author: Aleksandra Dziwinska
Minecraft - Secret of the Picture Solved After Months of Searching
Since the beginning of the year, a group of fans has been searching for the seed to generate a picture known from Minecraft. Their efforts ended on Saturday and the location of the mountain is no longer a secret.
One of Minecraft's great mysteries has just been solved. It is another example of a mystery solved by fans, thanks to their perseverance and persistence. This time we learned the location of the mountain known from pack.png.
The pack.png file is a small graphic showing a tree-lined mountain from which a stream flows. The hill appears in Minecraft as an icon representing the default resource pack and the default image for the server in the multiplayer game menu.
The search for the seed started with youtuber SalC1. At the beginning of the year, he published a video telling the story of the graphic appearing in Minecraft Java Edition. He managed to determine in which version of the game the world with the mountain was created. However, that was the only thing he managed to find out. Many times he hit dead ends and wanted to abandon the project. However, he decided to record a video and invite other fans to cooperate.
This June, the youtuber published a video informing about the progress. He thanked for the enormous support of players... and creators. Notch took an interest in the project and joined the Discord channel dedicated to research, but unfortunately he couldn't answer the questions that were bothering the community.
The players took many hours to locate the mountain. Clouds and water flow direction were analyzed. Why? The clouds in Minecraft are generated using a repeating texture and the water texture is not rotated. This establishes the approximate location of the hill. The next step was to create replicas of the image in the game. This turned out to be impossible, however, because the image was in low resolution (128x128 pixels). Therefore, the help of artificial intelligence was necessary. Seed Reverse Engineering Team leader - EarthComputer - created a mod that was making screenshots of areas generated by the game. The modification was shared with the players involved in the action. After collecting 1.7 million screenshots, the artificial intelligence "improved" the quality of the original image. In this way, the builders could refine the replica.
The next step was the developers' work. The image was divided into parts. Some of the elements were obstructing the search for the seed, while others were helpful. For example, the stream of water, located quite unusually for this version of Minecraft, in a high place, was one of the factors allowing further search. Without it, the mystery could have remained unresolved.
The aforementioned EarthComputer shared the good news on Saturday. Alpha version 1.2.2., seed 3257840388504953787, x = 49, z = 0. This is where the pack.png mountain is located. A group of players went to see the mountain and recorded a video that was published on YouTube.
Youtuber SalC1 confirmed the end of the search on his Twitter. In other tweets, he said that a video summarizing many months of work will soon appear on his channel.
The last few weeks have been good for discovering Minecraft's secrets. Will we hear about more solved puzzles, or is that already all that is hidden in the cubic world?
