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May 13, 2019 9:50 AM

Play the original 'Minecraft' in your browser, for free [Minecraft] [YouTube][10 Years of Minecraft]“Minecraft is celebrating its 10th birthday by making its Classic version easily playable on web browsers. You don't need to download any files to make it work, and you don't have to pay a cent for access. Since Classic was only the second phase in the game's development cycle, its features are pretty limited. You'll only have 32 blocks to work with, most of which are dyed wool, and it's strictly creative mode only. But who needs zombies, skeletons and other mobs when you have the version's decade-old bugs to contend with, anyway?” [Click Here to Launch in Your Browser] [via: Engadget]

• Minecraft's New 10th-Anniversary Map [Rock Paper Shotgun]

“As part of Minecraft‘s tenth birthday celebrations, Mojang have commissioned a virtual theme park celebrating the build ’em up. It’s available as a free map for all players. Exhibitions include a sculpture garden of monsters in a glasshouse, demonstrations of redstone-powered doohickeys, museums, galleries, Easter eggs… it seems real fancy. A season of festivities for a mere tenth anniversary might seem churlish but hell, Minecraft has earned this. It broke into the public consciousness in a way few game games do then was surpassed only by a game it inspired, Fortnite. Take a victory lap, Minecraft. “We created a map that celebrates everything about Minecraft past and present,” mapmakers BlockWorks explain. “Filled with Easter eggs, secrets and community references, this map is a tribute to the creative, curious and adventurous community of Minecrafters worldwide.””

posted by Fizz (21 comments total)

Did they Emscripten-ize an entire vintage JRE? Or is this a high-level JavaScript re-implementation?
posted by genpfault at 9:59 AM on May 13, 2019

I was never a die hard player but notch turning out to be a bigoted piece of shit has ruined this for me.
posted by loquacious at 10:36 AM on May 13, 2019 [14 favorites]

I hear you, loquacious, but notch has been out of it for while, and the current dev team seems super nice.
posted by carter at 10:42 AM on May 13, 2019 [9 favorites]

He got so bad they eliminated all mention of him from the game and the developers conference .
posted by The Whelk at 10:43 AM on May 13, 2019 [17 favorites]

I was never a die hard player but notch turning out to be a bigoted piece of shit has ruined this for me.
posted by loquacious at 1:36 PM on May 13 [+] [!]

I hear you, loquacious, but notch has been out of it for while, and the current dev team seems super nice.
posted by carter at 1:42 PM on May 13 [+] [!]

Yup and Microsoft has been really up front about distancing themselves and calling him out on being a toxic piece of garbage.

Minecraft Update Removes Mentions Of Notch, The Game's Creator [Kotaku]

“The latest Minecraft update makes a few changes to the decade-old phenomenon, none more notable than the fact the game’s splash screens have removed all mention of Minecraft’s creator Markus “Notch” Persson.

Previously, the game’s splash screens—the yellow text you see when Minecraft boots up—would display random messages, and some of them referenced Persson with stuff like “Made by Notch!” and “The Work Of Notch!”. As of the 19w13a snapshot released earlier today, those are all gone now.”

*And The Whelk beat me to it.
posted by Fizz at 10:44 AM on May 13, 2019 [6 favorites]

Anyway been thinking about posting a link to SciCraft recently, this thread seems to be a good place for an intro to 'technical' Minecraft:

MumboJumbo: Witch Farm Tour - SciCraft Survival
MumboJumbo: Builds and Farms: SciCraft Survival Tour #2
MumboJumbo: Auto miners and quarries: SciCraft Survival Tour #3
MumboJumbo: Removing the World: SciCraft Survival Tour Finale
ilmango: SciCraft Witch Farm Tour With MumboJumbo
posted by carter at 10:55 AM on May 13, 2019 [5 favorites]

This is the first game my son and I really played together. Well, the first game he was able to play... he did OK at a few console games but this was where his confidence in his gaming ability came from, initially. We built a server together, we've built a world on that server (map as of December - we did a partial reset for 1.13, and regenerated basically all the water at this point!), we've played with friends (his and mine). It's still fun. I'm really glad they made this map available on Java, because it seems at times that the Java version gets neglected. I wish they would find a way to allow Java and Bedrock users to play together. A lot of his friends are console-only, so he's gotten into playing online minigames on public servers using his Switch. It's cool that he can set up these play sessions with his buddies, even when all attendees are in different physical locations. But his friends can't see his world without actually coming over to our house (the server is only open to the local network), and not many of them feel confident playing on a computer because they are used to the console controls.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:55 AM on May 13, 2019 [3 favorites]

