Minecraft Beta's Last Unsolved Mystery

This is an obscure Minecraft mystery that has been simmering for nearly a decade...let's take a look at it.

NOTE: download at your own risk. File contains extremely NSFW language.

Music by RetroGamingNow

[ElsuperGTA]

I love how you make everything spooky just to suddenly drop “the cows are everywhere”

[AndrewIdot]

4000 creepers managing to crash an entire server and make it a sort of mystery is the funniest thing I've ever seen honestly

[CosmicTailz]

9:29 the long pause followed by "The cows are everywhere" had me in tears

[horos]

it's a bug that was also covered in one of bugmancx videos in the "minecraft the journey" series.
In some versions mob spawnpoints are bugged and makes them spawn thousands of mobs on one single block.

Edit: it's Ep 114

[Cri_Jackal]

Creepers spawn in overloaded masses due to a known glitch

Get replaced with cows due to a different bug

Then get converted into a horde of zombies, which then die, leaving behind feathers as that was their item drop prior to rotten flesh being added


Old Minecraft truly is an elder horror beyond comprehension

[MVER]

I actually believe their PC could of blue-screened, probably ran out of memory trying to load immense amounts of mobs simultaneously. Having between 2-4Gb of RAM on avg I can totally see that being a plausible issue.

[funkypengu]

The random feathers around the place would fit with the "zombie apocalypse" comment as the corruption replaced the cows into zombies, died by the day and dropped feathers around that version before the world was saved

[Boanine]

My friend: naw bro, I made this farm without cheats!
The farm:
9:38

[Mateo-ziub]

As you were mentioning all the files and the server log I was thinking: "Wow, this is a really well made ARG".
But is not.

The most plausible reason: it corrupted while downgrading.

[complex_city]

"a bovine tsunami"
not the words i was expecting to hear today but im definitely not upset

[Halfendymion]

"This is it; the freezing occurs when these cow pockets are within simulation distance."

[HungerGamesFan]

"we find something very different indeed" and then t h o u s a n d s of cows are staring you down

[kamilqwil]

Bro, how do you keep finding all this obscure stuff no one ever heard of? Keep going cause it's really great!

[redline]

Imagine having your entire world get cursed by a bug where cows spawn in the thousands and take over like a whole army

[misspotato]

The number E represents entity counts, the first number is the number being rendered at once, and the second number is the total the *client* is aware of. At 9:55 that is 22 thousand cows. As others have stated, there used to be a bug where entities spawned under certain conditions did not count towards the mob count. Minecraft always tries to aggressively maintain around 70 hostile mobs (probably different in older versions.) So it would spawn a batch of creepers, the hostile mob count wouldn't increase, so it would spawn more later.

At some point either through save corruption or update corruption the entity ID for these creepers got set to cows. I assume cows is probably the fail-safe ID for conversion of entities. The intense lag you feel is minecraft trying to calculate very very long ticks, trying to process entity collusion. This is why watchdog was later implemented forcing ticks to be limited to a maximum length of ticks.

Funny enough, MCEdit would easily fix this, as it has the ability to delete entities in mass. I experienced a similar issue on one of the first servers I hosted. instead of creepers it was squids. A single chunk was multiple megabytes of squid.

Entities used to also be saved at whole number positions which would often cause them to clip into fences and thus be able to break out of pens. This bug took many many tries to fix, and is probably still not fully fixed to this day.

[Conqueringrule]

I thought this was going to be some generic ARG, but that was actually really interesting. You definitely missed some huge aspects of it though. One of the biggest glitches that happened here was the strange "mob conversion", for lack of a better term.
We see this in the written story (creepers turning to cows), but without the later evidence that just seems like a lie like the quartz structure. However, in save D there were feathers at all the locations of the cows, and at that point in time there were chat logs about a "zombie apocalypse" and zombies everywhere. Here's the kicker; in Beta 1.3 zombies dropped feathers. Given this, what happened now makes a little more sense:

The corrupted world generated a massive amount of creepers, which then either converted to cows or despawned (since the cows were all stacked together at first, I believe the cows spawned separately after the creepers). The cows then lagged out the server quite a bit, and eventually unpacked. Then the final glitch happened; the cows converted to zombies (what was mentioned in the chat logs), and the zombies all burned in the sun and dropped feathers, shortly before Save D occurred.

And the last thing; given this was some kid in 2011, the PC used at the time was probably horrible even by their standards. I find it hard to believe the PC wouldn't bluescreen near all those cows.

[Protofall]

You briefly showed the Igloo. I find it fascinating how similar it looks to the actual igloos later added to Minecraft itself. The one in this beta savefile features a crafting table, furnace, bed (+ an extra one), ice as well as a ladder going down stairs. The layout is different, but that's a lot of similarities to the actual igloos we got.

[עדןמזור]

This is incredible. I've actually known about this map for 9 years, because I've used to watch SpicyCrap666 as a child. To this day, I still joke about Brabantia with my friends and talk about it from time to time (the day the archive was made was a great day for us). Seeing this video, and all the memories from Spicy and Brabantia, especially from a YouTuber I really enjoy watching, was an amazing experience.

[itailevin]

I actually remember this map from back in the day.
I was scared as fuck playing this map although nothing was there, except edgy signs.

Also there was an update video but I don't remember what spicycrap said (it was 10 years ago)

[Wunba]

Wow amazing video and efforts to research everything! One question though, how come you aren't a detective, seriously!?