204 Minecraft Changes!
From isometric screenshots to crafting leather with wool, here are 64 crazy Minecraft changes. Did you know torches used to be angled differently? Up until version 1.7.10, wall torches had a flat horizontal top. But starting in 1.8, they became slightly slanted with the top part rotating to match the direction they’re facing. It’s a tiny detail only the nerdiest players would notice, like you. In older versions of Minecraft, placing blocks like fences, glass panes, or iron bars in water would remove the water, leaving behind an awkward air pocket. It wasn’t until version 1.13, the aquatic update, that these blocks could finally water log, blending in naturally with the water. It’s kind of funny how this was seen as revolutionary at the time. If you wanted to change your render distance back in the day, you’d have a single button. Clicking it would cycle your render distance from normal, short, tiny, and far. However, starting in 1.7.2, too. This old button was replaced with a slider that lets you be a bit more specific with how many chunks you want it to load. Did you know if you attacked a wolf in creative mode in older versions, the walls would try to kill you still? Little do they know, I’m invincible. Everyone knows that villagers head to bed when nightfalls. But this behavior didn’t exist until Minecraft 1.14, the village and pillillage update. Before that, villagers had no concept of sleep. And when it got dark, they sprint into their homes and just stand there all night, often crowding together or pacing around. If zombies came knocking, the villagers would panic and shuffle around inside, but never actually lay down or rested like they do now. Nowadays, you’re able to place two vines around a corner like so. But before 1.13, placing two vines in a corner would cause one of them to get replaced. This kind of Nether portal used to be illegal. Before version 1.7.2, portals had to be built in the standard 4×5 shape. No bigger, no smaller. If you tried making a larger frame and lighting it, nothing would happen. But starting in 1.7.2, the rules changed. Portals can now be as big as 23x 23 blocks. That means we can build massive portals that we can send gas through. Check this out. In older versions, your dog wouldn’t attack skeletons. They’ just stay right next peaceful, which just looks so wrong. It wasn’t until version 1.8 that the functionality was added where wolves would chase after both skeletons and wither skeletons. Trap doors used to be one of the most frustrating blocks in Minecraft. They were super finicky. You couldn’t place one without a supporting block or it would just break. But that all changed in 1.9. Now you can stack trap doors on top of each other, float them in midair, and even build entire mini houses out of them. When you craft a shield today, it takes six wooden planks and an iron ingot and looks something like this. But originally, this wooden shield didn’t actually exist in the game at all. When shields were first added in snapshot 15W33C, they were crafted like this with three wool, three wood, and one iron ingot on the side. This meant that it was impossible to craft a shield that didn’t already have a base banner color on it since I think most players never choose to decorate their shield with a banner nowadays. It’s crazy to think that the regular shield almost wasn’t added to the game at all. Monster spawners are currently this dark blue color, but when they were first added, they were a much brighter blue instead. It didn’t feel very appropriate for a blog that literally summons monsters to have such a bright and happy shade of blue. So, it’s a good thing it had its colors tweaked to be a bit dingier in the official release of the game. Skeleton AI has had a really rocky history. Originally, they were so comically bad at aiming that they were barely a threat. Then, in the 1.5 update, they were made a little less stupid and a little more fun to fight. Birth in the 1.9 update, skeletons were made to be impossibly hard, being given the ability to strafe and avoid players or shooting them at the same time. If you ever tried to go up to a skeleton to kill it in this version, it would just walk away from you really quickly, raining down arrows the entire time, which was completely imbalanced. Fortunately, in the coming update, they will be tweaked just the right amount to be significantly easier to fight without making them as stupid as they were originally. back before Minecraft had any meat items. Sheep and pigs used to drop mushrooms instead. This somewhat made sense since they were the only food items in the game back then, but they really felt like a placeholder for something more proper in the future, which ended up being true when the pig got a proper pork chop drop in one of the indev updates. In Minecraft Alpha, pressure plates required three wooden planks to craft instead of two. You might look at this recipe and think, “Wait, isn’t that the recipe for slabs?” And you’d be correct because it was in Minecraft Beta 1.3 that the recipe for pressure plates was changed to only require two planks in order to make its old recipe the new recipe for wooden slabs. It was always weird that