Road to Minecraft 1.0, Day 1: Infdev 2010-03-27

Saturday.
Real date: 30 August 2025
Time machine: 27 March 2010
Recorded playtime: 5 hours, 35 minutes

It's very late again. I'm gonna make this brief.

Today was the day Infdev became truly playable! You can save levels now, and the basic gameplay functions mostly as intended.

Title screen isn't much different, is it?

Let's go ahead and start our game by generating a new world!

No seed entry before Beta 1.3. When you click on a save slot, it picks one for you.

Slightly different loading screen from later versions. Exciting!

Upon dropping into the world, I find myself in the ocean, surrounded in what is frankly the most extravagant Minecraft terrain I've ever seen in an unmodded game.

It really seems like every world looks like this in this version. Wild.

The pause menu looks a little different from what I'm used to.

"Quit game" rather than "Save and quit to title" as it says in later versions, and the options and back buttons are switched.

Also we can change worlds from this menu. Seems unnecessary. Notch once wrote a warning on his blog to not delete the world you're actively playing...

As I was digging a hidey-hole for a simple base, I found a massive iron vein. I guess this version still has Indev's ore spawning logic.

I decided I wanted to build a staircase up to the top of this mountain, so I chose to do a spiral one using cobblestone and slabs.

It isn't super pretty. The single-slab lighting bug is mainly responsible, I think.

It was dark by this point, so I got nervous about popping up into a hoard of mobs and getting killed...

Cautiously peeking, unaware that there was no risk at all.

As the sun started to rise, I decided to take my chances... I was met with quite a surprise.

How eerily quiet...

It was at this point that I realized: no mobs were spawning whatsoever! I thought maybe I had encountered an intermittent glitch, but no, I checked the wiki and Notch's old blog and found that mobs, hostile or otherwise, aren't in the game just yet.

For that reason, I decided to switch the game to peaceful for now. I can't exactly cook any porkchops if there's no pork to be chopped... So natural health regen will have to do. 

I recorded a short clip of me finishing the staircase, and then another climbing up it:

I then had another major revelation... this version of the game has no caves. None at all. That means, for gathering resources, it's mining in a straight line for as long as I feel like doing so...

I immediately fell victim to a combination of factors I wasn't adequately prepared for. Firstly, the infinite lava sea at Y=0 from Minecraft Classic is still present in this version. Secondly, there was a massive lag spike right as I was hitting the bottom of the map...

I felt a bit cheated by that, so I edited my level.dat to place me safely on the last step, not on fire. 

Resources are not at all scarce. I was unaware that there was any version of the game in which you could find this many diamonds in a single vein:

15 total, to be exact!

Before I wrap this up, here are a couple screenshots I took for no particular reason:

The entrance to my tiny base turned out looking nicer than I expected.

Another look at the insane terrain.

There's a major design oversight in this version: chunks don't carry an IsPopulated tag. This means that every time I load the world, trees regrow, ore respawns, etc. On top of that, leaves don't decay in a reasonable fashion, and I've given up trying to get rid of this half of a treetop that's always on the ground.

Maybe I should just pretend it's a shrub.

By the end of my first day with Infdev, this is what my resource pool looked like:

I only wish iron was this common in the modern game.

Iron is ridiculously common. Unlike in later Alpha versions, I actually feel like using iron tools despite their relatively low durability. It's just so plentiful.

I went ahead and made one diamond pickaxe and used it until it was nearly broken. My hope is that in a future version, when diamond tools gained better durability, it will have more use left in it. And then, in another future version, when they increase it again, I'll be able to get even more out of it! 

I'm trying to brainstorm ways to work around the lack of caves in the chunks I've already generated. On the one hand, I could just venture out into uncharted territory with each version, but that quickly becomes a hassle as the size of the world increases. Alternatively, I could open the world in MCEdit and prune any chunks I haven't noticeably modified. I'll cross that bridge when I get there, but at some point, I'm gonna have to generate new chunks to be able to explore caves.

That's all for now. I'm not sure how much time I'll be spending on this world until some more useful features get added, but I'm having fun at the moment. 

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