they DISCOVERED the Minecraft Seed for a… PAINTING?!

Does this image look familiar to you i mean of course it does it’s one of minecraft’s many in-game paintings for an item crafted with eight sticks and a block of wool you wouldn’t think there would be such an extraordinary story to tell but there is now does this image

Look familiar to you probably it’s the old default texture pack and server icon from years past which you may know as pac.png you may also know that this image is of a real minecraft world and that the seed for this world was recently discovered and the story behind

Its discovery has already been pretty well documented so what does pac.png and the skull on fire painting have in common well take a look don’t see it yet okay let’s replace the minecraft painting with a picture of its real-life counterpart do you see it now yeah that’s a minecraft world behind the skull

And it’s real and less than one week after the discovery of pac.png seed and after only 20 days of work the seed for the skull on fire world has also been discovered so let’s go ahead and let’s launch right into it curiosity is perhaps our most powerful and defining characteristic

Do we need to find the world seeds to seemingly inconsequential images no do we need minecraft to live no but we still play it in our own way we all have our own story and today’s story is about the discovery of the skull on fire world seed and the people who

Made it possible before we get into how they made this discovery let’s get into why starting in 2015 the race to beat minecraft as fast as possible really began to take off and at the time the most popular category of speedrun was any percent beat the game as fast as possible set

Seed glitchless in order to fully optimize this speed run it was important that the most optimal minecraft seed be found for a variety of reasons that’s really where minecraft seed finding and seed cracking began with speedrunning from there the effort evolved into more ambitious projects like finding the

World seed for pewdiepie’s let’s play world as well as the world seed for the x’s adventures in minecraft let’s play which i covered in a prior video linked above from there pack.png was found by you know just watch salsa one’s video on the matter it’s a really good one

In a nutshell pac.png was found by locating the probable coordinates that the player was standing on based on the cloud’s positions dirt variations and the crop of the image once the most likely set of coordinates was found all seeds that could not generate the blocks with confirmed positions were

Filtered out leaving about seven hundred thousand seeds to be brute forced until a seed with all matching blocks was found it might sound easy in retrospect but this effort took over eight months to complete and required the invention of many different seed cracking techniques naturally after completing such a monumental project

The community behind this effort mostly comprised of minecraft at home members wanted something more the two obvious choices to look for were the world seed for the original herobrine creepypasta which is in the works and the world seed for uh painting okay how did they find the world seed for

A painting for just a moment i want you to put yourselves in the shoes of those trying to crack this painting’s world seed within the painting we’ve got clouds we’ve got blocks sort of but it’s clearly not enough and this painting was made over nine years ago there’s no way that christopher

Zetterstrand the artist of this painting would have the original screenshot of the world that the painting is based off oh wait he does have the screenshot yeah rather than try to mentally murder themselves by guessing which blocks were which tom latsko one of the members of this project

Just emailed christopher asking if he had the screenshot and what he replied with was a jpeg image of a minecraft world while not a perfect png quality image this was more than enough to work with so they were off to the races this image told the team a few things

One the orientation of the moon showed that the moon was rising which in minecraft alpha 1.1 was north so the player is facing north two the crop of the image was easy to find due to the player’s arm being on screen and the knowledge that christopher that his monitor was of a 1920

By 1200 resolution and three the clouds in minecraft are one giant image file that just sweep across the sky along the x-axis meaning if you can find out which part of the cloud map is above you which they could by lining up the view with the clouds in game

You can find out the player’s z-coordinate and y-coordinate as well beyond that is some real csi craziness these guys then figured out which program was used to compress the original bmp image into a jpeg image so they could largely reverse the compression process and use machine learning to

Djpeg the image then after figuring out the player’s exact facing direction coupled with blocks that were easy to identify and line up a recreation of the map was conducted with a live overlay of the world that they were reconstructing to absolutely ensure that everything was in the right place

Because if the team used the coordinates of those flowers as part of the seed cracking effort but they got all of the coordinates of those flowers wrong you could probably see why that would be a bad thing so while the team now had an accurate recreation of

