Minecraft’s first world was just discovered. Here’s how.

Minecraft’s first ever world was just discovered. I know, it sounds impossible, but it’s a reality and it came from the craziest source you could imagine. So uh… let’s talk about that! Starting with the hunt. If you’re new here, hi subscribe thanks love you, but if you’ve been around these

Parts for a while, you might remember way, way back in September 2021 when I made a video about the oldest Minecraft world – it was from June 12th of 2009, about a month after Minecraft was created and it was full of statues, symbols, bridges and buildings, a pretty interesting find.

That discovery came courtesy of the researchers at Omniarchive – we’ll come back to them later – and ever since then we’ve been trying to outdo ourselves and find an even older world, until we eventually did! Just months ago when I found Minecraft’s first mod, I also accidentally broke the record

On the oldest Minecraft world with a new find that was 3 days older, from June 9th. There’s a ton of other interesting finds where that came from in an exclusive video on my Patreon, but now we have something even better – not just “the oldest world we know

About”, the first world ever created. Minecraft was released May 17th of 2009, but even though Google doesn’t know that, you probably do. What you might not know is that development actually started a week earlier on May 10th,

And the first playable version of the game was made on May 13th: the cave game tech demo. This mess of grass and cobblestone was all that existed back then – no menu, no multiplayer, no survival, no crafting, no placing or breaking, no saving worlds, just block data hooked up

To some old textures from Notch’s scrapped strategy game, RubyDung. Basically, it was a mess, but in just 5 hours or so, Notch had transformed this disaster into this: rd-132328, the first version of Minecraft that you can really call a game. You could build, destroy, screw with the mobs.

The world was yours to play with. And along with these new and improved game mechanics, something else was added as well: the ability to make a world, and in this first-ever screenshot of Minecraft you can see the first ever Minecraft world, with Steve chilling in his little house.

A relic of Minecraft history lost to time… or so we thought. It’s been 14 years, and we now have this world, we can relive those first moments of Minecraft’s existence… but how? How does a piece of history like this last for a decade and a half and make it to the public?

That’s a pretty interesting story, and it’s all because of one woman: ez. Elin Zetterstrand, aka ez, is Notch’s ex-wife – they married in 2011, filed for divorce the next year, good things never last, what can I say. But before they were married, Elin was Notch’s girlfriend for four years, meaning she was

Around before Minecraft was even an idea. ez is one of the most famous Minecraft players because of her rare name and capes, along with the whole wife thing, but not a lot of people know just how much Minecraft history she holds.

Back in 2013, ez sent over the early Minecraft source code to Mojang, which gave us access to some of the first versions of the game. 8 years later, in 2021, she posted screenshots of early textures, multiplayer and bugs from before the game was even released.

She knew her stuff, and she had the files to prove it… but what if we had those files too? Well, you already know we had to at least give it a crack, but who was up for the task? Enter Omniarchive. If you don’t already know, Omniarchive are basically the kings of Minecraft research.

Sure, if you specifically want history on old Minecraft servers, you’ll hit up 2B2T or MinecraftOnline. If you want to know history on the coolest Minecraft accounts, you hit up my Discord, this isn’t even a plug, that’s just what you do. But Omniarchive covers just about everything.

Over the last six years they’ve found some of Minecraft’s very first versions, players, videos, screenshots, mods and more. But one of the biggest side projects has been the search for Minecraft’s oldest world. It started a few years back, when they found a true Minecraft veteran named Bujold, an

Absolute legend who shared a lot of early worlds, including the oldest map we had at the time – that’s the one I covered in my original video that I talked about earlier. Then of course, there was my project searching for the oldest mod, which just casually also

Picked up the oldest world along the way, you know, no biggie, but… it wasn’t enough. The search for an even older map kept going, and when ez came back to Twitter sharing Minecraft’s earliest history, it was their best chance.

But they needed their best man, so, they sent out the ultimate researcher, the top dog: ProfessorApple, and his task was an impossible one – tweeting at her. Yeah I don’t know, I guess just nobody thought to do that?

I mean not a lot people knew she had anything important, maybe everyone just figured “ah, it’s been 14 years, why would she care”. Really, I don’t know, but apparently that’s all it took because a few days later, she responded!

Turns out she had kept those old files all these years, and she was happy to release them to the public, which takes us to this. This is the first Minecraft map, ever. It’s a map for rd-132328, the first proper game version of Minecraft we talked about

Earlier, and it was saved just an hour after that version was created. And considering how basic Minecraft was back then, the content of this map is pretty interesting, kinda like the content at patreon.com/mcbyt, god I’m smooth! But we do have a problem… how do you even play the map?

I mean seriously, the world is way too old for any modern version of Minecraft, so what do you do here? Well, it’s long overdue, but let me tell you about a little something called Betacraft. Betacraft is a Minecraft launcher with basically every historical version of the game, along

With bug fixes, early mods, a custom server list for old servers, everything you could possibly want in a launcher like this. I use Betacraft for pretty much every video that covers old versions, and not as a sponsor

Thing, this is just awesome, and it’s also how you can play this level, so here’s a real quick guide for Windows, if you’re on Mac or Linux you can probably also do this but I don’t know how so don’t ask me. Start by heading over to Betacraft.uk and download the launcher.

Once you’ve installed it, you’ll want to hit this “select version” button in the bottom left and pick pc-132128, it’s the second version listed. If you want, you can log in and tinker around with mods and Java stuff in the instance settings,

But if you’re just wanting to test out the level, all you gotta do is hit play! Now, close the game and download the level which is linked in the description. Then just copy it into the Betacraft folder, right next to your .minecraft folder in AppData, and start the game up again. That’s it!

Now, without further ado, let’s hop into the first ever Minecraft world. Just like in the first screenshot, we start in this little hut Elin had built – it’s got a few windows, a doorway, a fence, a chimney, everything you want in the perfect starter home. Feel like it might be missing something though…

Just can’t put my finger on it. But just outside, you can spot something off in the distance, and if we head towards it we can see a sort of gateway thing leading us to the first mine in Minecraft – though I’m not exactly sure what she was mining for.

It takes us down to a big man-made cave, or woman-made in this case, which is definitely a step up from the “caves” in the tech demo. But once you’re down here, you have two paths to take: the first, directly in front

Of you, wraps around to the bottom of a big pit, and if you climb up, you end up back in the house we started – you also, apparently, discover Minecraft’s first X-Ray glitch. But if you take path number two, it leads to a proper, Indiana Jones-style treasure

Room – at least, I think that’s what it is, but these guys got here first, so no more treasure. It wasn’t exactly well-hidden either, since there’s a gaping hole in the Earth that leads down here, a few smaller holes that have been dug to the edges of the known world,

And a stairway to a hidden balcony above it for, I don’t know, spooky assassin reasons or something. So why don’t you become that assassin? Download the map yourself, link in the description, and take a look around! It’s a tiny map for sure, but a really, really interesting piece of Minecraft history

With a super cool story, and to still have it around today, a decade and a half later, is nothing short of a miracle. Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoyed! Also, of course, huge thanks to Omniarchive and EZ for this insane find, and a big thanks

To the boys on Patreon for all the support. I’ll spare you my spiel, but it’s pretty cheap and there’s early videos, bonus videos – stuff like that, so you might like it. But that’s all for today, so have a good one, boys. Peace peace.