News archive

All GPU & CPU (Onechunk SSG + TrailerCrack) tasks completed + current research projects & future of MC@Home
Hello all BOINCers and Minecraft@Home fans,

As a preface, would like to subtitle this post the 'Beginning of the End (...of the Year)' update. You'll see why soon. This is a long post, and I hope all those BOINCing with us at Minecraft@Home will read and see this.

First, I shall give everyone an update on the events of the past two months since the launch of Trailercrack and the OneChunk Speedrun seed-finding project. All tasks have been completed as of Mid-November 2021, and all results have been collected as of December 2021! We still must go over the final results, or any missed results for both projects, but safe to say all your efforts and data are now collected on our servers, and all BOINC computing is on 'break' for the month of December, and possibly into mid-January.

Now, we have tried to stay to our promises of a 'Minecraft Trailer' 10th anniversary recreation video, which you can view our announcement of below. As said by Tomlacko, one of our major Discord administrators and contributors today, "The full remake, including the reveal of all seeds, will come out later when we're finished! (This might still take us a month or so, we'll see)".

Trailer Remake Preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kox1ZR8xJ5E

Additionally, we have an announcement regarding the results of the SSG Project (OneChunk). For a limited time, Minecraft@Home held the Enter-End World World Record of 17.5 seconds! All thanks to your computing power allowing us to find an insanely rare, easy to access End Portal seed. After loading the fresh seed, we literally were able to dig down and jump into the End Portal (one of the biggest challenges of Minecraft speedrunning). I would would call that a major time save and success. You can view this Speedy Steve in these videos:

Official Speedrun announcement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtPZIHqGYXo
Speedrun detailed by 'TheMisterEpic': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gvgf5cAAGY

Or, retrace our steps in the seed: -5362871956303579298 with Minecraft Java, Version 1.12!

I hope you all understand that there shall be some downtime while our team investigates the major changes within the Minecraft 1.18 'Caves and Cliffs Part 2' update. Some of which are critical to the now more difficult future of Minecraft seedfinding, but also brings us some hopes of wonderful new worlds with the drastically different and expanded world generation that it brings. These changes were revealed to us with the expansion of the seed-space (how many unique seeds that exist) from 44 bits (48-4 bits) to 60 (64 full bits, minus 4 again). In simple terms, this means we now have 65,536 times more work to do to find a single 'lost' seed. That's many thousands of times more possibilities than before.

Those familiar with our previous BOINC projects, or current ones may know the complex relationship between computational time, computational workload, possible acceleration of work and the seedspaces we must work with, or constrain for to complete our projects. The Minecraft 1.18+ RNG (Random Number Generator) algorithm itself has changed to one called 'Xorshiro' from my quick review of the latest discussion chats, and a method to 'skip' over full-RNG computation for our future projects has already been theorized and possibly in development.

It also appears that this new RNG is fairly easy to calculate beforehand, with results small enough that it is possible to create into a few-kilobyte sized lookup table that our computing devices can quickly compare the input and output results from. One may scheme that with newer, larger GPU or CPU caches and cores (See, RTX 4000/AMD RX 7000), these LUTs can be further massively distributed across the device to help provide some of the speedups we shall need to reasonably compute more results within this 60-bit seedspace. Our projects often find, or have weird, super fast optimizations that can turn multi-GPU projects into more solo, or CPU based tasks depending on the dedication, time and luck our MC@Home geniuses have during our projects' lifecycles.

This leaves us to the remaining tasks on hand for us to work on over the next month or two, which are:
1. Post new SSG results (One new possible candidate from Mid-November 2021 found)
2. Trailercrack trailer results (for the video thumbnail) final seed-collection from your BOINC results
3. Minecraft 1.18 SSG (ie, OneChunk2 & 12-eye portals) project creation and coding, for our next Long-Term BOINC tasks
4. Celebrate the New Year, and to 1.5 Years of Minecraft@Home!
5. Give all participants in the last two major projects badges

In 'Super Short': Minecraft Seedfinding will become potentially a lot slower as of 1.18, require more computers, time and coding until new tricks are found. We may have more CUDA and OpenCL (long-term) projects as well along the way. Thank you to everyone who has been with us, whether from the beginning, or the past few months to dedicate your resources to finding lost, new, or the impossible Minecraft seeds.

Now, for 'The End':
If you know anyone who may have some free time, and are good Java/C/C++ coders and/or interested in Minecraft, please let us know, or join us on the Discord at: [url] https://discord.gg/FVM4SPp [/url].

