I found Minecraft’s first mod. It’s pretty incredible.

Today, we’re going to find the first mod in all of Minecraft. So back at the start of the year we found the first skin in Minecraft, and not long before that we found the oldest world in Minecraft. And uh… it’s been a while, but we aren’t finished in our search for early Minecraft

History. Let’s get started. Oh, also, subscribe and stuff, thanks, love you. Before we begin, you need to know when Minecraft even became a thing, which was May 17th of 2009, so ideally we need to look for mods from pretty close to that time.

Alright, so just as a shot in the dark, let’s try a few of the big ones. How about Optifine? January 2011… Minecraft was released in mid-2009, so… probably not. Too Many Items is from the same month and other big mods like Pixelmon came way later,

So I don’t think this is gonna work out. We might have to actually do some research, can you believe that? But first, I have a very important announcement: right now, I’m live on my brand new channel streaming the beta of my brand new server.

That’s right baby, two-for-one, I’m starting a stream channel and opening a server, we have survival right now but we’re going to be adding a ton of original gamemodes over the coming months; I really don’t want it to be some generic cashgrab, it’s going

To be pretty unique, for better or for worse, so definitely check them out! mcbytLIVE is the channel, mcb.yt is the server, both are on-screen and in the description and if you ever need any help feel free to join my Discord too, we’re like 2,000 strong and pretty active. Anyways, back to the research.

Let’s start with our trusty friend, Google. Hey Google, what’s the first Minecraft mod? Well, according to this guy it’s the Aether mod, let’s fact check that and yeah, nope, that was June 2011, you’re a liar and a fraud and I do not like you.

Also, this isn’t even an Aether portal, this is just cobblestone with a nether portal photoshopped on top, he didn’t even try, I can literally see the islands of the other world he stole the portal from. F-, see me after class.

But under this scam artist’s video, there’s a lot of forum posts where basically no one can agree on who was first. Was it BuildCraft, an old machine mod? How about IndustrialCraft, an old machine mod? Or what about MineFactory, an old machine mod?

Yeah, there seemed to be a trend back then, but none of these are the oldest, and they all actually came after Optifine so I’m not really sure why people think otherwise. There were also a few people mentioning World of Minecraft, a hack client for classic Minecraft,

As well as a link to this old MinecraftForum thread for what seemed to be the ground zero of texture packs. We’ll come back to World of Minecraft, but let’s tackle the so-called “Desert Mod” for now. Just taking a quick look through MinecraftForum’s mod section shows us this is definitely not

The first mod, but it does remind me of something. Remember how in the skin search video, we found that one screenshot of nude Minecraft skins from way back in the day? Well, texture packs didn’t exist back then; if you wanted to change any texture of Minecraft,

Including skins, you had to directly edit the Minecraft files; that’s modding baby! And that was all the way back in Classic 0.0.17a, which was around from June 10th to the 13th of 2009; that’s pretty old. So unless we want pixelated penises to set technical records as the first skin, the first

Texture pack and the first mod, we need to look harder. Last time, all it took to beat the Super Hero Squad of peepee was a little bit of time in some old chat logs. So if we want to see success, I must consult the archives.

The oldest logs we have, Testvan’s archive, dates back to just days after the release of the game, meaning that if anyone discussed mods in chat, we’ll probably find them here. And… nothing. Notch and the community discussed supporting mods and texture edits in the future, but

I couldn’t find anything but a few map editors from the time, like Notch’s lost DOOM levels, a level editor from Awol10 and something from a guy named Giver. Cool, but not what we’re looking for; the ones from Notch and Giver edit the world files,

Not Minecraft’s code itself, and I tried to contact Awol10 but couldn’t find a way to do it; besides, his probably works the same. It’s looking like the logs might not help… except. In the midst of all of this, I stumbled upon a player, Super-Dot, trying to add his own

Custom Mario skin into the game, sort of like what Parthon did in the first skin video; I guess the first Minecraft players must’ve really, really loved Mario. But Parthon officially added his skin on June 13th with the release of Classic 18, and the nude skins were modded into Classic 17 around June 10th.

Super-Dot’s custom skin endeavours came on May 28th… and later he tried to add a monkey skin on June 7th but we’re ignoring that one. That’s two full weeks before any of the other skins we found. And if you look at his messages, he had everything he needed.

He had the java files of Minecraft, he found the player model texture, and he had made his own to replace it. All he needed to do was copy and paste, and he would have the title of Minecraft’s first modder. But he failed.

The process was one single step, and yet somehow, it didn’t work out, and we’re back to searching. May 29th, nothing. May 30th, nothing. May 31st… now that’s something interesting. A Javascript project adding a challenge to Minecraft… that sounds like a mod.

He sent a link to it just a few messages later, and somehow, over 13 years later, it’s still online, along with two other versions I found just by changing the URL around a bit. It looks like some sort of multiplayer RPG challenge; it would keep track of everything

You built, mined, planted, dug, or anything else, and assigned points to them that you could use to buy special items helping you to earn money faster. Whoever made it to a certain amount of money that the players decided would win. And there it is: the first Minecraft mod. Except… it wasn’t a mod.

