After a week of trying everything, I opened a Bedrock world and the cave was there…
Before anything else, thanks to the Minecraft@Home community, who had been on this panorama for days. I cracked the seed, but the camera everyone worked out together and some ideas saved me a lot of time and work. What each person did comes up along the post and I go into detail in the thanks.
Done, I have the seed of the Minecraft 26.4 panorama, the ice cave behind the main menu, and I got it on November 11th, eight days after the Java one came out and one day after the Bedrock one, which is the one I used. I announced it the same day.
It works the same on Java and Bedrock and if you want to stand where the camera is, use this:
| Java | /tp @s -175049.5 110 -269602.5 -135 0 |
| Bedrock | /tp -175048.5 110 -269602.5 -135 0 (one block further in x) |
| Java sunrise | /time set 23530 (approximately) |
Its 32 bit2^32 = 4,294,967,296 possible seeds, exactly what I said it wasnt. On November 8th I published a post saying it wasnt 32 or 48 bit and that it was probably 64. This post follows that one, so I take for granted some things I already explained there, like how the camera was found or the filters I used on Java.
The menu
With the seed
The panorama came out with snapshot 7Java test versions, one comes out every week. That same night I searched every 32 bit seed by biomes and the right one was already in the list, but it failed the ice crystal filter. Then I went through the 2^48 seeds281,474,976,710,656 seeds, the ones Create World gives if you dont type one on 4 rented GPUs and got nothing. A week later the Bedrock panorama came out and the day after that I had the seed.
Laggy (i_am_sheep) found the camera of the Java one from the rotation of the stone textures, using CoordsFinder. He also got the /tp, which landed right in the center of a block. Bachale rounded it and checked it. I also checked it with my tool. The texture rotation of the 95 stone blocks I looked at matches on all 95, and moving the camera one block on any axis drops it to about 40% (which is what you get by chance). Without those coordinates you cant search anything by decorationWhat the game places after the terrain, like ores, crystals, gravel or icebergs. How they got it is in the previous post.
The Bedrock panorama
A week after the Java one, the Bedrock PreviewLike snapshots, but for Bedrock (26.70.24) added the new panorama. Its the same spot as the Java one, with the camera one block further east.
At first I used the Java camera for Bedrock too and nothing came out. Bachale shared the Bedrock /tp and then I checked it by matching 434 terrain points between the two panoramas. With the camera one block further in x the median error is 0.21 pixels, and with the Java one its 37.
Why Bedrock
On Java the decoration uses all 64 bits of the seed but on Bedrock it doesnt. Bedrock decoration only uses the low 32 bitsThe seed has 64 bits. The low 32 are a number from 0 to 4,294,967,295. Every rule (ores, gravel, icebergs) gets its random generator from the chunkA 16x16 block piece of the world seed, which comes from those 32 bits, mixed with a hash of the rule name. So you can go through all of 2^324,294,967,296 options pretty fast.
This is the usual way for the latest panoramas. For example, its how Laggy cracked the 26.2 one (Chaos Cubed) in October. He got the low 32 bits from the ores and glow lichen in the Bedrock panorama and the high ones from where deepslate turns into stone.
My plan was to get the low 32 bits from the Bedrock ores and the high ones from the Java crystals.
A whole day where nothing fits
I marked block by block everything you can see near the camera, which was nine iron veins, a huge gravel patch on the floor, another one on the ceiling, coal and crystals. I checked every block against the real game texture.
I ran around 25 searches over the 2^32 low halves, with different mixes of clues. No seed ever scored better than a random one. The best one explained 7 of 9 iron veins, but out of 4.29 billion seeds you get that by chance.
First I tested my searcher on worlds I made myself with the official Bedrock server, using seeds I already knew, at the same coordinates as the panorama. With the right seed it got every vein and every gravel patch, and with a random one, none.
I also checked whether the client generates differently from the server and whether the image was mirrored, and went through the rules of every public preview since 26.60.29. Everything was fine and it still wasnt coming out, I was getting really frustrated :(
The icebergs
In the last post I put the icebergs under “stuff that didnt help” because they were too far away. On the Bedrock one, with HDRAn image with a lot more light range than a normal one, you can see them a lot better. Also, on Java they depend on all 64 bits of the seed and on Bedrock only on the low 32, so on Bedrock you can search with them. They had already come up in the channel for Java. fanda857 asked early on if they could work as a filter, elenaran looked at how the game generates them, and HARYA and Bachale were rebuilding them.
They also dont depend on the cave, so if it had something weird the icebergs didnt care.
On Bedrock every frozen ocean chunk has a 1 in 8 chance of having an iceberg, and its center comes from the low 32 bits of the seed again. I measured where the three clearest ones were, within a couple of blocks. The rule is this.
if rng.next_int(8) == 0:
x = cx * 16 + 12 + rng.next_int(8)
z = cz * 16 + 12 + rng.next_int(8)I tested it first on a server world I made with a seed I already knew, and the icebergs were centered where it said.