Many of us have spend hundreds or thousands of hours (and dollars) into this passion project of ours since June 2020, with occasional external assistance from both content creators, and even from Minecraft/Microsoft themselves. As we continue into the New Year, I'd like for you to keep in mind that some of us may not be able to dedicate as much time as we have over the first, or any at all. That includes myself, as one of the original MC@Home members and contributors. My own professional career has kicked off over the past few months and life has changed quite a bit, meaning I have not been as attentive and able to assist as I have before. I feel and read that the same is certainly been true with other members' lives, whether it due to changes in their own jobs, family, other hobbies or ongoing educational aspirations. As Minecraft@Home grew, so did we.

You may already know we are quite different than other BOINC projects, as we're almost fully open-source on Github, and both self or community funded by a bunch of mostly anonymous, worldwide and passionate Minecraft fans. A handful of our notable and contributing members are experienced professionals, but many of us (including myself) are much younger compared to other BOINC project teams and not affiliated with major academic or research institution. Especially as some of us do not have extensive educational and work experience outside a Bachelors degree (yet), if any degree at all! It's amazing what we've been able to accomplish over the past 18 months, especially the scale of our computing infrastructure and the increases of non-developing but active members of our Discord server, who all share the same passion and excitement for the interesting worlds of Minecraft, regardless of if they are lost or (re)found. Occasionally we have trouble with distributing our findings and announcements, but Youtuber experts and a few historical Minecraft figures have pitched in over the past year and a half to help us solve these problems- and to our relief.

With almost all of the historical seeds of interest found, and all/many of the recent Panorama (menu) seeds discovered by our Discord members' own quick computational projects, some questions may arise to what can we find going forwards? This situation, along with the reduced ability to dedicate our free-time to projects from external and internal factors means that we might have a slower period of announcements and minimal administration of projects in the New Year, until or unless new blood can be found or major, exciting discoveries are presented. There are so many techniques, tasks and knowledge one must keep in their minds when working on and with Minecraft@Home, making it difficult for some of us to both train and retain possible new members of our development, testing and project teams. Many are too inexperienced, young or busy to become accustomed to our project's (chaotic at times) development processes and cycles, and so it leads me to wonder personally what we can do to improve this, or how long we can continue running the projects. We're not having a computational resource problem, but a human (and hyena!) resource related one. Not enough meat in some places, we got the bones still in these big seedfinding steaks, but they're not as juicy or fresh as they once were.

Regardless, I feel I can say that we're not going away yet, or within the next half year. You and I may need to keep our expectations smaller and more realistic, and there may be chances that a lot of work done on an unknown, future project is for 'nothing'... aside from knowing that either some code is wrong, or that quite literally, something is truly impossible due to time, resources or lack of possibility of occurring.

Goodbye for now BOINCers, and enjoy your December 2021, whether freezing, festive or boiling hot-
Hyenadae/Hy & MC@Home team
7 Dec 2021, 4:39:05 UTC · Discuss

Trailer Thumbnail 2 Crack (CUDA/Nvidia GPU) Released!
A new boinc project called trailertcrack has been deployed, it aims at cracking the seed for the Thumbnail 2 of the Trailer video of Minecraft (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmB9b5njVbA), this is currently the last one missing so we can fully reproduce the original trailer within Minecraft in higher quality right in time for the 10th anniversary of this iconic piece of Minecraft history. (we do already have most of the seeds and this is an active project).

This app is GPU only and will be rewarded 3333 credits We currently only support Windows and Linux 64 bits for NVIDIA GPUs (we use cuda).

Happy crunching !
Cheers, Neil
30 Sep 2021, 20:04:32 UTC · Discuss

Badges
Hello crunchers !

We are happy to announce that we rewarded 4551 of you with a brand new badge for your participation in the cactus projects, we are truly grateful of your participation and we though that having such badge would be a good way to show it.

We couldn't have done it without you !

On a side note, we are open to suggestion if you feel like we should do that more often/make more badge goals.

Cheers,

Neil

(high quality: https://minecraftathome.com/download/badges/cactus_badge_hi.png)
25 Aug 2021, 2:34:52 UTC · Discuss

OneChunk launch and onwards
Hello everyone,

We didn't announce the launch of OneChunk SSG here even though we teased it already so this post is announcing it officially. This is our first CPU project and 2500 credits will be awarded by tasks since all have been designed to last approximately the same time. The calculation for the reward is based on the current runtime of a task, power draw of a CPU and our past GPU credits attribution.

