Road to Minecraft 1.0, Day 115: Alpha 1.0.6(_01) and 1.0.7 (Seecret Friday Update 5)

Monday.
Read date: 2 February 2026
Time machine: 19 July 2010
Recorded playtime: 22 hours, 24 minutes.

I have fallen a bit behind again. I played 1.0.6, then skipped to 1.0.7. The thing is, 1.0.6_01 added and changed a few notable things, but then 1.0.6_02, 1.0.6_03, and 1.0.7 were all minor releases (Notch does not understand semantic versioning at all). Therefore, for the sake of catching up a bit, I deemed it unnecessary to play all the minor in-between versions, and figured we could explore the changes from 1.0.6_01 from within 1.0.7.

Alpha 1.0.6

1.0.6 was the 5th Seecret Friday Update, meaning, once again, Notch did not officially announce the changes to this version, and left the players to find them on their own.

Cactus has been added, which generates naturally on any sand (in new terrain, of course). There's no purpose in it for right now, except that it can hurt the player. Boats have also been added, and they're even more annoying than you remember, because they break upon any contact with land. At any speed. Or at no speed at all. It's just great.

Leaf decay is broken again (which I kinda forgot until I left a floating tree by accident)... 

...and snow blocks now only take 4 snowballs to craft, which is quite funny, because they still drop 6 snowballs. It would be a heck of a duplication trick, except that snow is a renewable resource in this version, anyway. Snowballs themselves now stack up to 16 as they do in the modern game.

One other important change is that friendly mobs now only spawn on grass, which should cut down on pigs and sheep randomly spawning in caves.

With the addition of boats, I decided it would be a good time to head back to my first base, which is still quite a trek. My boat made the last leg of it a little less annoying, though.

Upon arriving back at my old base, I discovered my sign was not spared after all.

Cool UI with the signpost impaling the done button. I don't remember noticing that before.

I am not entirely sure why the sign broke. I didn't load this chunk in the version with broken signs, because if I had, then the game would have crashed. 

Now that I'm back home, I can check on my diamond pickaxe that I left nearly broken many versions ago:

(the leftmost diamond pickaxe)

As you can see, it is back up to half durability, which, by the old durability numbers, is a whole other pickaxe!

This isn't related to this game version specifically, but I went upstairs just in time to witness a cloud pass through my attic.

Oh, and I nearly forgot, in some recent version, it was made so items would appear in your hand in third person. It looks a bit different from later versions.

Torches look especially weird.

I randomly decided to put a workbench down in the middle floor of my house, and put a torch on it. However, you can't directly place blocks on interactable items; the sneak + right click feature wasn't added until years later. The trick is to use a nonsolid block, such as glass, to place the torch. I remembered after doing this that you can also just use a second torch instead of wasting a block of glass, but oh well.

I stopped playing 1.0.6 here, and moved on to 1.0.7.

Alpha 1.0.7

Changes in 1.0.7 include...basically nothing. However, changes in 1.0.6_01 include working leaf decay (again) and boats not breaking when you breathe on them. The water splashing effect also only activates when you're going fast enough to break the boat.

The snowball duplication bug still hasn't been fixed, so that's the first thing I did.

I had some fun with it...

Check it out! Boats aren't (quite as) annoying now!

I went back out to my secondary base and headed out to new chunks from there. I wanted to find cactus. It really didn't take long, and I encountered some kind of weird chunk border along the way.

Finally, the weird cactus behavior in these early versions...

And that's all for now. I need to go to sleep... I stayed up too late to write this...

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