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Trivia / Minecraft

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  • Artist Disillusionment:
    • Notch steadily grew more and more detached from Minecraft (largely a result of various incidents) beginning in 2011 and ending with the 2014 sale of Mojang to Microsoft.
    • Miraculously, during a Twitter conversation with Dinnerbone in early 2020 he mentioned he mostly no longer feels this way! He cited the infectious passion of Minecraft YouTubers and the fact that Minecraft has changed enough that he can view it from the viewpoint of a fan as his influences.
  • Ascended Fanon:
    • In 2011, the Beta 1.8 version was leaked to the public early by mistake. Instead of trying to rectify the problem, Mojang decided to have pre-release versions of the next update revealed to the public from now on in the form of "snapshots". The results were twofold: players can get a sneak peek at new features and bug fixes while Mojang gets feedback from the players about the snapshot so they can fix whatever bugs there are before making the snapshot official.
    • Notch was known to throw in several features suggested by fans, such as the ability for eggs to spawn chickens on rare occasion, and much of the speculation about the Endermen.
    • The Mini-Games are based on multiplayer server games designed by players.
    • The Minecraft world is commonly depicted in fanworks as an earthlike green-and-blue planet, but in the shape of a cube. While it wasn't implausible, there isn't a particular reason to believe it was the case in-game; within the playable area, there isn't a "world's edge" where the land itself bends at a 90 degree angle. Enter the 1.14 update, which introduces the "Globe" banner pattern, obtained from Cartographers. When printed onto a banner, the Globe takes the shape of a cube with colored landmasses dotting it, just like the fanon depictions.
  • Author's Saving Throw:
    • The overhauled combat of 1.9 was... controversial, to the say the least, not helped by the fact that Bedrock Edition retains the old combat. As of this writing, the developers are testing another overhaul of the combat system for all versions of the game that significantly speeds up attacks while still being more skill-based than pre-1.9. The changes have seen a warm reception, and the developers are responding to criticisms of the new system, such as allowing auto-attacks to be toggled off.
    • A major complaint about updates 1.17 to 1.19 was the fact that countless features had been revealed for updates, only to either get delayed to later ones or scrapped outright. This’d end up getting addressed with the 1.20 update, where on first announcement, the only things shown off where the things that had been completely finished, with later features being revealed as they were finished, thus ensuring that something like the previous three updates wouldn’t end up happening again.
  • Cash-Cow Franchise:
    • Minecraft was only a few years old at the time, but its consistently insane popularity allowed its creator to build his own game company in record time. xkcd's money chart shows that the game brings in about $193,500 daily. Not bad for an Indie Game about punching trees.
    • In Winter 2014, Mojang was purchased by Microsoft for $2.5 billion, and they have by now expanded the franchise to contain Xbox One and Windows 10 editions.
  • Colbert Bump: Minecraft sold around 1000 copies after being referenced on the Valve blog. Shortly afterward, Penny Arcade made a series of comics about it, which led to 7000 more sales and a server meltdown.
  • Completely Different Title: The Chinese edition of Minecraft is called 我的世界 (My World).
  • Cowboy BeBop at His Computer:
    • This Fox News article states that Infiniminer was made by Notch as a prototype to Minecraft. While Notch was inspired by it, Infiniminer was actually made by Zachtronics Industries.
    • A story claims that an 8 year old is facing felony charges after charging $800 to his grandmother's credit card. Minecraft itself costs around $30, had no in-game store at the time, and even if you are talking about the Xbox 360 version, has nowhere near $800 worth of skin packs to purchase. Guilty of this trope are: the grandmother, the boy's father, the police, and the (non-gaming/tech) news outlets who are repeating the story.
  • Creator Backlash:
    • Brandon Pearce admitted on Twitter that he and a few of the other Minecraft developers regret how the Phantom turned out, as their existence encouraged players to sleep more to avoid exploring at night. He's mentioned that he's been looking into ways to rework it, but is unsure what to do yet.
    • Following the announcement of the Sonic the Hedgehog DLC for Bedrock edition, Notch tweeted “Minecraft's a little bit dead.”
    • Regarding the Minecraft "renaissance" period, the developers nowadays clearly regret the first mob vote (in Minecon Earth 2017) and what came out of it. A lot of players didn't like the 1.13 mob vote, predominantly because all four ideas were interesting but in the end only one would end up in the game (which ended up being the Phantom), and the Phantom is now seen as The Scrappy, a view that seems to be shared by the developers themselves, since according to some tweets, they considered the Phantom to be badly implemented but aren't sure how to fix it. The unpopularity of the first mob vote was acknowledged in the official recap of the 2020 livestream.