This is a long-awaited project which is meant to find all seeds with 11 eyes stronghold for Minecraft 1.7/1.8.

Context :

To put it in context in Minecraft, you have a portal that allows you to go to the end dimension to beat the final boss called the ender dragon. This portal needs 12 tokens (eyes of ender) to lit up, fortunately some portal have those tokens already inserted from 0 to 12. If 12 are put inside the portal lit up and you can go through, however there is a catch in Minecraft 1.8 and below, 12 pre placed tokens didn't lit up the portal automatically so we are finding the next best thing 11 tokens/eyes ones!

Technical Details :

To compute those 11 eyes portal, a lot of stuff needs to be computed, the first thing we did is we used a lattice to find all combination that makes a 11 eyes portal then we reverse it to what we call a population seed and now on Boinc we are trying to find Stronghold that generates such as the portal room have that population seed. If you didn't get that last part, let me make it a bit clearer, basically we can not reverse fully the process so we use the midpoint strategy where we know valid numbers that were reversed and then we need to simulate forward a layout such as we match the numbers we found previously.

You can find our project here: https://github.com/minecrafthome/OneChunk and the Pull Request with the binaries : https://github.com/minecrafthome/minecrafthome/pull/77

As the client needs a bit more data we provide it from an API hosted at ssg.seedfinding.com.

Onward :
The current tasks (around 1.9M) should last us about 100-200 days and will yield about 200GB of data that will then be processed directly on the server to give us the best seed.

You can download the current results here: https://files.seedfinding.com, those are the raw results (seeds, coordinates) and will be further processed later on but they are already 11 eyes strongholds.

Happy crunching !

Neil
13 Aug 2021, 21:14:40 UTC · Discuss

OneChunk CPU In Testing (X86_64 & ARM64)
This week marks the period where we finally begin creating tasks and testing the OneChunk CPU application in an actual BOINC environment. Once tonight and tomorrow's testing shows that we can validate these tasks, and that our work-gen / task data creation system is working as expected we shall be able to roll this out to our main Minecraft@Home server as a 'Beta App'. Over the past month since my last progress post we've had yet another set of delays. Some of this is because 'Sia' has not implemented the features we were hoping to use, and also some of our developers have been travelling in the past few weeks.

(See; https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/forum_thread.php?id=102 )

On the bright side, we shall now be checking seeds for 11-Eye dungeons in version 1.7 and 1.8 at the same time, and our code has had some significant changes for the order of 'filtering' and how it works to find these special seeds and spawns required for the Super Speedruns / OneChunk challenges.

Shown below is a screenshot of my Raspberry Pi 4 (2.025GHz) running 4 tasks concurrently. We will be tweaking the time estimate (known config issue), but each individual task will take 4 hours (per core) on an RPi, and for example on a 5800X it takes about 1.5 hours per task per core.

For our BOINCers and those interested in running on a Raspberry Pi 4 (64bit), please note that the latest Debian Repos / Raspbian 64bit OS images have an issue with BOINC. This may appear as the BOINC client / BOINC manager saying you do not have a "GUI-RPC" permissions or password, and make the process of having the BOINC GUI working more frustrating than it should be. There's a few guides and other forum posts on this issue, but I shall probably make a quick step by step guide to ensure BOINC is operating properly *if* your 64bit ARM distribution wants to not play nice
10 Aug 2021, 0:56:07 UTC · Discuss

Kaktwoos version 2.13 released + reminders for Nvidia Linux OpenCL packages
We've released the latest version of Kaktwoos-cl, which is now 2.13!

In this update, we've added further checks for GPU model detection and printout for what GPU and its 'name' a given Kaktwoos-cl task is on. Please note that we highly suggest you run sudo apt-get install nvidia-opencl-dev if you are on Ubuntu or Debian (or a corresponding package + command on your distro) in order to install the missing OpenCL headers and allow Kaktwoos-cl to run. We would appreciate that all BOINC users thinking or currently running Nvidia GPUs on Linux to verify that BOINC tasks are not reporting computation errors accidentally, and leaving them running 'carelessly'. We have not truly resolved the very rare 'stuck at 100% / Infinite Task' post-crash issue, and we recommend for those tasks to be aborted manually if you encounter one at >99% for more than 10 minutes on a new GPU.

