The beginning of a personal journey: Road to Minecraft 1.0

Hi. Longest time, no see. Still me. Remarkably little has changed in my life since I last wrote, aside from graduating from college.

Recently, I got a wild hair to try something goofy. I started playing on a new vanilla Minecraft server with my buddy Michael the other day, and we were having a surprising amount of fun with it. It seems to have fully rekindled my love for the game, so much so that I want to go back to its roots and experience its mature into the (recurring!) cultural phenomenon we know it as today. It's silly, and I don't know how long I'll actually stick with it, but I want to chronicle my journey on this blog that I otherwise seem to never use.

The PC I'm using for this project:

It's a custom 2013-era build I did recently just for fun.

•  Antec 900, a later revision with front USB 3.0 ports (free!)
• Gigabyte 970A-D3P socket AM3+ (also free!)
• AMD FX-8350 ($50 and it wasn't worth it...) 
• Dynatron Evolution U-4 cooler ($24, new old stock) 
• 16 GB of G.SKILL DDR3-1600 (free)
• TeamGroup T-FORCE 256 GB SSD ($18)
• 4x Western Digital VelociRaptor 1 TB 10,000 RPM hard drives in RAID-0 ($112, honestly completely worth it, they're freaking awesome)
• VisionTek Radeon R9 280X ($44)
• Thermaltake SMART 600 non-modular PSU ($42, and yeah I know it's cheaply built, but it's working just fine) 

Now, onto Minecraft. 

Briefly, I must explain to the uninitiated, the Minecraft development cycle is broken into:

1. pre-Classic: basically some very early test builds
2. Classic: everything up to and including version 0.30, which was the final free version of the game that so many of us played and sometimes revisit with ClassiCube. This also includes some very early survival mode prototypes.
3. Indev ("In Development"): from 0.31 to unnumbered builds simply called Indev, this includes the early days of proper survival mode as we know it today. By the end, the game looked much like it does now, but the maps were still finite!
4. Infdev ("Infinite Development"): the beginning of "infinite" worlds, which are of course never truly infinite. The vast majority of the basis for modern Minecraft is traced back to here.
5. Alpha: really just a renaming of Infdev to signify major development progress. This did reintroduce proper version numbers, though, and multiplayer finally made a return.
6. Beta: ditto.
7. Release: everything from Minecraft version 1.0 in fall of 2011 to now!

The plan:
Play as many versions of the game, in real time relative to their releases, as we can while using the same save file before Minecraft 1.0 releases about 20 months later. At the end, we will defeat the Ender Dragon (which will require some level editing due to the fact that the required structures obviously don't exist all the way back in these days, but that's okay). 

Let's turn back the clock to... we'll say that today (well, yesterday now, I guess, seeing as it is 1:30 AM), Thursday the 28th of August 2025, represents Thursday the 25th of March 2010. That puts us in the days of early Minecraft Infdev, but back in those days, Infdev's level format was still the primary focus of development. Because of that, you couldn't exactly "play" Infdev yet. You could walk around and interact with stuff, but if you quit or died, you had to start fresh. 

That means if you wanted to play casually, you still had to play Indev. The version of Infdev that includes level saving will release this Saturday, March 27th (August 30th of 2025 in real time), but in the meantime, I want to take a crack at the final version of Indev from the 27th of February 2010. This is only the second ever version of Minecraft to feature furnaces, making it pretty much the second-oldest version to have the complete final gameplay loop of Minecraft! 

Welcome to Indev:

Not really sure why the bottom is cut off of these screenshots. Kind of annoying, but whatever.

Indev has some fun level customization options:

For the sake of demonstration, I decided to generate a floating, deep, small, woodsy level:

It really is pretty wild! 

But anyway, for casual play, I just wanted to do a big level with otherwise default settings. In other words, I set the size to huge, but left the other values as island, square, and normal.

I played for a little over an hour. I know the torch spam is ugly... but such is how things were in old versions. The mob spawning code was very obnoxious. 

I keep my inventory pretty empty out of habit, but you're not in danger of losing your items in this version. You have to manually save, and if you die, you simply load your saved game.

Skins are working thanks to an addon that works for all versions of the game called LegacyFix. This also allows sound and music to work, though most launchers seem to also have that sorted these days. My skin is Kuroyukihime's/Black Lotus' Assault form from the Accel World OVA. :) 

It's night time in the game, so I couldn't go outside, and I really need to go to bed in real life as well. But basically, the worldgen looks like Minecraft Classic. It's rough, unrealistic, and mostly uninteresting on the surface. 

But caves!

Caves are simply fascinating in this version. It may be hard to see in these screenshots, but they seem to never end. These massive caverns that are difficult to fully light up generate intersecting with each other, and every little nook and cranny ends up connecting to yet another larger cave. 

Mining is... scary.

Everything is insanely dark. Your tools break very quickly. Mob hitboxes are crap and hard to hit. And on top of that, hostile mobs don't have unique sounds. Every hostile mob's hurt sound is the same as the player character, which is amusing but confusing. None of the hostile mobs have idle sounds, either, meaning you can't hear what's around the corner; you can only hear that something is around the corner by way of its footsteps.

Anyway, I'm up too late again, but this humble start to this journey has been quite interesting... I will play some more Indev tomorrow and update if I find anything interesting. Otherwise, I'll be back on Saturday after we begin with Infdev.

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