Road to Minecraft 1.0, Day 126: Alpha 1.0.12 and 1.0.13(_01)

Friday.
Real date: 13 February 2026
Time machine: 30 July 2010
Recorded playtime: 23 hours, 42 minutes.

Alpha 1.0.12

This is a minor update that only tweaks slimes and a few subtle aspects of the game.

Slimes now have sounds. I think small slimes still use the same sounds, but in release 1.4.2, medium and big slimes were changed to share the magma cube sound. Big slimes (the ones that hurt) no longer spawn on peaceful.

The pause menu's "save and quit to title" button no longer has an incorrect ellipsis (..). Really big stuff here...

The game no longer crashes if splashes.txt is empty or missing, instead showing the special splash "missingno." Honestly, I'm not sure why Notch did this; under normal circumstances, the file should never be missing.

As a test, splashes.txt is missing in this version... 

which should've been my first clue that I forgot to change the game version. Yeah, I accidentally played a1.0.11 for a while longer, which I guess isn't really that big of a deal.

I didn't really do much during the time when I thought I was playing a1.0.12 but was actually playing a1.0.11. I just started digging a basement area on my winter world.

Not sure what I plan to do with it yet, but I intentionally allowed grass to grow down here, hoping animals will spawn eventually. 

When I sat down to move on to a1.0.13_01, I discovered I had never actually played a1.0.12... so I went ahead and played a1.0.12 for a bit.

Yeah, slimes sure do make noise. The spawning rate is still insane, which I suppose was made far more obvious by the addition of sound effects.

I decided to track down the slimes that were making all this racket, which revealed an element of old Minecraft jank I had forgotten about...

Yeah, big slimes still only have the collision box of small slimes.

Alpha 1.0.13

I was running behind again, so I skipped and didn't play this version.

All it did was re-add splashes.txt with a bunch of new splashes, add the new 3D slime model that the game still uses today, add some checks to avoid world corruption due to multiple copies of the game running simultaneously, and fix the long-lived player animation bug where the player's fist gets stuck in weird positions after using third person or the inventory.

Alpha 1.0.13_01

This version only fixed one crash bug, but it also marked a very special occasion... one that seems so insignificant by today's standards.

That's right, the release of this version (or, more correctly, the slightly later reuploaded version) celebrates 1,000 sales in a span of 24 hours. Thinking about that number now is frankly mind-blowing. Future generations will not be able to comprehend Minecraft behind such a small-time internet thing considering the pop culture sensation it is today. I went to Walmart a year or two ago and saw fashionable, name-brand, Minecraft-themed clothes for elementary school girls. I can't even fathom how shocked and confused 12-year-old me would have been... I had a creeper tee-shirt from ThinkGeek. That was all I got for a few years. That was all that was available. 

I don't even remember what I actually did while playing this version, as the only screenshot I took is of the new horizontally-shifted third person view:

And that's gonna wrap it up for now. I was a little late to writing this update... I'm kinda in the middle of big changes in my life, and it's getting harder to keep up with. I do plan on seeing it through to the end, though!

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