Maybe if this was finished, it would’ve been, but this never actually modified the game; Joat, the creator, thought it was illegal. And I don’t blame him; people were scared! While Minecraft was being developed, one of Notch’s other games called WurmOnline had

Just banned a wave of players for 9999 days for modding the client, and none of the law-abiding citizens of the Minecraft IRC chat wanted to see that repeated. If we were going to find the first mod, we needed to find the first person that wasn’t afraid to break the rules.

And this takes us back to World of Minecraft. Back in Classic when Minecraft didn’t have an official client and was online-only, mods were few and far between, but one of the biggest and apparently one of the first was World of Minecraft.

We talked about this in the history of mods video, and you should absolutely watch that, but it was essentially the first full-fledged hack client Minecraft ever saw, bringing fly, noclip, and creative mode before creative mode even existed. You might think that this was a bad thing, but back when survival didn’t exist and

Basically every server was based on building, it was actually allowed and even encouraged on most servers; you could sort of liken it to Schematica today, a usually allowed mod that just makes the whole building process much more efficient.

And based on some Youtube videos from its release, it seems that the WoM client started all the way back in October 2010, maybe even earlier. So that’s a very good start, and yet… it’s not the oldest. But it might lead us there.

See, World of Minecraft was the most well-known hack from back then, but it wasn’t the first. It was only based on it. Enter CPColin’s client, which was simply named… Minecraft.zip. Very original. Well done. But despite the lack of a great name, it does have a great place in history as what I believe

Is the first hack client in Minecraft. I can’t really find any info on when or where this was first discussed, whether through forums or logs or anything, but surprisingly it’s still available to us today 13 years later, though not exactly easy to find.

Like I said, this client is practically a fairy tale, a myth, nobody seems to know anything about it, but if you look up his username, it links to a Github, that links to his website, that links to another page on the site that links to 4 different Minecraft client files.

Yet, if you look at the dates… these were either reuploaded or replaced in 2010, way, way later than what we’re looking for, so we can’t find the original date without looking into the files themselves. Fortunately, because they’re zip files, if you open them in something like WinRAR

And look through the data, you can see these are actually a lot older than you’d think. But sadly, it only goes back to June 16th 2009; just days after the nude skins, but after them nonetheless. It’s possible that an earlier version of the client actually does beat the skins, but

The archives are incomplete, and every other source of the client that I’ve been able to find has been deactivated, deleted, privated or something else that means we can’t get it. And that means… we’ve done everything. Every log, every forum, every Discord, every source of every bit of information has been

Thoroughly scoured and we’ve found nothing. It’s over. Right? – Awol10. To most researchers in the Minecraft Classic scene, Awol was just another player, another name among a sea of names in the Minecraft logs and old screenshots. But to me, Awol10 was the link between the present and the past.

He had made something: a Minecraft world generator, like that of Notch or the Giver, but his sounded different; the only problem was, I had no way to know. I had no way to find him, and Google wasn’t very helpful. I was at a dead end… until I found this.

A link, from Awol10, to some website called Puregamer. That’s very 2009 of you, Awol. He never linked to his mod, just a few worlds he made with it, but I could settle for that; if this Puregamer thing was still up, I could at least get a date on the world which might

Prove that the mod was older than the naked skins, which would at least be a step in the right direction. But that was 13 years ago. Either the site or the file had probably disappeared. I expected failure. What I got was more success than I could’ve imagined. The files weren’t there.

I was right, they had all been taken down. But the website was still alive. And it wasn’t just some random file uploader; it was Awol’s personal online home. And right on the front page was a link to his Youtube channel. Just my luck. The Youtube channel was active. Just my luck.

His latest video had a link to his Discord. Just my luck. And when I added him, he accepted my friend request in minutes. Just my luck. Every single thing had to go right here for even a hint on the first mod. And everything went perfect.

I was now in contact with who may very well have been the first modder in Minecraft history… but there was still a problem. A major problem. It had been 13 years. In that time, hard drives can die, file hosts can shut down, computers can fail or be sold off or given away.

And yet, I was coming to Awol hoping, begging for him to even hold a shred of the past, a single file, a screenshot even of a one-off modding project for a game he hadn’t been- very involved with for over a decade, that is, if he even decided to grace me with his time.

My chances were low, man, they were practically in the negatives. And yet, I got more than I asked for. Awol had an archive, and once he scrubbed it clean of anything private, it was all mine. And what I found inside, honestly could be an entire video.

In fact, I might make it one, so stay tuned, but it had everything. There were worlds, including potentially the oldest Minecraft world we still have today: yes, it beats the one I showcased in my oldest world video, by 3 full days.

It had old versions of the game, including some files that publicly didn’t exist until now. It had lists of old players, possibly some of the first people to ever play Minecraft. And of course, it had what we came here for: the first mod in Minecraft.

It was written in a language called Perl which I don’t have much experience with, but looking into the files and you can tell, that’s a mod alright. And after a bit of research and tweaking, I had it running for myself, 13 years later,

And made my own custom Minecraft classic world with the first mod in Minecraft history. It took weeks of research, and a lot of struggle, but with the help of some incredible luck and some incredible people, we finally did it. We found the first mod in Minecraft history. Not a dirty joke.

Not a small texture swap. A program, that even with all of its limits, was years before its time and paved a path for some of the largest, most important Minecraft mods to come. Thanks for watching, and I hope you enjoyed. Have yourselves a very good one. Peace.