SalC1
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2020–2024
8:24 · 11M views · Jul 21, 2020
SalC1 explains how the seed behind the Minecraft title screen panorama was found, using community effort and the Minecraft@Home project. It covers the search through Beta 1.7.3 world seeds.
HN points to it as a mind-blowing seed-cracking story related to other Minecraft RNG reversal work.
3 comments from Hacker News
Yeah the Minecraft and MC anarchy community is insane. If you found this amazing, take a look at this, it'll blow your mind. [LINK] and this video
I mean, if you can acquire or otherwise reverse-engineer[0] the game seed, you can also just find resources by loading a local copy and noting the coordinates of ore. For major servers, anti-xray plugins will be installed as due diligence, but most of the anti-cheat efforts are focused on detection, reverting, and banning. Ultimately, if you have a big enough server to attract serious cheaters, you will (or at least should ) have tools that can also detect suspicious behavior based on heuristics (i.e. see if a player mined straight to an ore block). Tools like CoreProtect[1] can help detect and revert this. Ore obfuscation still works very well, however, for the majority of causal cheaters that just googled "hacked minecraft client" and installed the first result. One ore obfuscation technique used in PaperMC actually sends intentionally fake data to the user to "muddy the waters"[2]. (I know a lot of this because I help develop a Minecraft server management tool) [0]: this video [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK]
For context: [LINK] if you prefer reading instead of watching a video [LINK] Related but different discovery: how the title screen was found this video