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 Revert: Analyzing rd-161348 The version where Notch decided that yesterday’s experiment was wrong and today’s job was to undo it. One day after shipping the smallest Minecraft version to…
Porting rd-20090515 to Rust: The World Gets Interesting In which we discover that Java’s tile inheritance hierarchy maps to Rust match arms, that Perlin noise is neither Perlin nor noise,…
The Art of Subtraction: Analyzing rd-160052 The version where Notch learned that removing features is a feature. One day after building the largest single-version expansion in Minecraft’s early history —…
Porting rd-132211 to Rust: First Blood In which we translate 1,562 lines of 2009-era Java into modern Rust with a GPU rendering stack, learn that “up” is a matter of…
The First Mob: Analyzing Minecraft rd-132328 Six hours after inventing the voxel world, Notch populated it. On May 13, 2009, Markus “Notch” Persson released rd-132211 — the earliest known build…
Porting rd-132328 to Rust: The Entity Extraction In which we discover that translating Java inheritance to Rust composition is less about fighting the borrow checker and more about deciding how…
It’s Minecraft Now: Analyzing rd-20090515 The biggest single-version delta in Minecraft’s early history, and the one where it gets its name. One day after the first zombie stumbled across a…
Archaeology of a Phenomenon: Analyzing Minecraft rd-132211 The best-selling video game of all time started as 1,562 lines of Java in a 26KB JAR file. On May 13, 2009, Markus…
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