Much of the painting it was still believed that the player’s exact x-coordinate was required in order to crack the world seed so they tried to find it the theory was this if minecraft’s clouds always start from the exact same position when loading up a world

And if the sun or the moon in the sky can reveal what time of day it was it should be all of the information required to find the x-coordinate of this image unfortunately however minecraft clouds operate in sort of a weird way while the clouds do always start from the same position

They only do so every time you load up minecraft itself meaning if you fire up a world and the clouds move 200 units before you then close the world the next world you load without restarting the game will have the clouds be offset by 200 units meaning if christopher had loaded

Another world prior to this one which they only realized was probably the case after the fact then this method would not work and although they tried that approach because of the reasons i just mentioned it failed so they had to come up with something else and they did this image has something that

Pac.png did not have a detailed flower bed while yes the pac.png image did have three visible flowers this world has 18 and all flower beds generate based on the world seed before this image was dj pegged this is what the flower bed looked like you might be able to get the

Coordinates of each individual flower but the lack of detail definitely made the whole thing questionable however this is what the flower bed looked like after the decompression this was enough to identify with a high degree of confidence the relative coordinates of each individual flower in the pile where their z

And y coordinates were known at this point the team was ready to compile all of these findings into code that would allow for the general public to use their computing power in order to crack this world seed much like what happened with pac.png but then as they were putting those efforts

Into motion seemingly out of nowhere a user by the name of andrew 555 revealed that he had discovered the seed with a simple albeit legendary discord post simply stating painting but there’s snow everywhere wait what how did this happen what did andrew think of that the rest of the team

Did not so here’s what happened while andrew did use the team’s map recreation and other results from before he applied optimizations which he thought of independently that had not yet been implemented by the team one that the flower patch’s most likely center point was at a y level of 68

Which sped up the seed cracking code by a hundred and twenty eight times and then he only tested flowers that he absolutely 100 percent knew the z coordinate of and three his code would abandon a test if a flower that is at a coordinate that he was 100

Sure should not contain a flower contained a flower which is a further seven times improvement in speed all of andrew’s optimization sped up the search by around a thousand times allowing for him to crack this world seed with only a single 1660 ti graphics card in about two and a half hours resulting

In one single valid flower seed being found which in turn revealed the seed of the world So there it is the seed for minecraft skull on fire painting has been discovered if you want to load it up for yourself i’ll have information in the description down below along with many other relevant links as well if you want to know in detail who the team is that i’ve been referencing

Throughout this video i’ll have all of that information available as well with that in mind i think it’s important to name each and every person who played a role with this project if you’re interested in participating and or following along with projects like this one as they unfold i encourage you to join

The minecraft at home discord as far as this project is concerned there’s andrew 555 who made the final discovery tom latsko who contacted christopher and organized the project and made the interactive overlay and so much more polymetric who helped find the image’s original crop position and original in-game resolution and helped with

Much of the research pseudogravity who analyzed and wrote much of the initial code to find valid flower seeds cortex who helped with the initial flower seed code joey who trained the ai that dj pegged the original screenshot that christopher sent mr spike who worked with boy sanic in

Writing code that would allow for this project to be run on boink the program that would allow the public to crack the world seed philip who hosted the minecraft server that housed the map’s recreation and the bot that live updated the overlay k who worked on replicating the original jpeg algorithm

Z3 who also helped with the world recreation and overlay and then there’s poke 535 frederick hypers elias smile chair pop neil and ess 83 who all assisted with the project in their own distinctive ways while yes this specific project only took 20 days from conceptualization to realization

That’s only because of the months of hard work and dedication poured into other seed finding and seed cracking projects that came before this one these guys are truly experts and each of them deserves to be recognized named and credited for their contributions all i’m doing is telling their story if there’s

Anybody or anything that i left out of this video i’ll be sure to have information to everything in the description down below for now that’s their story and that’s the end of this video let me know what you think about projects like this one in the comment section down below and if

You enjoyed this video please consider leaving a like on it because it would really help out myself the channel and the video quite a lot so i hope you all enjoyed my name is antvenom and i bid you all farewell thanks so much for watching you