Changes:
Nvidia GPUs will use one of two kernels depending on their age and model. For example, any RTX or 16xx (Turing) GPU shall continue to use optimizations introduced in Kaktwoos v2.10. Older or weaker GPU models shall use the previous kernel, which means we should see a 5% boost to any GPUs reported to have a regression, as some of you may reported on our BOINC threads.

AMD RDNA1/2 GPUs are now detected and matched to use another set of optimizations, increasing their speed to their original (pre 2.10) or further increasing it. Due to architectural differences, changes made that improved GCN (ie RX 480, Vega 56) performance by 25-40% reduced RDNA 1/2 performance by up to 2X, which is now mitigated.

All task outputs will include the seed range searched as well (s: and e: parameters) for general interest and debugging potential. Otherwise, there is not much left I (Hy) feel there is to code for Kaktwoos-cl, and CPU projects are now more of a focus for Minecraft@Home than before, as you may have seen with our OneChunk pre-announcement.
6 Jun 2021, 18:39:47 UTC · Discuss

OneChunk CPU Pre-Announcement (X86_64 & ARM64)
Over on the Minecraft@Home discord, Boysanic ("Boincboi"), Matt (Stronghold simulation coding), other developers and I have been discussing and planning a rollout of our first CPU application. This OneChunk project is "a BOINC project in the works. Our goal is to find all world seeds w/ at least an 11 eye portal in MC Java 1.7.10". So, if this all works out, "you'll finally be able to say you've found an 11 eye portal by yourself!"

Essentially, we are combining parts of the "SSG" (Seed-Speedrun) and 11-eye portal seed-filtering programs together to go through a large dataset. This input file is 9GB in size, but we plan to split it up into many small manageable tasks to be distributed through BOINC, which is where you come in! Going through a 320kb sample input takes a 4.8GHz Ryzen 5800 (the fastest single-core CPU) around 2 minutes, simulating and checking over 5,220 worldseeds a second. A 2GHz Raspberry Pi 4, with 64bit Raspbian manages to compute 1,370 worldseeds a second, making it around 3.8x slower but much more efficient. (45W vs 5W)

Thanks to work by other developers, I have tested and confirmed that both x86_64 ("64bit Windows and Linux") and ARM64 (64bit Linux ARMv8) configurations will work. The OneChunk 'Filter9000' BOINC application is single-threaded, but will likely have multiple tasks running concurrently on your computer to best utilize its resources and scale to your unique hardware configurations. For 'PC' requirements, we suggest Ubuntu 18.04/20.04 64bit or Windows 7 / 10 64bit, running on an CPU such as an AMD FX or Intel 1st Gen Core i5/i7 CPU or newer.

If anyone has a Raspberry Pi 3(B/B+) or 4, we would like to invite you to install the latest 64bit Raspbian on a spare SDcard in preparation. We also expect Nvidia Jetson Nano/TX1/Xavier devices with Ubuntu 18.04 64bit or newer to successfully run our Arm64 tasks, once we configure our BOINC server to provide and schedule tasks for this platform.

Please follow instructions on the Raspberry Pi website, but we suggest that more experienced Pi users join us for this experiment! OS image below:
https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_arm64/images/raspios_arm64-2021-04-09/2021-03-04-raspios-buster-arm64.zip

Also, check out our Forums for upcoming updates, and to see the first 25-Tall Superflat cactus!
3 May 2021, 15:46:34 UTC · Discuss

23 tall blocks cactus found by PDW and edjotron
We've discovered the first naturally generated 23-Tall Cactus! Thanks to PDW and Edjotron, we can now confirm that the tallest is 23 blocks. To see this cacti in its natural habitat, right by a Mesa, please input the seed

184693195438010998

on 1.14 and use

/tp 16274576 64 10230656

to teleport to it, right next to the badlands!

As some of you may have seen on the BOINC Forums News updates, developers Balint, Hy and Boincboi have confirmed stability of our new optimization updates. These optimizations to Kaktwoos will allow many models of AMD GPUs to get between 30 and 50% performance, like the RX 480 and RX Vega series. Additionally, some RTX 2000 series graphics cards may see small boost in speed, of 5-10%, while a few (such as an RTX 2060) may see up to 75% more performance!

This means almost all of you can compute cacti much faster, as we launch the next round of Kaktwoos at y=65 shortly.

