Reverse engineering history, one version at a time. Technical deep-dives into early Minecraft's source code and the process of porting it to Rust — 878 versions from prototype to release.
The Classic Arrives: Analyzing Minecraft c0.30_01c Seven months of silence. 181 files. The browser game the world remembers. On December 21, 2009, Notch released Minecraft Classic c0.30_01c. The last version…
Porting c0.30_01c to Rust: Selective Fidelity at Scale In which the codebase triples, nine blocks are added, and almost everything else is deferred. This is the largest version jump so…
The Deobfuscation: Analyzing Minecraft c0.0.13a The version where Notch gave the names back, and we learned something about build pipelines. On May 30, 2009 — nine days after c0.0.13a_03 introduced…
Porting c0.0.13a to Rust: The Trivial Update In which the names come back, nothing changes, and we learn what “same game, different JAR” means for a porting project. This is…
Porting c0.0.13a_03 to Rust: Through the Obfuscation Wall In which the class names disappear, water fills the valleys, and bedrock seals the floor. This is version 7 of 878. The…
The Obfuscation Wall: Analyzing Minecraft c0.0.13a_03 The version where the source code stopped being readable, and the world gained water. On May 21, 2009 — five days after Minecraft got…
Porting c0.0.11a to Rust: The Birth of Minecraft In which RubyDung gets a name, text appears on the screen, and the player learns to build. This is version 6 of…
The Naming: Analyzing Minecraft c0.0.11a The version where RubyDung died and Minecraft was born. On May 16, 2009 — the same day rd-161348 shipped — Notch released another version. This…
Porting rd-161348 to Rust: The Revert In which Notch undoes yesterday’s experiment, the bushes come back, the particles slow down, and our modular tile system proves it was worth the…
Porting rd-160052 to Rust: Learning to Delete In which we remove a tile type that was only one version old, discover that subtracting code requires as much care as adding…
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