Kunai – The Story Of Minecraft’s Most Iconic Seedhunt

In 2020 this familiar title screen would set off an entire team of Minecraft investigators on a mission to uncovering the seed behind the blood title screen but would they actually find it and where did it all start okay imagine this it’s the 14th of June and one inspired

Seed investigator named Tom wondered if the word behind the title screen was actually somewhere out there however before even starting his investigation there was one serious problem the background of this title screen was completely blurred out and when asking fellow investigators if they were already on the case no one seemed to be

Interested so Tom had to push forwards alone staying up all night diving deep into the Minecraft files until finally aha he’d found it six low quality screenshots in all directions that when put together form what’s called a cube map it turned out the game was actually blowing the title screen itself giving

Tom his first breakthrough although with this exciting news another problem started developing this title screen had been in the game for such a long time it had survived some major updates including one that completely changed Minecraft’s World Generation so Tom had his out was this title screen from beta

1.8 on the cutoff point where completely new world generation was introduced or was it from an older version such as beta 1.7 it wouldn’t be immediately clear but by looking at the changes that were made in 1.8 including the game’s lighting the sea level being completely shifted one block down and the clouds

Being raced higher ton figured the Panorama screenshot had to have come from beta 1.7 this completely opened up Tom’s research allowing him to dive deep into the Panorama and figuring out that whoever took the screenshot was in fact facing south so what now well Tom knew

If you wanted to find the seed he needed to find the exact coordinates of where the player stood so he got back to work digging up the y-coordinate by simply counting the blocks from the water level and the zikorn despite requiring a little bit more work being found through

The cloud patterns having the Y and Z coordinates was massive progress however the x-coordinate would remain completely missing but Tom still felt like he passed a major hurdle and wondered if it was truly enough evidence to get the other seed Hunters on board and of course there was only one way to find

Out he reached out showing them what he discovered and without a second thought they were instantly hooked this one-man seed hunt had now become a full-on operation and this time the investigators weren’t going to waste a second as they realized they would need a way to measure every block accurately

And decided recreating the world block by a block using Panorama images would be the cleanest solution so an investigator named Philip D opened the server for anyone to join the hunt really started picking up momentum but with every win in this investigation a problem always seemed to follow was not

Having the original image overlaid in real time meant the team’s Builders would have to keep going painstakingly back and forth between their block placements and the Panorama image this was a real issue and to an investigator suggested setting up Bots with a constant live feed of the six views and

Despite the idea sounding a bit absurd at first an investigator named dutchun went ahead developing a mod to do exactly that however the use of mods wouldn’t stop there as others were created to adjust the game’s rendering and grass offsets which actually allowed Tom to uncover the missing x-coordinate

And the exact positioning of where the Panorama was taken this level of progress was now attracting more experienced seed hunters or asking the same question what would truly be the best method to cracking the sea the investigators started exploring their options discussing methods and ideas was a seed Hunter named Earth computer

Experimented with narrowing down the correct chunk seed by the position of a specific tree and the grass around it however this method only led to disappointment as the grass didn’t narrow down the results as much as they’d hoped for forcing the investigators to completely abandon this approach but they weren’t going to give

Up so soon as on their second attempt Earth computer would work alongside two other seed Hunters named cortex and Neil and together they would come up with a new plan you see they would program a multi-level filter that would check through all 280 trillion world seeds

Until they found an exact match or at least they hoped so because as good as this theory was generating every World in existence would need a ridiculous computer and a couple centuries of waiting time so the investigators had to be smart about this they picked out three specific features from The Game’s

Code that also existed inside of the Panorama and reassembled it into three super optimized filters a tree Checker a biome Checker and a Terrain Checker now bear with me while I explain all of this you see with the tree Checker being the fastest and first filter any seed that

Wouldn’t match the tree in the Panorama would be immediately discarded and only the seeds that passed would move on to a second slower filter where two Bion borders would be matched against the Panorama from here any remaining seeds would have a few blocks of their terrain checked as well hopefully leaving out

Only the real Panorama seed in the end this was exhilarating for the investigators as the idea of finding a seed so soon would be a huge accomplishment but despite the massive optimizations it was clear that if they actually wanted to go ahead with this it

Would need to get a hold of an insane amount of computing power that they simply didn’t have at least that’s what they thought as they quickly remembered a previous project aiming to find the tallest cactus using a platform called boink allowing players who were also interested in the seed hunt to donate

Their graphics cards to calculate the seeds speeding up the search immensely although as the investigators started tinkering with using boink they quickly discovered it wouldn’t be as easy as they first thought as they were faced with tricky technical issues that would take some serious time to resolve and so

For a moment things went quiet but it wouldn’t last long as a group of frustrated seed Hunters took it upon themselves to leave out boink and return to their original plan you see they would rent out all the computer power needed to run the filter system correctly and in turn instead of failure

It had worked the filter had narrowed down every seat and as the investigators excitedly looked through the results they were hit with a sudden realization not a single seed that the filter has sorted match the one they were looking for the seed Hunters were in utter disbelief scrambling to find and fix any

Potential issues that could have caused it to fail in the first place but in the end being left completely empty-handed As It ultimately turned out the tree Checker despite being fast was in fact too unreliable at this point the seed Hunters were growing tired they’d been

At this for so long and it felt like their chances were getting Slimmer and Slimmer with this big of a setback the seed Hunters knew they would have to change their approach once again this time forgetting about the tree and solely relying on using biomes and the

Terrain but there was a slight problem you see checking two Bayern borders will let too many seas through the filter so cortex came up with a crazy but straightforward approach on retrieving the bio measurements as in theory the color of brass in Minecraft is determined by the biome is located it

And so by measuring the color the investigators could trace back their steps and find out the buying values for each block which an investigator named pseudogravity would take upon himself to work on as it showed some real potential but in practice this was a lot harder than anticipated as Minecraft secretly

Uses a climate system with temperature and humidity values meaning he would have to find exactly how the game uses these numbers to pick a color and after digging through Minecraft’s files discovering the game uses texture to determine colors of the biome with high humidity making things look Greener

While drier areas are made to look more grayish or brown it allowed him to finally calculate the climate values and completely Reviving the excitement around the seed hunt this was amazing news and the investigators weren’t going to waste a second as cortex with Earth computer went ahead to implement these

New bio-measurements into the seed cracking code the stakes this time around were so much higher with everyone painstakingly double checking everything to make sure no mistakes were slipped through and it was a good job they did as they noticed a problem within how the measurements were taken that could have

Completely thrown off the seed hunt it was incredibly lucky that they had spotted it and now with everything set up and ready to go they began with the investigators hoping boink would kick in hard as with just the code they were stuck only calculating 10 million seeds per second and luckily enough boink

Really kicked in with over 230 gpus contributing towards cracking the seat making at the time the 16th most powerful supercomputer in the world now despite this power the seed Hunters estimated that it would take around a week for the sea to be filtered and checked through so anxiety was

Understandably High among the seed Hunters as they could still end up with no result if even the smallest of Errors was encountered but to everyone’s surprise six nervous hours after boink was activated and a month worth of methods attempts and strategy they had actually done it the seed was finally

Cracked and shortly after revealed to the public within a YouTube video