    "You were allowed to vote for the next mob that we add to Minecraft! Again! Because apparently, nobody learned their lesson after the Phantom!"
  • Creator Breakdown: An admitted one that predicated the sale of Mojang to Microsoft. To give a sign of how bad things got, Notch's farewell to the fans explained that the sale was for the sake of his own sanity, and included a vow to abandon any future project he worked on that looked like it was going to start getting popular the way Minecraft did.
  • Defictionalization:
  • Demand Overload: Back in the fall of 2010, before Minecraft was as massively popular as it is now, Penny Arcade made a two-part strip about Gabe playing the game, and linked to the game's website in the news post. Thousands of readers proceeded to bombard the site. Even after traffic died down a bit, the authorization servers were completely nuked, so Notch declared it a free weekend just to avoid processing so many logins.
  • Development Gag: One of the most iconic enemies, the Creeper, was originally a botched attempt at making a pig from pure code and geometry (the torso was accidentally coded facing vertically instead of horizontally). However, the model was kept, and made into the enemy known as the Creeper.
  • Development Hell: The mod API has been pushed back version after version, even after Mojang hired someone specifically to work on it. Later, the person hired to specifically work on it left the company due to "creative differences" and a "reduced focus on the mod API".
    • At MineCon 2015, it was effectively announced that there would be no official modding API, because the existing fan-created Minecraft Forge had filled that role.
  • Distanced from Current Events: The 1.19 snapshot 22w17a removed the splash text "Привет Россия!", which is Russian Language for "Hello, Russia!". Given the removal happened in late April of 2022, it was likely due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the splash text could be misinterpreted as showing support for Russia.
  • Dummied Out: [[Dummied Out/Minecraft Has its own page.]]
  • Executive Meddling: Ask any Chinese gamer why the Minecraft community in China or even Southeast Asia is dead and they will give you this answer: NetEase. The company's "predatory and parasitic" business practices had saturated the game with so many opportunistic micro-transactions that Minecraft has become a largely hated and forgotten game in that region.
  • Fan Community Nicknames: Minecrafters (or Minecraftians).
  • Fandom Nod: A 2024 update introduced a new decorative panting based on the infamous “pack.png” image used for the server selection screen, which had become subject to major fandom intrigue in 2020 in regards to what seed the picture was taken on.
  • Follow the Leader: And how. You don't become the best selling video game of all time without a few people copying your tricks. Minecraft's runaway popularity caused several of its elements to become gaming standards, to the point that it could arguably be considered the Trope Codifier for a good number of them. Item Crafting, Survival Sandbox, procedurally-generated worlds, and voxel-based buildings are all gaming tropes that really took off because of Minecraft's success (though as noted below, it borrowed several of these tricks itself from Infiniminer). On an industry level, Minecraft led to loads more developers offering public alphas of their game and expanding the lifetime of a game by releasing periodic free updates that add new content and gameplay.
    • Rock Paper Shotgun coined the term "Minecraftbut" to describe the genre of open-world survival sandbox games that emerged in the wake of Minecraft's popularity, owing that most of them can be described as "It's Minecraft, but...".
    • The lack of a console version of the game at first led to clones coming out of the woodwork. See The Mockbuster below.
    • Terraria is usually described as "2D Minecraft", but its gameplay is largely different — more like a platformer/RPG set in a Minecraft-ish environment.
    • Then there's Don't Starve, an isomorphic game based around surviving in a randomly-generated, flat environment. More generally, TotalBiscuit has noted that survival as a game mechanic seems to be getting more popular, even in big-budget retail games like Far Cry 3 and Tomb Raider (2013).
    • Minecraft itself was a successful result of an Infiniminer clone wave.
  • From Entertainment to Education: Architecture + Creativity + Mathematics + Programming + Survival: it has been used in school for years to teach these things. Architecture and creativity from building, mathematics and programming from Redstone, and survival from the game's general mechanics. There is even an educational version now.
  • Genre Popularizer: Is very much like Doom in that while it was not the first sandbox cube building game, it was the first to make it big and inspire numerous clones and 'clones'.
  • In Memoriam: Mojang added a crown to the pig mob featured in the launcher of Minecraft's Java edition in July 2022 to honor a big-name in the game's community, Technoblade, who had passed away from cancer days beforehand.
  • The Merch: The game has whole stacks of merchandise. There are now official T-shirts on sale and replica stone pickaxes incoming. Store here. The T-shirts are just the tip of the iceberg made of stuff like stickers, posters, plushies, foam replicas of in-game items, handbooks, novels, figurines and even LEGO construction sets.