PDW: https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/view_profile.php?userid=316
edjotron: https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/show_user.php?userid=13486619
10 Feb 2021, 23:43:38 UTC · Discuss

The Grand BOINCale for Kaktwoos?
We apologize yet again for the lack of work over the past month and a half, since all of you had last BOINC'd to solve Minecraft’s tallest cactus mystery. Now, after improving Kaktwoos’ ease of use for our developers we are ready for one last, hopefully long round of cactus stacking and chunk smashing with our fellow cacti enthusiasts. Thanks to some changes behind the scenes, our developers no longer have to painfully modify many configuration files and verify multiple server adjustments (as mentioned in our previous post). At most now they will only have to change two numbers and send work out, as all of the preliminary seeds have been pre-loaded for BOINC to work off of! So, how much work do we expect to generate over the next few days?

Well for starters, an average run of ‘Kaktwoos’ per block layer (y-level) creates 120,000 tasks at a minimum, and each task takes a midrange gaming GPU at least an hour to complete. We have at least 10 layers planned to be checked for 23 and 24-block tall cacti, making this one of our most comprehensive searches yet. Even with 1000 users computing away 24/7, we can imagine this work, and reviewing all the data from it will take at least *60* days. This doesn’t even include that the seeds we are working on are only a fraction of the potential cacti to be stacked, though are the most likely to successfully merge into Tall Cacti at these unusual heights.

So, how high up in a desert do you think we can find tall cacti? Will ‘Superflat’ presets be the final destination for outrageously tall cacti searches? Join us now at Minecraft@Home to find out, and bring back immense compute power to our BOINC network! We recommend anyone with a Windows 7/10 64bit and Ubuntu 18.04 or newer OS to join, and especially those with an AMD RX 460, GTX 750ti or newer/faster. Intel Graphics are supported as well, and multiple GPU systems are in high demand and very capable to assist us. If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere feeling cold and isolated this winter, why not BOINC with us and chat in our Discord server https://discord.gg/xArErFf , or pay a visit to our messaging board?

If you have already begun the penultimate search for ‘stacctus’ with us already, try to find your own tall cacti under ‘Your Tasks’ in the BOINC client’s ‘Advanced View’, then by clicking on the task number inside your browser. Inside those logs maybe there’s a chance you’ll find a 22 or taller ‘natural’ cactus of your own, that you can build by and share with us. We will be posting updates often to announce any interesting findings from your hard work, so stay tuned in the upcoming weeks for more.
27 Jan 2021, 21:18:34 UTC · Discuss

From sandy valleys, up to sand dune peaks. Kaktoos rises to the challenge!
After a somewhat long hiatus, Kaktoos is coming back for another round in the ring, and this time at higher and higher heights. Many of us who contribute to the project (Minecraft@Home) got a little busy with school/work after the Pack project concluded, so I apologize on everyone’s behalf for the silence and uncertainty as of late.

As for where we left off, the y=62 search wasn’t as fruitful as we would have liked. No taller cacti had been found at this height than were found at the slightly higher height, y=63.

With the way things usually go, we would need to create an entirely new version of the program in order to run kaktoos for different heights. We started on y=63 for the original version of the program, and then changed this to y=62 for the second run of the program.

This time around, we’ve flipped the script, and different heights can now easily be run at the same time or in series, with 0 program changes. Effectively we’ll be able to get the final answers we’re looking for from the kaktoos project much easier and without as much “red tape” as there usually is with program changes due to security reasons.

What does this mean for you?

This means more kaktoos, more often, and with less breaks between runs for the foreseeable future.

There’s some limits to how many heights we can attempt since there comes a point where you simply will not find any cactus, however, we have a fair range to work with now with these new changes in play.

What now?

We’ll be launching a run of kaktoos very shortly. We’ve been testing this in beta with a height value of 64 for a short period of time to make sure that things are running as smoothly as we would like, but we’re happy to announce that we’re ready to go!

Some have offered far more support than we ever expected during this beta, which definitely surprised us! We’re grateful for everyone’s enthusiasm, even if it’s to our own disadvantage to have this run done so quickly.

For the curious, this new run will encapsulate heights of 65, 66, and 67.

That said, happy crunching! Kaktoos runs will begin soon outside of beta. Thank you all for the support and understanding over the last couple months as we work through things.
6 Dec 2020, 20:05:33 UTC · Discuss

We have found the SEED of Minecraft's title-screen background PANORAMA!
Everyone should be familiar with this world. It's the one that always appeared on Minecraft's main-menu (title-screen), blurred and slowly rotating.
It first appeared in 2011 for Minecraft Beta 1.8 and remained for many years, it was only recently replaced in 1.13 each subsequent version.