That leaves 357,764 seeds out of 4.29 billion. Still a lot, but none of them depend on the cave.
The emerald
On the third face of the panorama, the one looking into the cave, I spotted a hidden emerald ore, on the floor blocks going up.
Emeralds only generate in mountain biomes. And that part of the cave already counts as one.
About 1 seed in 180 (0.55%) puts an emerald ore in that exact spot. So with the icebergs and the emerald there were 2,115 left.
The camera is at Y 110 and at that height iron comes from a separate rule, the upper iron one, which only places veins from Y 80 up. Then I checked how many iron veins each of those 2,115 put in the right place. Almost all got very few and only one got to 6 of 9. That one had to be the low half of the seed…
Out of 2,115 seeds, one getting 6 of 9 by luck happens less than once in a thousand. The 7 of 9 from before meant nothing because it came out of 4.29 billion. On top of that, this seed also got the ceiling gravel right.
So what was off
The 3 iron veins that seed doesnt explain and the gravel patch on the floor. They are all in the same place, right in front of the camera.
I think the foreground was edited by hand so it would look nicer. Its not new either. The 1.17 panorama seed took 6 years to find because Mojang made the cave almost entirely by hand, with the lava, the water and the ores placed by them. shawn_xu found it in October with help from the Minecraft@Home community (his post).
The 1.17 panorama and its seed
The seed is -5535916609452687941. The geode is in the world, but the lava, the water and almost all the ores were placed by hand by Mojang. Cracking it took community rebuilds, finding the coordinates and even the Education Edition panoramas.
It was the most visible stuff and I was requiring it in almost every search, so nothing ever fit. Everything on the ceiling and far away is normal generation and comes out perfect.
The high 32 bits
With the low half fixed there are another 2^32 options for the high one. The Java crystals had already failed me and I explain why further down, so I used the only things that depend on the whole seed, which are biomes and terrain.
First I searched by biomes, with frozen ocean where the icebergs are and the ice caves biome at the cave. 1,828 candidates came out. Then I generated the terrain of each one with an exact Bedrock generator and looked at 20 blocks, 10 around the camera that have to be air and 10 on the ceiling veins that have to be rock. A random seed gets about 10 of 20.
Every wrong one stayed at 15 of 20 or less. One got 19 of 20 and its high half was all ones.
Thats what a negative 32 bit seed looks like in 64 bits, the sign bit gets copied into the whole high half. A positive one would be all zeros. Out of 1,828 candidates, the chance that the right one has an all ones or all zeros high half by luck is about 1 in a million. Putting the two halves together gives the whole seed.
And when I opened the world… the cave was there! The terrain matches on 816 of 828 blocks and the number comes from a text in the game itself. Its 100% this world, even if not everything in the panorama comes out the same.
The seed text
A 32 bit seed comes from a short number typed by hand or from a text. The game turns the text into a number with the Java hashCodeWhat Java uses to turn a text into a number and Bedrock does the same. I tried hundreds of millions of phrases and none that made sense gave that number. They were single words, block and biome names, the yellow splash texts and combinations of two and three words. I didnt try the texts from the create world screen itself.
A few hours after I posted the seed, the Minecraft@Home community started trying to turn the number into text and Andrew typed this.
Its the gray text in the seed box when its empty. It gives -692520701. Someone at Mojang probably typed that gray hint text into the box instead of leaving it empty.
The funny part is that it was right in front of us the whole time and it was even a known seed already. In 2014, in a Minecraft Forum thread, someone was asking for a good ice biome and BigAlanM replied that the seed for “Leave blank for a random seed” is -692520701 and that you spawn in a cold taiga next to ice plains (the thread).
What matches and what doesnt
I generated the world with the official Bedrock server 26.70.24 and compared it block by block with what I had read from the panorama.
All the checks
| Clue | Result |
|---|---|
| Iron up high and far away (6 veins) | 15 of 15 blocks |
| Emerald | in place |
| Ceiling gravel | 13 of 13 and 20 of 20 |
| Coal | 4 of 4 |
| Terrain shape (stone) | 816 of 828 |
| Icebergs | in place, and none where the sea is empty |
| Floor gravel | 0 of 29 |
| Iron in front of the camera | 0 of 4 |
| Bedrock crystals | 5 of 10 |
| Java crystals | 18 of 33 |
| Packed ice | around 190 of 658 come out as stone |
| Calcite | 82 of 178 come out as stone |
| A wrong seed, as a control | stone at 72%, almost no calcite or gravel in place |
What doesnt fit is almost all ice or calcite that comes out as stone in the world. I tried previews 26.70.20, .21, .22, .23 and .24 and they all give the same, with .20 having a bit less ice. None of them place the ice like in the image.