crafting three cobblestone in a row made thick stone slabs, but crafting three wooden planks in a row just made a thin little pressure plate. So, it was nice to have the recipes made more consistent. In early Minecraft versions, there was no crafting table to obtain special items and blocks. So, the player actually just spawned with a bunch of stuff, like 20 arrows you could shoot by just pressing tab on your keyboard and 10 TNT blocks that were simply detonated by just punching them. Spawning with some stuff to immediately play with was pretty fun, and I really wish the bonus chest in modern Minecraft had some more interesting items in it. The way you used to get stone slabs in Minecraft was honestly really weird. By simply punching a piece of coal ore with your fist, you were able to obtain a few stone slabs for building, which felt incredibly cursed. Additionally, since there was no crafting, oak logs would just drop planks when you dropped them instead of dropping the log itself to be converted into planks. And craziest of all, whenever you would mine a gold ore block, it would just drop an entire gold block for you. I mean, you couldn’t use that gold block for anything but buildings, so it wasn’t that crazy. But if gold or dropped gold blocks in the modern game, that would be ludicrously overpowered. Originally, paintings were crafted with eight wooden planks instead of eight sticks, making them a lot more expensive. It also just felt a bit weird for a little painting to require so much wood. So, I think changing this over to use sticks in Minecraft Impev made a lot more sense. When arrows were originally added to the game, they couldn’t be crafted at all. Instead, the player would just spawn with 20 arrows, as indicated by this little bit of text above the hot bar, which they could fire by just hitting the tab button without needing a bow. Then, when the bow was added, arrows became a craftable item. And for some reason, Notch made it possible to craft them using apples. A few days later, this would be updated to a more familiar looking recipe, but one that was still pretty different from the one you know today. It required a feather, a stick, and instead of a flint at the top, an iron ingot. This made sense since flint didn’t exactly exist as an item back then, and iron was probably the closest thing to what an arrow should be made from. Still, when flint was eventually added a few weeks later, it was only ever used to craft flint and steel, and the recipe for arrows wouldn’t be unchanged for another 5 months when the game would enter its alpha stage. Iron bars used to look very different. Today, when you place one down, it stands straight like a pole. But originally, they formed a cross shape when placed alone. It looked odd and felt unintuitive. My guess is that it was meant to show how they could extend in any direction. In version 1.9, they were updated to the pole design we have now, which looks much cleaner, especially for bills like umbrellas. The same change applied to grass planes when they used to have a cross shape, but were updated to be straight. Nowadays, crafting golden apples is pretty expensive since making just one is going to cost you a whopping eight gold ingots, but for a while you could craft golden apples with gold nuggets instead. This was incredibly cheap for such a powerful item. But it gets even crazier. The enchanted golden apple is even more powerful. So powerful that it can’t even be crafted. You can only find it in loot chests around the world. But originally, enchanted golden apples were not only more powerful than they are now, but they actually could be crafted. It was pretty expensive taking ace gold blocks to craft, but since enchanted golden apples pretty much made you invincible, it was totally worth it. It was overpowered, but I kind of missed being able to make these stupid things. In some of Minecraft’s earliest versions, you could actually toggle the weather without commands. By simply hitting F5, it would just magically start raining around the player. Since these were just versions for testing new features, it makes sense that this special rain toggle keybind would eventually be removed. But it’s a shame we’re not able to easily make it rain in survival mode anymore for getting cool screenshots. The appearance of slimes has become quite iconic with their transparent outer layer making them look especially slimy. But when they were first added, their model was way simpler. They didn’t have any transparency to them at all. They were just this big solid green cubes with faces on them. This made them feel a lot less slimy and a lot more like big weird grass cubes or something. The slim remodel was a major glow up for sure. When stairs were added, they were one of the first blocks in the game with a more complex model. So, it should come as no surprise that they weren’t exactly perfect. The most obvious problem they had was just their inventory texture, which looked like this. I don’t even know what I’m looking at here. It honestly makes me feel like I’m going to throw up. Unplayable. Drowning in Minecraft used to be way scarier because every time you took damage from drowning, the game would make