The Minecraft title screen.

For seven years, this was the panorama image that appeared.

This was later changed in newer versions of the game, but for most of Minecraft's lifespan, this was the image you would see every time you'd play Minecraft.

But have you ever wondered what that image really is?

Is it a real Minecraft world that you can generate?

Well, let's not get too ahead of ourselves; today we have a lot to cover

CC by PyroBlank

Let's start with the history of the Minecraft title screen.

In the early days, it wasn't anything too special.

The background was just plain ol' dirt, but when Minecraft beta 1.8 was released,

The title screen was completely overhauled with a brand new moving panorama background,

AND it stuck.

In fact I'd say it stuck around for so long that almost every seasoned Minecraft player is certainly familiar with this particular title screen.

And that's when a programmer by the name of Tomlacko go the idea

After watching my video about the pack.png project, he got inspired to find the actual seed of the title screen image.

At first glance, it almost seemed impossible! This image is so blurry that there couldn't be any way to get any useful information out of it.

However, by looking into the game's files, you'll find this: 6 images that make up the title screen panorama.

Here we can see a lot more detail, as the game itself creates a blur overlay when shown on the title screen.

With those image files, Tom started to do some research to see if the idea was viable.

Now at first glance at the images, the terrain doesn't look like what you'd see in modern versions of Minecraft.

If the seed was to be reverse engineered, it's crucial that it's known exactly which version of the game this image was taken in.

At first, this was a bit worrying, because between versions beta 1.7 and beta 1.8, Notch was working on massive changes to the world generation system.

If this picture was taken some time in between those versions, the chances of finding this image would be next to impossible,

as the development versions of this world generator are pretty much non-existent.

But luckily, this wasn't the case at all.

It was as simple as taking a look at the image's meta-data,which showed exactly when the image was saved;

June 27th, 2011.

Now this date is really important to know as this is months before the 1.8 pre-release was distributed, and beta 1.7 was even released.

This pretty much confirms that the world generation system either had to be beta 1.6 or beta 1.7,

as it was pretty much identical in both versions.

Now that Tom knew that the project was viable, it was time to recruit the others and to start looking for clues.

A recreation of the image was also started to be constructed.

One technique that was used to confirm block placements was a simple program that overlayed the recreation with the original image.

This was extremely helpful with the process of brute forcing terrain near the end of the project.

as that was taking place, a big push was starting to be made to try to find the exact coordinates of where the image was taken.

Two things were used.

First, similarly to the pack.png project, the clouds were used to find the z- direction,

but what separates this the most from the pack.png project is the fact that the image contains tall grass.

That's right, the tall grass in this image was crucial for findng the exact coordinates to where this image was taken.

Lemme show you why.