From the camera, with the seed on Bedrock, it looks like this.
PanoramaWith the seed
PanoramaWith the seedThe world has a whole ice pillar in front of the camera that blocks almost all the view. Its not in the panorama and you can see the sea, so they most likely removed it.
And on Java…
The terrain is the same. In a Java world (snapshot 8) with the seed, the 204 ceiling stone blocks I checked are where they should be. This is the real Java panorama next to a screenshot of mine at the same spot, with the same framing.
PanoramaWith the seed
PanoramaWith the seedThe pillars, the steps and the stone bands are the same. Of the 20 crystals the world has near the camera, 17 show up in the panorama.
Why it didnt show up on Java
The night the panorama came out I searched every 32 bit seed by biomes. I got exactly 13,851 candidates. To pick between them I used the ice crystals from the Java panorama. None of them matched so I gave up on 32 bit seeds. The right one was in that list, on line 13,798…
I read 33 crystals in the Java panorama. In a Java world with the right seed 18 are in place. The other 15 arent there. My filter allowed a few misread crystals, but it couldnt take almost half of them missing.
Then I did the same with the 2^48 nextLongWhat Java uses to give you a random seed seeds, on the 4 rented GPUs and the same filter. There I also required the andesite patch next to the camera. Every seed had to pass the andesite filter first and then the crystal one, so of course the result was zero.
That search was never going to find it anyway. -692520701 isnt one of the seeds nextLong can give, I checked every possible case.
The searches and the model were fine. I tested them on a ton of worlds I made myself with seeds I already knew.
What I think
This is the world, but the menu image doesnt come out the same in any version I tried. They could have made it on an internal version instead of a snapshot, but there isnt a single known panorama where they did that. Its much more likely they edited it by hand so it would look nice, mostly in front of the camera and inside the cave.
Update
November 12th. The seed is already on the Minecraft Wiki, on the panoramas page. Trailertooz (cactooz) is working on the Minecraft@Home video about how it was found.
Tools and thanks
I cracked the seed with my own project, the same one from the last post, which reads the blocks from the images, searches seeds and checks them against real worlds. On Java I did the filters, the 32 and 48 bit searches and all the checks, and I documented everything from the start, even before I was in the Minecraft@Home panorama channel. On Bedrock I got the low half from the icebergs and the emerald and then the high half from biomes and terrain. The camera from Laggy and Bachale saved me from having to find it myself and adapt my tools for it.
My project is private, Ive been on it for years and its still a work in progress, so I dont name every tool I used. Almost everything was already built, so I went fast. I only had to change some values and check it. Some didnt help, because they didnt fully work yet or because Mojang had changed blocks in the scene. A lot of things I had to do by hand and I spent days nonstop on it. It was really frustrating, because with my own test worlds and screenshots everything worked. But in the end came the excitement and the joy of cracking it :>
Outside my project I used these tools. Some of them only as a second check on what mine was already giving me.
- The official Bedrock server (Bedrock Dedicated Server) from several previews, to get the generation rules and to make test worlds.
- worldgen by Helix, an open source Bedrock terrain generator in Go, to check the terrain of each candidate.
- WebCoordsFinder by Laggy, where I marked the blocks (including the emerald).
- The Minecraft Wiki, for the panorama history.
- Everything from the last post.
Thanks to the Minecraft@Home community. Laggy (i_am_sheep) found the camera and the /tp. Bachale rounded it, shared the Bedrock /tp and started rebuilding the cave from day one. Andrew, who had already cracked several panoramas before, noticed it was “Leave blank for a random seed” and linked the 2014 thread, where BigAlanM had already written it.
More people helped in the channel. fanda857 gave a clue for the Z coordinate from the clouds and the cloudfinder by humhue, based on the one by polymetric, asked early on if the icebergs could work as a filter on Java and asked that I be given access to the channel after seeing I was helping from other channels. elenaran looked at how the game generates icebergs. ui (xnuuizh) helped find the camera by suggesting we search further out. xpple also gave clues for the camera from the start. sage uploaded the six panorama faces on day one and worked on the coordinates. M33_Galaxy ran another text seed search by biomes. Trailertooz (cactooz) and Philipp_DE set up the recreation server, where Bachale, HARYA and ui (xnuuizh) rebuilt the cave and the ocean by hand.
Right now Im finishing a game jam with my friends at WhiteRoot Studio, my indie group. After that Ill keep helping people find their lost worlds, cracking seeds of cool stuff and working on my project, more motivated than ever after this.
If you liked it, follow me on X (Twitter) so you dont miss the next one. And follow Minecraft@Home too and join their Discord. Thats where things like these panoramas get cracked, people get help finding lost worlds and there are a lot more projects.
I save the site and the posts on the Wayback Machine so the content is still there even if my site goes down or something changes in the future.
Thanks for reading :D