Mind you, I can still respect not wanting to support this game if you have a hard line with regards to supporting Microsoft as a company. They're not without their own issues in the gaming community/industry, but they're at least not outspoken gamergaters.
posted by Fizz at 10:55 AM on May 13, 2019 [1 favorite]

Ooh. A friend of mine has just started a youtube series that I think fits to the theme of this post! They're going from the very first playable beta of the game to the present day.
posted by nickm at 11:01 AM on May 13, 2019 [1 favorite]

My favorite bug, back in the day, was one which simply refused to render whole chunks of the world. A huge cube, maybe 50 blocks on a side, would just be rendered as empty space. This was very cool, because you could stand on one side of that cube, and see across to the other sides, where the whole subterranean world was laid bare. From that one vantage point, you could see all kinds of mineral veins — coal, redstone, diamonds! — glittering in the face of the wall.

That bug didn’t last long, but I took advantage while it did to dig out oodles of goodies. I had chests full of diamonds and redstone for a while.
posted by darkstar at 11:09 AM on May 13, 2019 [5 favorites]

I have to confess that I've never played Minecraft -- I'm concerned about the time I'd sink into it -- and yet I have already sunk a lot of time into watching British people play Minecraft (mainly the Yogscast and Mumbo Jumbo).

And yes, those SciCraft people are deep wizards.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 11:19 AM on May 13, 2019 [1 favorite]

darkstar, we still see rendering bugs like that. Chunks don’t render, until a block in the chunk changes. It’s weird, you can walk into open air and look all around. Caves in adjacent chunks show, but all blocks between the surface and the next air gap are invisible. Unclear if it’s a vanilla bug or a Spigot issue (we run a server using the latter).
posted by caution live frogs at 4:42 PM on May 13, 2019 [2 favorites]

CTRL-F "aporkalypse" (sad)
posted by JHarris at 5:37 PM on May 13, 2019 [5 favorites]

OMG aporkalypse, yes!
posted by darkstar at 6:10 PM on May 13, 2019 [4 favorites]

I miss the Aporkalypse so much. /waves to all who played with me for so many hours. When someone torched my painstakingly-built-over-weeks tree city is when I kind of gave up on the game, and so much has changed about gameplay since then that I don't like playing anymore. But it's always going to have a special place in my heart. Maybe just a few hours of creative play on this version might scratch the itch!
posted by gemmy at 8:09 PM on May 13, 2019 [4 favorites]

/waves back!
posted by Harald74 at 11:09 PM on May 13, 2019 [2 favorites]

Hi Aporkalypse folks!

No time right now but will have to give this browser thingy a try. The wacky bugs were definitely part of the fun, in a weird way the game world felt more real because of the likelihood of unpredictable setbacks. Like I started building a scenic boat cruise around my property, exploiting a bug that allowed horizontal propulsion of boats, only to be foiled by a different bug which broke boats entirely for a couple of months!

There was lots of craziness behind the scenes for modders/tool builders too, like when the direction of the sun changed(!). North used to be the -X direction in the game's X/Y/Z coords, then suddenly one day North was -Z. (Who knows why?) One of the most unexpected, amazing sources of technical debt ever--"every comment and variable name in this program that refers to a cardinal direction is now wrong because the world's axis of rotation changed".

But so much of what made the game great was there so early. Especially the strange beauty of the landscape.
posted by equalpants at 11:10 PM on May 13, 2019 [4 favorites]

I played a lot of Minecraft between about 2011 and 2015 - as with so many things I saw some noise on here about it and gave the free browser version a go. I played some on servers but mostly single-player and would spend hours and hours building my world.

It still amazes me just how damn immersive it is - I had a decorative pool / pond lined with reeds outside one of my bases and one morning I came out to discover a squid in it. It was only one block deep so I felt a bit sorry for it and spent 20 minutes digging blocks out so it would be deeper and more comfortable for dear old Squiddy.

Of course it never occurred to me that the squid wouldn't spawn in the same place the next time I played so in my next session I made a detour to go and visit him and of course he wasn't there and it took me a moment to get over my disappointment. I still find myself every so often thinking about the time we had together..
posted by jontyjago at 2:28 AM on May 14, 2019 [7 favorites]

Would that no bigoted individual could ever create.
posted by filtergik at 4:59 AM on May 14, 2019

For posterity, here is the original MeFi post on the game, which itself turns 10 in less than a month.
posted by Rhaomi at 7:52 PM on May 14, 2019 [3 favorites]

Just connected the dots here to realize that the official 10 years of Minecraft birthday celebration is May 17, the day the first playable public release was apparently unleashed on the world.

May 17 is the day my son turns 10. He was THRILLED to discover that he is exactly as old as Minecraft.
posted by caution live frogs at 9:40 AM on May 15, 2019 [1 favorite]