you sink a little bit into the water, briefly stopping your progress as you’re trying to reach the surface again. I remember this causing me so much anxiety when swimming in older versions, but I still have nightmares about it. Minecraft has a ton of secret tricks you can use for quickly moving around your items, like shift clicking to instantly move an item into a chest, shift double clicking to move every single stack of that item, and even right- clicking and dragging to evenly distribute a stack of items into multiple smaller stacks. But originally, none of these actions existed in the game. And the only way to move items around in inventories was to just click and drag them one at a time. This was especially annoying when you’d come home from a mining trip and your inventory was just completely filled with cobblestone. So, putting it all away in your chest was just a painfully slow nightmare. Yes, I’m that lazy. Sue me. Originally, there were only white sheep in the game, but instead of dropping white wool, they were initially intended to drop red wool, as can be seen in this development image released by Notch. I guess he realized it was too weird to actually put into the game, so he never released a version where the wool was red. Does anyone remember how mobs in monster spawners used to be rendered so big that they literally didn’t fit inside the block? I remember seeing these cursed spawners on creative servers with giants and gas rapidly spinning in circles. It was honestly pretty hilarious. And I’m kind of sad that putting a gas in a spawner nowadays just looks like this. Look at how small and boring he is. You’re small and boring. For a long time, the invisibility potion didn’t really work on sheep. I mean, technically it did. If you splash one with invisibility, most of it would become invisible. But this entire outer layer of wool stayed visible, meaning a sheep could only be truly invisible if it was sheared. I’m not sure if this was a bug or just a weird secret feature, but it definitely didn’t feel like it made much sense. So, in the 1.8 update, Mojang changed this behavior and now Sheep could finally become fully invisible, allowing them to hide anywhere. They could be in this very room stalking me. Gotcha. Nope. No, that was just a wall. Nowadays, Minecraft’s world is 384 blocks tall from the bottom layer of bedrock to the top of the height limit, but it used to be way smaller. Back in beta, the world had a height limit of just 128 blocks, which is a third of what it is now. It would eventually be doubled to 256 in the 1.21 update, but the next increase to the height limit was over 9 years later in the caves and cliffs update. Some people love being able to build so much higher, but others are just annoyed that the game is so much laggier now. If I asked you what item this is, you’d probably guess that it’s cooked steak, but you’d actually be incorrect because this is footage from before cows were even added to the game. This is actually just what the cooked pork chop item used to look like back in Minecraft Alpha. The texture was later reused for cooked steak when cows were added to the game, but it was pretty confusing to have two identical looking items. So, cooked pork chop had its texture updated in Minecraft Beta 1.8 to the new lighter color we’re more familiar with today. The item forms of blocks used to look very different when they were dropped on the ground back in the day. Instead of having the blocks full texture, dropped blocks were instead miniature versions of their larger counterparts, only using a tiny cutout of the full texture instead. I think these old dropped block models were really adorable, and I would honestly love to have a mod that adds this feature back to the game. Golden apples aren’t too hard to get a hold of nowadays. Sure, they’re a little expensive to craft, but originally they were completely uncraftable, making them incredibly rare. They only generated in loot chests around the world, which are much less common in early Minecraft since there were so few naturally generating structures. YouTuber Ant Venom famously had a whole series just about hunting down a golden apple, and it took over 5 years to actually find it. It’s kind of hilarious to think that nowadays, if you wanted a golden apple, it would probably take you less than an hour to actually get one from spawning in. Though that isn’t necessarily the case for the enchanted golden apple, which is still pretty hard to come by since they’re still uncraftable after all this time. If you played Minecraft before the village and village update, you probably remember how villages used to look. And specifically, the fact that all of their paths were made of gravel instead of path blocks. I think these used to look pretty nice, but then they changed the gravel texture, and villages just didn’t feel the same anymore. So, I’m glad they got a refresh with the newer path blocks. Deserts are supposed to be dry and empty, but back in Minecraft’s old terrain generation, they used to have a bunch of these little lakes, just like the other biomes in the world had. Maybe one or two very occasional lakes makes sense for deserts, like a sort of desert