The seed was found on 18th of July 2020 at around 5:45 AM UTC.

Version: Beta 1.7.3
Coordinates: X=61.48~, Y=75, Z=-68.73~
Seed: 2151901553968352745 OR 8091867987493326313 (both work)

Why two seeds? There are actually 2^16 (=65536) seeds that will all generate the same world. Older versions of Minecraft used only 48 of the bits of the seed. Here's the formula for getting all of them, as explained by Earthcomputer:
25357015387625 + 2^48k, 0 <= k < 2^16; (k is an integer)
The two seeds mentioned are the only "valid" seeds, in the sense that they can be naturally generated by Minecraft (due to Java's random function implementation).
There is not any word/string of characters that will produce this seed, it was generated randomly.
This has nothing to do with "shadow seeds", they are not present in these versions.
What can change is placement of trees and fauna as that depends on the order chunks are generated; otherwise, there are no differences between the two seeds.

Earthcomputer, Cortex, Neil - wrote the biome and terrain checking code
DutChen18 - made multiple tools/mods to help with the recreation and gathering data for the seed checking
MC PseudoGravity - reversed the tallgrass colors and found the biome values in the panorama
Philipp_DE - hosted the recreation server and screenshot bot
Tomlacko - started the project, found the coordinates, produced the panorama viewer with recreation overlay
...many other people helped in other ways (such as building the recreation block-by-block) listed here.

To see how this was accomplished, watch SalC1's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaRurhiK-Lk

Seed reveal video from Earthcomputer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caLCZNLPgrM

~ this post copied mostly in verbatim from Tomlacko's Reddit post on the subject
30 Sep 2020, 10:42:47 UTC · Discuss

Onwards to new and great (actually, lesser) heights (of cacti)
The first round of Kaktwoos processing is nearing its completion. A small number of hosts caused many errors with faulty hardware or software configurations which caused the failure of a handful of workunits. Due to these failures; several thousand new tasks have now been submitted to allow any previously failed workunits an additional chance to succeed.

All historically submitted data is currently under re-evaluation as a subset of these completed tasks has outputs which don't appear to be nominal. The re-validation of tasks will reach completion shortly, and soon a follow-up will be posted detailing the tallest cactus found during this round of Kaktwoos processing.

The Kaktwoos (kak-two-s) project was initiated by computing a small set of tall 'candidate cacti' using the single-chunk cacti stacking application Kaktoos (kak-tus). The initial cactus seed search assumed stacking began at an elevation of y=63 blocks from bedrock which is the basis of assumption for the Kaktwoos multi-chunk cacti scanning work. You have likely volunteered resources towards this effort over the past few weeks.

Now, onto the exciting news: the Kaktoos application (note the missing 'w') shall be launching on BOINC.

This application will exist to scan for individual chunk seeds which produce tall cacti (7 blocks minimum) with generation elevation of y=62. Using a lower elevation parameter for Kaktoos will hopefully allow us to discover additional naturally-generated 22+ block tall cacti with Kaktwoos.

For those wondering, the next set of tasks will produce many more resultant 'candidate' cactus seeds than the previous y=63 run. We expect 120 million generated seeds despite the required minimum height of 7 blocks we chose to reduce output drastically. This dataset will be used for quad-chunk stacking (Kaktfours anyone?) and is much more challenging to manage due to the lower probability of finding 22+ block tall cacti and increased development overhead. We could theoretically find much taller cacti with this method, with a caveat of requiring significantly more processing power. Don't worry though; there are other projects brewing which will take priority. If you are a 'stacktus' superfan or a member of the 'big cactus community', you also needn't worry; there may be even more permutations of Kaktoos and Kaktwoos inputs to try which should keep us all busy along the way.

Finally, and for reference, the tallest known cactus found by MC@Home (in Minecraft: Java Edition v1.14.4) is 22 blocks, and 24 blocks tall if using a superflat world with the desert preset. We distinguish these heights as we consider "cactus naturalis" (cactus of normal generation) cacti to be the true tall cacti, as opposed to "cactus fma vi" (cactus of superflat generation).
2 Aug 2020, 15:09:11 UTC · Discuss

Server outage resolved and supporting our infrastructure
Between 23:54 UTC yesterday (2020-07-20) and 15:35 UTC today, we suffered from a catastrophic SQL failure which forced us to restore from backup.

