Minecraft – abandoned signs…

5-Jan-2023

It is safe to say that Minecraft has been extensively mined. The dot-matrix sandbox juggernaut, which has been around since 2009, has saturated YouTube with instructional videos and our lounge rooms with our children. Each virtual world covers a four-billion square kilometres. What we have left is millions of communities with stories and moments that aren't shared, and users who are forgotten beyond the scope of those who were there.

One Reddit user, known as “Worldseed”, has attempted to uncover these unheard stories, data-mining old internet servers in search for messages. Players can write whatever they want in the game's books, signs, etc. These volumes contain love letters, diary entries, and other morsels of emotion as well as information about times and people who have passed.

Worldseed stated to Motherboard that a lot of the material was “cute little slices of life” in 2018. It can also be depressing.

The data contains a wide range of creativity, including in-game instructions to a diary written from the perspective of a chicken and far darker messages. Worldseed outlined the message he discovered in a cave. It was closed for five years. An unknown writer wrote: “If my heart breaks tonight: The stars will still disappear…the sun would still rise, the Earth would still revolve, and the seasons would change …”.”

Another sign is the cleaving or severing of a game session that was left unfinished, which will forever be kept in stasis. This is similar to the daily actions immortalised by ash of Vesuvius.

The sign said, “I don't believe you guys will ever come back… kat11/10/15.”