Fans find seed from Minecraft home screen

With the help of a distributed computing network for Minecraft research, fans of the well-known Microsoft game have found the so-called seed of the world that can be seen in the home screen.

All worlds in Minecraft are procedurally generated using a seed number as the basis for the properties of that world. So when you start a game, you get a unique world, which another can only experience if that game is started with the same seed number. Since those seeds work with numbers of nineteen digits, the chance that you will see the same world twice or accidentally stumble upon an identical world is astronomically small. Likewise, haphazard or brute-force searching for the parameters of the world that can be seen in the start screen of Minecraft is a hopeless task: reason for fans to use clever tricks in their quest.

For example, part of the puzzle was first solved by looking at the clouds of the home screen panorama. Subsequently, a distributed computing network, Minecraft @ Home, was used to search further for the seed. This was possible because a search was already underway on this Boinc network for the seed of the world that can be seen in Minecraft’s pack.png icon. The method of searching for that was also used to search for the panorama seed.

It only took one day, but the equivalent of 93 days of calculating with 54.5 exaflops to find the home screen seed. In fact, two seeds were found because the Java random number generator produces fewer unique numbers than the number of possible seeds. This leaves ‘only’ about 231 trillion possibilities.

By entering the seed 2151901553968352745 or 8091867987493326313 in Java client version beta 1.7.3 of Minecraft and going to the coordinates X = 61.48, Y = 75, Z = -68.73, you can see the panorama of the home screen itself. The search for the world featured in the pack.png icon continues unabated, but all 200 million Minecraft buyers can now walk around the world they’ve been seeing for years.