  • Never Speak Ill of the Dead: A real-life example. One of the title screen splash texts once read "Cooler than Spock!", but some time after the death of Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock in Star Trek: The Original Series, the text was changed to "Not as cool as Spock!".
  • Newbie Boom: In its alpha days, before becoming the household name it is today, the game experienced a huge boom when it was the focus of several Penny Arcade strips, a bit before the time the Nether was added. The influx of new people was enough to knock Mojang's web servers off their metaphorical feet, and for a while the Minecraft homepage was a blank white page with a few lines of text.
  • Official Fan-Submitted Content: During development of the 1.14 Village and Pillage Update, Mojang announced a contest held on Twitter where fans could submit pictures of their cats and vote to have one added into the game as a texture variant for the mob. The winner of the contest was Jellie, an American shorthair owned by the Hermitcraft member GoodTimesWithScar, and she was implemented as the ninth cat texture in Snapshot 18w50a.
  • One-Hit Wonder: Mojang has made a handful of video games, but none of them have come close to the monumental success of Minecraft.
  • Pet Fad Starter: A notable increase in people getting axolotls as pets in the 2020s was partly attributed to axolotls being added to Minecraft as aquatic mobs in 2021. They were especially popular with kids, who not only make up a significant portion of the Minecraft player base but are understandably drawn to axolotls for their cute and colourful appearances; some parents were persuaded to get their kids axolotls due to them being perceived as relatively easy and safe pets. Unfortunately, this fad also resulted in many axolotls ending up in animal shelters due to people not doing thorough research or underestimating the amount of care axolotls need; they have complex care requirements and require a lot of work to keep them healthy and happy (to the point they're not usually considered suitable pets for young kids).
  • Portmanteau Series Nickname: Minecraft → "MaiKura" (マイクラ). Alternatively, Minecraft → "MC"
  • Port Overdosed: Minecraft had been one of the most widely-ported video games, ranging from smartphones to video game consoles.
  • Referenced by...: Has its own page.
  • Saved from Development Hell:
    • Dinnerbone had stated he wanted to add pandas into Minecraft since 2012, but it took over six years for this to actually happen.
    • Living Piglins. They were first suggested by a player named Miclee as precursor to Villagers in 2010, still under the old name Pigmen. They actually added to the game in 2020, a full decade later.
    • The Warden featured in the Wild Update is based on an old concept for a mob for the Nether update. Namely, it would've been a blind Piglin that could only respond to sounds in a different biome from the rest of the area, much like the Warden itself does.
  • Schedule Slip: During its alpha and beta days, the game never had a release date posted for the final version until it came pretty close to being a full version, which was released on time. When Jeb took charge of the game, he gave fairly accurate release dates for each new version of Minecraft. Nevertheless, gaps began growing between version releases, from every few days (until Beta 1.1), to every month (until Beta 1.8), to every two to five months (starting with Beta 1.8), to 10 months (from 1.7 to 1.8), to 18 months (from 1.8 to 1.9). Since 1.9, the delay between versions has ranged from four months (from 1.9 to 1.10) to 11 months (from 1.12 to 1.13). This can be justified by how updates have added much more in each one. The gap between 1.7 and 1.8 has given time for the modding community to develop massive modpacks with the help of the new ID name system, whose extensive Forge use marked the end of block and item ID conflicts; when 1.8 came out, while Forge was quick to update, most mods ended up stagnating due to the rendering overhaul, and while modders have warmed up to the new versions, moreso considering that later versions weren't as drastic a coding change as 1.7 to 1.8, many mods have not been updated past 1.7.10 and have been replaced by Spiritual Successors (for example, DefenseTech takes over the role of the ICBM mod).
  • Screwed by the Lawyers:
    • C418's departure as the game's composer (as well as the lack of his music in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate) is heavily implied to be a result of his refusal to sign over the publishing rights to his music to Microsoft.
    • In July 2021, Minecraft ended up briefly age-restricted in South Korea due to updates in how one accesses the game conflicting with the infamous "Youth Protection Revision Act", which from as early as 2011 prohibited minors from playing video games between midnight to 6 AM. Previously, this was easily circumvented as the game could be accessed through a Mojang account that has no age verification requirement, but in the mass migration towards Xbox Live accounts (which do require users to be 19 and above) between 2020 to 2021, Minecraft was slapped with an 18+ rating. This ended up reigniting backlash towards the heavily-criticized "Cinderella law", and with the assistance of Microsoft and petitioners (one petition on the Korean government's official website accruing over 88 thousand signatures), the law was officially repealed in August.