There may be some credit issues where the system granted more or fewer credits than you expect for work done during this time.
I can't apologize enough. If our BOINC deployment was architected for scale rather than for low cost, we could've avoided this.

There are several enhancements to our infrastructure and upgrades we'd like to make, such as migrating services to Kubernetes and potentially using a managed SQL service.

You can help! Please consider visiting our Patreon page, reviewing the current set of benefits, and making a contribution of any size; any amount helps - patreon.com/minecraftathome

All contributions go towards covering infrastructure cost and quality-of-life improvements to ensure the project's longevity.
21 Jul 2020, 20:10:54 UTC · Discuss

That was fast
The origin of the panorama image used in the Minecraft main menu from beta version 1.8.1, released in September 2011, has remained a mystery until now.

In less than 24 hours after launching the panorama application; a volunteer host for Minecraft@Home, in a sheer stroke of luck, found the world seed, 25357015387625.
This was approximately 93 days of processing time at a total of 54.5 exaFLOPs compressed into the last 24 hours.

The specific host which located the seed belongs to the user vanos0512.
Thank you to the 137 users who contributed 181 hosts with 231 GPUs over the last 24 hours. You all accomplished this.

Here are the details if you want to generate this world for yourself:
Minecraft version: Beta 1.7
Either of these two valid world seeds: 2151901553968352745 or 8091867987493326313
Co-ordinates: x60, y76, z-67

See the video released by EarthComputer announcing the finding.
18 Jul 2020, 15:32:11 UTC · Discuss

Enjoy the scenery
Minecraft@Home is now over one month old! To celebrate this milestone, I present a new research focus; the panorama project.

If you were here during beta-testing, you might have received a very early version of panorama tasks, and the eagle-eyed among you may have seen the application details on the server status page.

The panorama app is a CUDA-only app for Linux and Windows with an Nvidia driver version of 418.96 or higher.

This project attempts to find the world seed of the iconic panorama image which appeared in the background of the main menu of Minecraft between 2011 and 2018. The first phase of this project will only last a few days, and we shall update you with their progress in the coming weeks.

Right now, the application is quite substantial. Unlike the OpenCL applications for the Kaktwoos project, if you allow BOINC to run tasks always; you may experience some stuttering or lag in your desktop environment while running these tasks. These tasks do not have checkpointing support, but run in around 1 hour on an average host to mitigate the majority of lost cycles.

As always, you can change which projects of which you decide to participate in your user preferences.

Let us know if you have any questions, and as always join the discussion over on the Discord server.
17 Jul 2020, 15:31:43 UTC · Discuss

Kaktwoos 2.03 and Badges!
You may have seen many workunits just disappear from existence today.

Worry not! We realised there were far too many workunits scanning duplicate seeds, so we've scaled back the original workunits to the correct seed ranges (no in-progress results were touched, so none of you should have lost any credit).

We have located some promising seed candidates which were missed from processing and can be used as an input to this job, so they are currently set as the highest priority.

Also, we now have badges! If you view the forums, any comments in threads, or on the leaderboards; you will see the new badges.
We're open to suggestions for future badges, so please leave us some comments on this thread.
8 Jul 2020, 21:06:03 UTC · Discuss

Profile creation and OpenCL vendor pinning
In the last news post, I advised everyone to create a profile in order to be eligible for 'user of the day' selection.
Unfortunately, there was an issue with the ReCaptcha implementation which prevented this. This issue is now resolved.

Now, you are able to create a profile here.

Also, good news for hosts with OpenCL capable hardware from more than one vendor (e.g. an Intel iGPU and an Nvidia GPU)
The latest update to the kaktwoos app should ensure the tasks run on the correct device.
If you are a user with a multi-vendor host, please keep an eye on your results and let us know if you're having any issues.

As always, please get involved with the conversation in the message boards, and join the Discord!
3 Jul 2020, 16:57:49 UTC · Discuss

MultiGPU, checkpointing, and another record breaking cactus (22 blocks tall)
Finally, support for multiple GPUs and checkpointing has landed.

• If you have multiple GPUs, the research apps will now make use of all available GPUs.
• We now support Intel GPUs.
• If work is suspended, or your machine is powered off, checkpoints will now ensure work does not start from the beginning.
• You will also notice work estimates are far more accurate.
• You do not need to take any actions to enable these features.
• We are also taking steps to increase the priority of additional results added to workunits after computation errors. This in order to speed up validation of incomplete workunits.

