Road to Minecraft 1.0, Day 111: Alpha 1.0.5(_01)

Thursday.
Real date: 29 January 2026
Time machine: 15 July 2010
Recorded playtime: 21 hours, 26 minutes.

I just had the realization as I sat down to type this that, frankly, if I had been playing this back in 2010 and had the full force of the game's novelty behind me, I probably would've played it a whole lot more by this point, but that's okay. We're soon to reach the point in the game's life when I find it the most fun, so I'll probably be playing much more at that point.

In the meantime, this is...

Alpha 1.0.5

Pretty much all the changes relate to winter worlds. Snowballs have been added, and they automatically drop when snow is destroyed by any method other than placing a block on top of it. Speaking of, yes, snow is now replaced when you place a block on it, which wasn't the case before. Snowballs can be used to make snow blocks, just like the modern game, but they require 9 snowballs to craft instead of 4. Snowballs themselves stack up to 64 in this version!

The first step in continuing my winter world was waiting for sunrise. As the sun began to rise over the horizon, I decided to step outside. I still don't have coal, so I literally could not see to go mining.

I was greeted by a creeper.

Apparently, while snowballs don't do any damage, they do shear sheep.

You may also notice that the pitch of the snowball throwing sound varies widely between throws. 

Next, it was time to go find some coal, now that it was daytime. It didn't really take long. The mountainous terrain in Alpha tends to allow surface coal quite frequently.

One quite fun thing about snowballs not requiring a shovel to obtain is that when you melt snow with torches, it magically becomes snowballs.

I stopped here for the night, so now it's time to move on to...

Alpha 1.0.5_01

Both snow and snow blocks must be mined with shovels to obtain snowballs now. Lame, but... fair enough. Snowballs also now only stack to 8, which is weird and dumb, if you ask me. The throwing sound is less varied now. Water now (re)freezes when exposed to the elements, which I didn't realize it didn't already do.

There is one more very important bug fix: the last durability point of a pickaxe no longer destroys the material it's mining. This has been an issue since the beginning of Indev.

Back to the game... considering animals are supposed to be rarer in these winter worlds, there sure are an awful lot of them.

In this moment, I suddenly remembered that cows don't exist yet. That's right, this whole time, I've been oblivious to the fact that only pigs and sheep spawned. This means that leather armor is actually "cloth" armor. Armed with that realization, I decided to make some:

Cloth/leather armor is actually pretty useful before release 1.0. It doesn't last long, but it's good for at least a few hits before it's too damaged to be useful. And of course, it is cheap. I went through two sets before this session was over, but it saved me from dying.

There's really something that feels magical about this eternal winter. It's such a different vibe from normal Minecraft.

Finally, I decided to go mining for real this time... and it happened again.

Somehow, I precisely avoided all of the caves. I'm starting to think this is a bug and/or feature of these old versions. There are weird gaps in the cave generation.

I realized I heard running water and monster sounds underground right near my house, along the beach...

I ended up digging down into this cool cave with a roof partially made of sand!

I mined for quite a while, and had some funny incidents with the Very Smart AI from early Minecraft.

I left and came back, and when I returned, I found some sheep that had wandered down into the cave. I took the opportunity to make a backup set of armor.

This cave ended up being really cool, and it went on forever. I found a good supply of iron for still being early game, too.

Seriously, I cannot get over how cool this cave generation is. I've never before been in a Minecraft cave with multiple paths so close to each other, intersecting just enough to have little windows into the neighboring pathways.

I mean, I would say this is probably more realistic of a cave than any cave from the release era pre-Caves and Cliffs.

A couple more very cool shots:

Lastly, a couple more monster encounters that were interesting:

That's all for these versions. I had a lot of fun in these couple of sessions. This was a cool mining expedition, and the winter world was a nice change of pace.

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