  • Sleeper Hit: Minecraft, initially a one-man project, gained a ton of press by word-of-mouth alone, and is still receiving steady sales even past its beta release. The game slowly and slowly gained popularity with almost no advertising. It helped that it was available since the very early versions. The Xbox 360 edition ended up being one of the most popular games on the system to give you an idea.
  • Teasing Creator: Ever since Mojang found out about the Urban Legend of Zelda Herobrine, every single update changelog has included a line stating "Removed Herobrine". Word of God on the topic consists mostly of flat out stating that there's no Herobrine and that the entries were deliberately put there to toy with the community but also includes a good bit of Suspiciously Specific Denial, refusal to comment, and declaration that everything you've heard is true (depending on who at Mojang you ask, what day it is, the current status of the tide, and whether or not Herobrine is currently behind them).
  • Throw It In!:
    • The Far Lands, the severely distorted lands that would generate at the "edge" of the world due to a glitch in the map generator. While the bug could've been fixed, Notch liked the idea of a mysterious place so he kept it in. Unfortunately, the bug was accidentally fixed in Beta 1.8 (the "edge" now has an invisible barrier), but the Far Lands are still present in the Bedrock Edition.
    • Creepers are the result of a failed pig model. Oh how far he's come.
    • The "AMPLIFIED" world type is the result of Jeb messing with world generation.
  • Tie-In Cereal: Kelloggs released a Minecraft Creeper Crunch Breakfast Cereal, the box made to look like a Creeper holding a bowl of cereal.
  • Tribute to Fido:
    • The tuxedo cat is based off of Jeb's actual cat Newton, who passed away in 2014.
    • A special skin rabbits get when named Toast was implemented as a memorial for a missing rabbit of certain player's girlfriend. Unlike the other examples here, this one is specific to using a name tag on the animal, rather than a naturally-generating skin.
    • In MINECON Earth 2018, Jeb announced that the community could vote for a 9th cat skin to be added with the rest of the other 8 cat skins*. Ultimately, GoodTimesWithScar's cat Jellie won the contest and was added in the 1.14 "Village & Pillage" update.
  • Trolling Creator: Notch used to do this from time to time. One instance was his Suspiciously Specific Denial of Herobrine's existence (see the entry on this page) which not only indirectly suggested that rumors about him were true, it added even more on top of it. Also, he implemented Saddles for pigs when people asked to be able to ride them, they just forgot to mention also having a way to tell them where to go too.
  • Urban Legend of Zelda: The entity known as "HIM" or "Herobrine", the supposed dead brother of the game's creator, known for creating strange objects and being elusive, a white-eyed version of the default player skin who would stalk the player from a distance, a la Slender Man. Word of God has jossed the rumor, but the creators like to poke fun at it: almost every update has a line that says "removed Herobrine" or something similar. On top of this, in a multiplayer server, if a player is killed by an arrow shot from a dispenser, the message that displays the cause of death is said to be from Herobrine. Sometimes you may look into a mod of a game, or even a game itself, and will find the log referencing to a Herobrine of sorts.
    • Notch, creator of Minecraft, has now removed Herobrine from the game several times (or so the changelog says) but the rumor still will not die. Which makes one realize that no matter what the Dev Team does, Herobrine keeps coming back. Or is it Herobrine who refuses to stay gone?
    • Herobrine exists... as part of many of the over nine thousand mods made by the community.
    • Rendering spasms gives the impression that Herobrine's face appeared on the screen. It is awfully uncomfortable to witness that happen.
  • Vaporware: The game has been modded by the community basically since it launched, and the Mojang acknowledged this by committing to developing an official Application Programming Interface for the game. However, the project was shelved indefinitely due to unknown problems. The third-party Forge and Fabric loaders are unofficial but standard.
  • What Could Have Been:
  • Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things:
    • Surprisingly averted in one high profile case. After fans DDoSed the multiplayer servers (because they wanted Notch to release a Minecraft update, no less), they're pretty damn lucky Notch didn't just give them the middle finger and took them down permanently. He was also surprisingly okay with Beta 1.8 being leaked early, as it gave the fans a chance to find bugs so that they could be fixed before the official release. In fact, ever since that leak, Mojang themselves have been regularly releasing the updates early, specifically for bug-fixing purposes.
    • Zig-zagged with emerald ore. Endless complaining from the fandom with regards to its rarity eventually made Jeb remove it from the game. Then after that, endless complaints about its removal forced him to put it back in.
    • After dealing with abuse and complaining from the fandom, Notch slowly withdrew from Minecraft, eventually handing development over to others at Mojang while he himself worked on other projects. This eventually culminated in Notch selling the studio outright to Microsoft (after a heated response from the fanbase over minor EULA changes in August of 2014) which, in Notch's own words, was for the sake of his own sanity.
