, but not anytime soon. 

Near the end, my inventory looked like this:

Just before I went on my final mining run.

I never died. I usually don't in old Minecraft, honestly. If you play your cards right, you can stay alive pretty easily even if you get in rough situations. 

To quit the game, you just save your level file and close the window. There's no way to return to the title screen, as there was no need to "end" your play session gracefully to avoid world corruption in Indev.

That's all for now. Before the day is over, I will begin my adventure in Infdev, and update the blog once again, hopefully in a less long-winded manner.

Thank you, and have a very safe and productive day.
--Sidney