Road to Minecraft 1.0, Day 130: Alpha 1.0.14 (Seecret Friday Update 7) and 1.0.15

Tuesday.
Real date: 17 February 2026
Time machine: 30 July 2010
Recorded playtime: 24 hours, 13 minutes.

Alpha 1.0.14

This update was announced as adding powered minecarts. That's the only addition Notch mentioned. The rest of it was secret.

The secrets included:

• Chickens
• Eggs
• Discs
• Jukeboxes
• Chest minecarts
• The reintroduction of music! Currently includes calm1, calm2, calm3, piano1, piano2, and piano3. Some of these tracks are a bit different from how they sound today.

The secrets weren't limited to new additions. Some existing mechanics were modified. 

• Cactus grows
• Obsidian's blast resistance is buffed to 1,200 making it indestructible to TNT
• Arrows are crafted with flint instead of iron 

Overall, a pretty notable update! And we aren't quite done... Ironically, the new minecart mechanics intended to make powered minecarts possible also cause the booster exploit. Powered minecarts really aren't super useful, but the booster exploit allows for some seriously crazy stuff... I'll get to that later, as it's really one of my favorite aspects of old Minecraft.

The title screen has been reverted to normal.

Well, "normal." You may notice that the M is missing a pixel. That's not intentional.

The first thing I did was try to make arrows... and that's actually when I noticed this was the version that changed the recipe to flint.

This recipe change was pretty important for game balance. In the Infdev days, iron was super common and made sense to use for something as disposable as arrows. Now, iron is much less common, and flint exists as a cheap but still not super common resource. 

While I was messing with my little minecart track to determine whether I could immediately see any differences, I suddenly got attacked by a skeleton.  

It apparently spawned directly above me in this little dark cavern that I didn't notice existed before.

A couple minutes later, something quite magical happened...

This is the very first time music has played for me since Indev. It's difficult to explain, but I truly did have quite an emotional response to it. It felt like a sign of the game growing up.

Soon, I encountered chickens.

(Sorry once again for how messed up the audio is here. I haven't figured out a way to prevent that issue.)

It's nice to have a source of feathers other than zombies now. Arrows won't be so annoying to craft.

On my way back to my main base, I realized the next version adds the ability for lava to start fires. There's still a bunch of lava in a little forest near my underground access... I decided to at least cut down a few trees and separate them so as to prevent the whole area from burning down.

While I was dealing with that, I randomly built a tower straight up to get a lay of the land. Check out this crazy horizon.

Floating islands everywhere. This old worldgen is just so cool.

And here's the finished product.

Now to move on to a1.0.15 and see what happens...

Alpha 1.0.15

Firstly, the M is fixed now.

Other changes include the previously stated ability for lava to start fires and a new third person arm-swinging animation.

When I loaded my world, it really didn't take long...

Yeah, that Alpha fire spreads quick. 

This is all I'm really gonna do for now. It was late when I recorded this part, and we have a while yet before the next version. I'm probably gonna do some minecart stuff in between.

Oh yeah, the arm swinging animation.

This never changed. It's still like this today.

I'll leave you with a screenshot of the horizon that I took there at the end.

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