Pack.PNG

Project Summary

This 128x128 icon is considered to be one of the most iconic Minecraft images, along with the original title screen panorama. It's been in the game for almost 10 years now and is still present to this day (in one way or another), but nobody ever knew where it came from, or which seed generated it. Until finally, after 8 months of hard work by 2 teams of Minecraft experts and other volunteers, the seed has been found on September 5th 2020 at 4:04AM UTC! Here's everything you need to know to generate it yourself: 

Minecraft version: [JAVA] Alpha 1.2.2 (don't forget to enable historical versions in the launcher!)
Seed: 3257840388504953787
Hill coordinates: X=116, Z=-31 

If you need help with loading that seed, or want more details on how to replicate the icon yourself, here's a tutorial on how to do that: https://pastebin.com/CmsEKDev  

Also, a quick FAQ:
Q: Can I use anything else than Java?
A: No.
Q: Why is the pig not there?
A: Animals aren't influenced by the seed (in this version)
Q: Why didn't you ask Mojang?
A: Notch & Dinnerbone both tried to help as much as their could, but they didn't have/remember anything.
Q: Is it really that exact hill? Can it be found anywhere else?
A: It's the only seed and the only location where you will find this perfectly exact terrain, nowhere else.
Q: What about shadow seeds?
A: Shadow seeds are not in Alpha/Beta versions. If you're confused why the panorama had 2 seeds, that's something completely different (sister seeds) and too long to explain.    

The story: The search for the seed started back in January 2020 when Youtuber SalC1 made a video wondering about this picture's origin. This sparked the interest of the Minecraft seedfinding community and they quickly got to work. In the following months, they managed to figure out a lot of the ground work needed to reverse-engineer the random seed Minecraft used to generate this world, and made all of this possible in the first place. SalC1 already made an update video on the state of the project a few months ago that you can check out. 

Sadly, after those few months of work, they reached somewhat of a dead end after their method didn't work out, and lost some enthusiasm towards the project for quite a while. All of this changed, however, when the seed for the title screen panorama was found. The Minecraft@Home community that formed around that project brought in new members with fresh ideas, and the work on pack.png (along with some of the previous members) moved to continue over there instead. We took a bit of a different approach though. We tried to recreate the blocks (on a server) and camera perspective (using regression fitting) as precisely as possible, which with the help of a live overlay enabled us to pinpoint more features with better accuracy. This disproved some previous assumptions as well as making new methods possible by being able to determine previously unrecognizable blocks. By the middle of august, we already managed to statistically determine the exact coordinates (using dirt thickness), and so we tried bruteforcing the seed again (using the waterfall position and the nearby trees), but just like before, it didn't work. We thought it was due to something unaccounted for (like a dungeon) that was messing with the generation code's RNG (in the end it turned out to be an error in the code), so we settled on a slower, but much more reliable method instead - filtering all the seeds based on the way the sand and dirt blocks mix together (visible on the beach and underwater).     
While the previous bruteforce search was quick enough to run on a single PC in the matter of hours, this newer bruteforce would take nearly 1.5 years to search through all of the 2^48 possible Minecraft seeds. That's why, as you might have already guessed from the name, Minecraft@Home used BOINC again to utilize the power of distributed computing. With a total of around 3700 volunteers, the whole search took only 3 days to complete, producing just under 700K matching seeds, which were being processed further (by terrain height matching) on-the-fly on a single PC while new results kept coming in.    

We were all anxiously waiting for a match to appear, but all 3 days went by and there was still nothing. The search was almost over with only a few compute tasks that got left behind, and so many of us gave up hope and started preparing a search at different coordinates, thinking that was the error all along. But then suddenly, at 4:04 UTC, this alarm went off, as the pack.png seed was actually in the last 5% of the seeds searched! There was quite a bit of chaos as we were under pressure to reveal the seed as quickly as possible, so there wasn't enough time to make a proper announcement until now.    

Please take a look at both lists of the  credits sheet listing everyone who worked on this project for the past 8 months, as they all truly deserve some recognition.  

Additionally, the users "niraami" and "zombie67" were the lucky ones whose computers processed the final seed during the BOINC bruteforce search.