Thank you to Hypprs, nicoboss, DutChen18, BalintCsala, and anyone else who was involved in testing and updating the app.

For the third time in 1 week, Minecraft@Home has broken the tallest cactus height record in normal terrain generation.
I present, a 22 block tall cactus:

1.14.4 world seed: 11343195073417814, co-ordinates: 14955936 64 -3750655.

Congratulations to volunteer SirNapkin1334, your host was responsible for locating this one!

While I have your attention, user profiles are now enabled, please ensure you create a user profile.
This will ensure you can be selected for 'user of the day' which is displayed on the homepage.

Please post any issues on our message boards. Alternatively, for real-time discussion, join our Discord.
1 Jul 2020, 12:44:20 UTC · Discuss

Record breaking cactus #2
For the second time this week, we have broken a Minecraft cactus height record!
Host belonging to volunteer 'vcokltfre' located a 21 block tall cactus which was later processed into a valid world seed.

1.14.4 world seed: 7007665385562311, co-ordinates: -20626031 64 17078576.

Congratulations to all for taking part. Here's to 22 and beyond!

27 Jun 2020, 16:39:49 UTC · Discuss

BOINC Project
Many new members have joined from SalC1's announcement and the listing of our project on the BOINC site. We welcome and hope to see all members stick around to see the community's contributions, development, and achievements.

Minecraft@Home is a research project to locate seeds, features, the unknown, and the unseen in the block game, Minecraft.

Minecraft is currently the best-selling video game of all time. Although we have no affiliation with Microsoft, Mojang, or the development of Minecraft itself; this project was born out of necessity. Many members of the community have the desire to push the game, which keeps on giving, to its limits.

The listing of Minecraft@Home allows users to join the project more efficiently. Volunteer compute resources are essential to the success of our research, as some elements require high volumes of computing power in order to retrieve results.

As many may have seen in the latest batch of workunits, we have had a series of errors and issues. We believe these to be mostly ironed out.
BOINC is a learning experience for us all. Grid computing technology is very new to us, so there has, of course, been some teething issues.
We ask the community to bear with us as we perfect our development workflows and move to release more projects and exciting news in the coming weeks.

If you missed our previous announcement regarding the record-breaking cactus Minecraft@Home discovered, visit our Twitter: https://twitter.com/minecraftathome

If you are a BOINC expert, a developer, or otherwise enthusiastic about Minecraft and our project; please join our Discord! https://discord.gg/xVFh9bp
25 Jun 2020, 15:59:18 UTC · Discuss

We are live
The beta period has ended! We are happy with the progress so far, thanks to all who contributed during this phase of the project.

We have now pushed over 1.2 million work units for processing as part of the cactus finding project.
This is following the success of locating world seeds for cactuses up to 21 blocks tall, 2 blocks higher than the existing record.

You may notice a new application, panorama; this is attempting to locate the world seed which was used for the panorama screenshot used in the Minecraft main menu.

There are plenty more applications and work units to come. Thank you all once again for taking part in this adventure.
21 Jun 2020, 2:42:22 UTC · Discuss

Beta testing now live
The Minecraft@Home server is now open for beta-testing.

Kaktwoos is the first application in test with several thousand work units available for processing.
Currently, this application only supports Windows 64-bit clients with an Nvidia GPU, this will be expanded to cover the majority of other platforms soon.

Kaktwoos uses chunk seed generation to find cactus stacks of 20 blocks or higher by locating neighbouring chunk seeds which overlap with the input chunk seed.
Cactus stacks generate when two overlapping chunk seeds generate a cactus on the same x, y coordinate.
The input seeds for Kaktwoos were generated by scanning all 281.7 trillion possible chunk seeds for cactuses of 10 blocks or higher. This yielded 42,497 seeds which were algorithmically reduced to a smaller sample (used as the input for Kaktwoos) by scoring each for the likeliness to collide with another cactus.

During beta testing, any issued credits will be cleared as the beta period ends, this is to ensure fairness once we are out of beta-testing.
Any work unit time estimates are inaccurate as we have not specified the number of floating-point operations required for work unit runtime during this stage of testing.

Computation errors during this stage are expected and should be ignored. We kindly ask you to leave your clients running for as long as possible whenever idle to allow us to take full advantage of this beta test.
15 Jun 2020, 3:00:31 UTC · Discuss

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