Road to Minecraft, Day 101: Alpha 1.0.1_01 (Seecret Friday Update 3)

Monday.
Real date: 19 January 2026
Time machine: 5 July 2010
Recorded playtime: 18 hours, 7 minutes.

I skipped the last version of Infdev/first version of Alpha (which Notch retroactively decided were one in the same, as Alpha 1.0.0), because despite being a milestone release of sorts, all it did was... change the way sand and gravel are generated and make it so falling into the void kills you. Really, this is entirely unimportant as a milestone, as the the version string changing to say "Minecraft Alpha" is the only notable difference in presentation as of yet.

Alpha 1.0.1 was the third Seecret Friday Update, and possibly the most important one at that! It added redstone, which didn't have an official name yet, as well as iron doors, buttons, levers, pressure plates, and, of course, redstone torches. 

Alpha 1.0.1_01 fixed some mouse bug under Linux and came out the same day. 

So, for today, our mission is to find some redstone!

It turns out that stairs have actual models now, which is nice. 

They don't render correctly in the UI, though, and that won't be fixed for quite a long while.

I started off by adding proper stairs to my staircases in my second base here.

Also, I never made any paintings, so I decided to do that for fun, after finding a sheep.

I went down to the end of my newest mine. Checking my coordinates in level.dat, I was too high to find redstone, so I dug back down to lava level.

It didn't take long for me to find a little cave. Nothing there, though, and I have to keep digging until I reach fresh chunks before I'll find redstone, anyway.

The enemy AI in this here video game is very, very smart. 

/s

Only a little digging later and I found a cave with my first redstone ore!

Redstone ore takes a very long time to mine, which is something that I've always wondered whether was intentional. This was changed all the way in release 1.0. It also doesn't light up or emit particles, as far as I can tell, which feels... odd.

Once I got some redstone dust, I took some videos of the redstone mechanics in this early version.

Some notes: 

• Redstone dust is broken by walking over it, which is just silly. I'm glad that didn't make it far into development. 
• Power sources don't seem to work very consistently, sometimes not powering blocks when it appears they should.
• Redstone torches emit a tiny amount of light, just like they do today, but they put off normal flame and smoke particles. 
• There are some weird bugs with block updates (not shown on video) that I don't think got fixed until some time in the Beta phase.

Overall, a very cool, very important update indeed. The game is starting to feel a bit more like a complete game.

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