    • Also averted in that the dev team deals with flak and bile (and lately, with the combat overhauls planned for 1.9, death threats) from the fandom whenever any big change is announced, and yet still decide to put out snapshots instead of eliminating the snapshot system and sticking to full, non-experimental updates. This is justified in that they do care about fan feedback about the changes.
  • Word of Dante: Herobrine is a character from a creepypasta. Many people now think he's a real character, either Notch's dead brother or a dead miner. It eventually became Ascended Fanon by constantly appearing in official release notes as a Running Gag. Herobrine has now been "removed" several times from the gamenote , and another bugfix stated that "all ghost entities under the command of Lord Herobrine" had been removed.
  • Word of God:
    • The creepers are crunchy like dry leaves, and the Enderman is a shout-out to The Slender Man Mythos.
    • Notch once used both his Twitter and his Tumblr regularly to update his fans. He also often managed to cause massive web traffic on a scale worthy of Digg or xkcd when he tweeted about a site he liked. Said traffic often involved people taking over chat sessions or forums simply to ask Notch to do something in Minecraft. The ban hammer often followed.
    • Mojang has confirmed that the character Alex is a female, by constantly referring to her to with feminine pronouns. Steve has been confirmed to be a male by the context of the sentence, though that should have been obvious.
      "(...) But jolly old Steve doesn't really represent the diversity of our playerbase. For that reason, we're giving all players opportunity to play with an Alex skin instead. She brings thinner arms, redder hair, and a ponytail; she actually looks a bit like Jens from certain angles." — Owen Hill from Mojang
  • Working Title: The first four versions of the gamenote  used the placeholder title Cave Game. The next versionnote  changed it to Minecraft: Order of the Stone, before the version after that dropped the subtitle.

Miscellaneous trivia:

  • Contrary to what it appears only half of the name Minecraft is meaningful. Minecraft comes from mine and craft (obviously), but the craft portion is actually a Snowclone of Starcraft.
  • In May 2019 Minecraft reaches 176 million copies sold, being the best selling game of all time and beating Tetris. (This is doubly impressive if you remember Tetris was released in 1984, having a 25-year head start.) And that's all we'll say about sales, because that number is just going to continue increasing.
  • There's an achievement that requires about 329,700 kilograms of iron, a track that can accumulate at least 1km of distance, and a helluva lot of sticks.
  • The player is capable of holding 44,518,667 kilograms of material, assuming that they are wearing gold armor and every slot in the inventory is filled with gold blocks, as out of all the various materials in the game, gold is the densest — and thus heaviest — one in real life.
    • For those who are unfamiliar with metric or too lazy to do the conversions, this means that the player is capable of carrying just shy of 50,000 tons... all with no apparent strain or fatigue. Kinda make you wonder why he'd need tools at all, with that kinda strength...
    • Strangely, despite the player having immense strength, it's possible to fill his near-50,000-tonnes-capable inventory with 4.6kg...and he can't carry any more. This is done by filling the entire inventory with feathers, the lightest substance in the game at about 4g per. His Super-Strength appears to be Zig-Zagged.
    • He can also swim in water with said 50,000 tons of gold, even though a human that heavy would probably sink in rock.
    • And now, with Shulker Boxes, said maximum limit is now 27 times as large. Yikes.
  • Because of the endermen's height, the middle of their body is their crotch. The middle of the body is also the "sweet spot" for them to become aggressive. So either the endermen are either some bizarre form of The Vamp, they're compensating for "something" by stealing blocks from your world and are embarrassed by it, or they are just offended by you staring at their crotch.
  • The Ghast is voiced by C418's cat, who makes distinct and vaguely human-sounding noises if you disturb him while sleeping.
  • The Endermen neutral sounds were believed to be warped recordings of words like "here", "what's up", and "uh oh" played reversed, though the developers mentioned that it's just speculation.
  • According to the 2019 book Minecraft Game Design, the reason why Endermen move blocks around is because they are trying to bring about the collapse to all dimensions by displacing blocks that are key to the world's existence... which is also noted to be a hilariously slow process, though the book mentions that they have an eternity on their side.
  • Assuming the Name Tag article from the Minecraft website is reputable, the Ender Dragon cannot be name tagged due to already having a true name like the players... said name when uttered would completely obliterate the End, the Nether and the Overworld at the same time.
  • The poem that appears after defeating the Ender Dragon and exiting the End Portal was written by Irish Alternative Rock singer Julian Gough, who was invited to do so at Notch's request. Because Gough never formally signed a contract with Mojang or Microsoft, he retained copyright over the poem, eventually releasing it into the public domain in 2022.

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