The Search for Minecraft’s Oldest World

Everyone loves a little bit of minecraft history and just through a quick search on youtube that’s very easy to tell with players like sip over and fitmc racking up millions of views on every video there’s clearly a very big market and youtubers have taken advantage of that covering almost everything there is to

Know about the game but there’s one big thing that nobody on youtube has talked about yet the oldest world in minecraft not the oldest world ever created that would have been notch’s first test world of course but the oldest surviving world known to exist one that anyone can play

On now this idea isn’t exactly new and many other youtubers have made similar videos in the past but uh they were kinda wrong no i mean seriously i gotta talk about this what is going on here this was three years after the game was created this was three years before the

Game was created and look at this this is preston he says the oldest map is 2012 with impression against his 2007 just for multiplayer and also why is the eye here not capitalized i don’t get it i don’t understand what is going on nobody’s even close except dan ddm who’s

Actually very close and we’ll be talking about the map he used later in this video but as far as i can tell the oldest known minecraft map has never been seen on youtube not even once so in today’s episode of minecraft uncovered come with me as we search for the oldest

World in minecraft so where do you even begin to research something like this i mean there’s literally millions of maps floating around the internet it seems like an impossible task but it’s actually not too difficult to find some of the oldest maps that still exist for this we’ll want to head over to

Minecraftforum.net and check the map section once you set it to sort by thread date there it is le mao boats giant tree the oldest post in minecraft forms map section which is genuinely very very close to the oldest it was uploaded on july 7th of 2009 and this

One was actually shown off in dantdm’s video though he wasn’t able to download it so honestly good on dan for doing literally the bare minimum amount of research because around that time nobody else did so now we have a good starting point but how do we continue well

Fortunately for me somebody else already did the work for me after the publicity dan brought to the map a guy named furwolf replied to them saying this wasn’t actually the oldest from what he knows it was the third or fourth but fortunately for us he provided his first

Map rosetta’s water climb uploaded to minecraft forum nearly a month earlier but how was that even possible didn’t we just check the entire map section well yes but this world wasn’t uploaded there for whatever reason it was uploaded to what is now known as the mod discussion forum i’m guessing they didn’t actually

Have a map form for a few weeks so players just posted maps wherever they could i did check the old posts in that forum and i was actually able to find an even older world download but it’s since been taken down to be honest i’m kind of happy about that because having the

Oldest map being a plain super flat world would have probably been the saddest ending to a video i have ever seen okay so quite a big jump from july 7th to june 16th but from here things get tricky this is the oldest map on all of minecraft form at least that anyone

Has found and other websites like planet minecraft aren’t much help either we’re gonna need some real heavy duty research for this one let’s begin so to find the oldest map that’s still around we have to first find a date what is the oldest possible time that a minecraft world could even come from

That’s not a very easy question to answer for a lot of reasons most of which have to do with saving saving a level wasn’t always a part of minecraft early on it just wasn’t physically possible to save the game according to the minecraft fandom wiki saving was added in version 0.0.13

Alpha on may 22nd 2009 it links to a notched tumblr post about the addition of saving so let’s just check that out and oh dear so yeah while i was working on the script for this video not just tumblr just died like it’s gone fortunately it

Has been archived by quite a few people including archive.org and omni archive i’ll be using the latter for this video just because it loads faster and looks nicer but as you can see yeah may 22nd of 2009 is when saving was added to the game so that’s as old as we can get

Right well it’s not that easy because of course it’s not of course notch had to be weird and make minecraft online only and have all the file saved on his servers with no way to download them yay for a while this was kind of a huge roadblock in my research because i just

Couldn’t find any info about when saving was moved from the mojang servers to your local hard drive for days i was stuck but after hours and hours of research i found a saving grace from a perhaps unexpected source i was looking for irc logs of minecraft to see if i

Could find any old map links and though i didn’t find any working archives there was some very useful information in this the logs from june 8 in the minecraft irc chat saved by a guy known as test fan this was the same day as multiplayer was released so the chat was super

Active and one of the many things players were trying to figure out was how to save their levels eventually one man figured it out vedgum per girmer no i didn’t have a stroke that’s actually his name but he figured out that if you load up a multiplayer level and let it

Auto-save you can then copy the server level data and save it to your computer making this the first known way to save a minecraft file locally that means that instead of potentially having maps anywhere from may 22nd to june 16th it was actually only june 8th to the 16th

Just over a week so now i had a good range of time to start searching and that’s exactly what i did every forum post every word of knowledge update every message and every chat log every link i could find and after a very long day of research i finally found it

I found disappointment because there was nothing there was nothing all of that research for absolutely nothing it was beginning to look like the search was over june 16th was as old as we were going to get just because everyone else around that time had deleted or privated their worlds it looked like failure

In my moment of desperation there was only one group of people who i could think to turn to omni archive the same group that’s been finding and archiving lost versions for years see my video about that if you want and the group that made the word of notch archive i’ve

Been using this whole video when i thought it was all over i turned to them to see if i had possibly missed something some vital piece of information that would aid in the search something unimaginably important that i had just glanced over and well i’m not sure why i didn’t just go

To them in the first place but uh they like immediately were like oh yeah we already have it yeah no we just already have the oldest map like what i’ve been researching this for weeks and it was just here right here and this discord server that i’ve already been in for

Months and already used to research old minecraft history it was right here the entire time god i hate myself but they were right they had an older map a surviving 0.0.13 alpha build 3 world from june 12th of 2009 just a few days after i think it would

Have been possible to save this one was archived by a guy named boujold who um played the game a long time ago i don’t know who he is and it was shared in the omni archive discord on december 27th 2020 by professor apple who’s pretty well known in the minecraft archiving

Circle or at least i know of him so i assume he’s well known since i know almost nobody that does archive work one of the other people i do know though is morse deck and i have to say huge thanks to him for helping me get beta craft

Working not just for this video but also for my alpha survival streams old minecraft is very confusing and i would not have been able to make this content without him but as for the map itself it’s complete with what seems to be apartment buildings a pixel art

Nighthead a replica of the la mi dossier statue a sign that says amigrad and some other not so nice builds that were probably considered funny in 2009 though now they just seem tasteless still this map is a pretty interesting piece of history and it might be fun to explore parts of it

If you’re at all interested in old maps like this it’s very possible that older maps in this exist but as of yet none of them have been found maybe just maybe you’ll be the one to change that hope you all enjoyed the video and yes i

Know it’s pretty short i have a video coming out soon that’s not actually part of minecraft uncovered which would make it my first unscripted video in well over a year at this point so get hyped maybe if that sounds like something you’d be interested in it’s not going to

Be just a generic commentary video i’m pouring tons of time and effort into making it really entertaining so i think you guys will like it when it’s finally ready but for now this is what i’ve got for you so thanks for watching and have a good one peace You