The 1.19 Title Screen

Project Summary

The Minecraft 1.19 panorama featuring the new Mangrove Swamp biome was added to the game in Java Edition snapshot 22w15a. On April 13th 2022, the day of the snapshot’s release, the Minecraft@Home team swiftly began work to uncover the seed.

Our process is pretty standard by now. Like with any other panorama project, we extracted the six images that make up the panorama from the game's files. After creating a recreation server for this project, we used a custom overlay to display the source images over our recreation to aid in accurately rebuilding as much of the world as we needed. While we were building the recreation, others within the team began working on finding the exact coordinates where the panorama was located. We narrowed down the coordinates using clouds at first, but the full set of coordinates would later be found by MisterX using the rotations of lily pads. Work on the recreation continued, and within a few days, we had more than enough of the world rebuilt to explore possible methods of cracking the seed.

It wasn't as easy this time around though. We knew the ideal approach would be using the lilypad positions to get the seed. Unfortunately, using this method efficiently relies on seedcracking techniques that have not yet been fully discovered on Minecraft versions 1.18 or higher. Therefore the only option we had was brute force, the slowest cracking method available. To counter this, we planned to use an FPGA, which is a special kind of chip that can reach much higher speeds than a normal CPU. A few members of our discord server have already experimented with FPGAs, and so they attempted developing code for this project as well. But unfortunately, not much work ended up being done, and all progress ground to a halt.

However, on June 8th, a day after the official release of 1.19, one of our members named Andrew managed to surprise everyone again by finding the seed entirely on his own! Interestingly, his code took less than a second to run despite using the same lilypad brute-forcing technique we originally planned to use.


So, how in the world was he able to do that?

The answer is surprisingly simple: Andrew made a few assumptions, one of which turned out to be correct. The seed wasn't random; it came from manually entered text. When inputting a text seed, the game will convert it into a number that is, for technical reasons, shorter than randomly generated seeds. This means that there were less seeds that needed to be checked, and so the code was able to check them all in a short amount of time.

Please also check out the full list of contributors, describing who did what: https://mcatho.me/pano119credits
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Seed: -1696067516
Seed text: thewildupdate
Version: Java Edition Snapshot 22w15a
Coordinates: X=3820.872, Y=67.868, Z=553.455

Precise teleport command:
/tp @s 3820.872 67.868 553.455 -89.1 0

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Here you can find the code that Andrew wrote to crack this seed: https://pastebin.com/H2mw76zH

We invite you to join our Discord server, where you can either help with projects like these, or just hang around, watch the magic happen and keep up with the news!