oasis. But having them be this common definitely made no sense. So, Mojang went in and made sure deserts can no longer spawn lakes in version 1.6.1. Have you ever looked at a zombie pigman and thought, “Man, I want to eat that.” Probably not. But for the entirety of Minecraft alpha and beta, zombie pigmen actually dropped cooked pork chops when killed. This made them a bizarrely effective food source since farming pigmen was an easy way to get a bunch of cooked food, meaning you didn’t have to mine coal and smelt the food yourself. This was frankly too overpowered and made other food sources pretty useless. So zombie pigment drops were changed in the official release of the game, making them drop rotten flesh and gold nuggets instead. This incredible screenshot of an old Minecraft world was actually taken without any mods using an amazing Minecraft feature that was removed very early on. They were called isometric screenshots. And back before Minecraft world generation was infinite, you could just hit F7 on your keyboard and get this awesome image of your entire world. Obviously, this wouldn’t be able to work exactly the same in modern versions of the game, but even just a massive screenshot like this of the currently loaded chunks would be pretty cool. Did you know the ender chests were almost made with wood instead of obsidian? That’s right. The ender chest was actually based on a community suggestion by user Soap Awake and they had initially suggested that the crafting recipe for ender chest would use one ender pearl instead of an eye of ender with eight oak planks around it. While I would appreciate being able to have an ender chest within the first 20 minutes of playing in a Minecraft world, I do think this recipe would have been a little too easy for how overpowered ender chests are. So, I think the current recipe is much more fair. The Minecraft launcher has changed lots of times over the years. Nowadays, we have this flashy modern launcher that’s used to launch both versions of Minecraft and all of its spin-offs. But originally, the launcher was just this, a dirt background, an ugly gray box where you can enter your username and password and the words Minecraft launcher in plain text at the top. Yeah, this launcher really sucked. But the second Minecraft launcher was iconic. It added the Minecraft logo to the bottom left, took the login information in the bottom right, and filled most of the screen with this feed of Minecraft news so players could stay up to date on every new Minecraft update every time they logged in. The launcher would go through a few more minor updates over the following versions, but mostly just tweaks and feature additions, but eventually the entire thing got completely replaced with this weird square launcher that just had a big green play button on it. And then finally, the version we all know today. I really miss being able to read the newest updates patch notes whenever I open up Minecraft to play. But hey, the new launcher has a Jack Black button on it, and it doesn’t get better than that. Minecraft mobs are already rather dumb. But believe it or not, they used to be even stupider. For some reason, mobs near the edges of blocks would just constantly jump up and down, even if they weren’t actually walking up the block. That also often jump up and down or spin in a circle on top of any blocks that weren’t full blocks, like cakes or chess. It was honestly pretty hilarious, but I’m glad mobs have finally learned to relax and give their legs a break. Originally, skeletons actually had a completely unique arrow texture compared to the arrows shot by the player. Instead of the standard brown arrows, they shot these purple arrows instead. I don’t understand why Notch felt the need to create an entirely separate arrow texture for these early skeletons, yet didn’t bother to actually give them bows. But the purple arrows would pretty quickly get removed and skeletons would finally be given bows. Oh, but they’re not even holding them, right? The street lamps in villages are pretty simple, but they honestly used to look a lot worse. For some reason, these street lamps originally used a block of black wool to hold all of the torches instead of the stripped wool we have today. I know the stripped wool block didn’t exist back then, but I still feel like there were a number of better options, like oak logs, oak planks. Heck, even cobblestone would have been better than black wool. One of the most useful building features by far has got to be the fact that the stair model changes when you build around a corner, allowing for much more detailed stairs and roofs in our builds. But we didn’t always have corner stairs. And originally, if you wanted to build stairs into a corner, you’d have to use full blocks on the inner corners and slabs on the outer corners. It definitely got the job done, but yeah, this looks much better. The Minecraft logo has changed a lot over the years from literally being made out of cobblestone to being this slicker pixelated design to now having a super smooth highresolution design. So, it should come as no surprise that Mojang has also changed their logo a lot over the years. Originally having this weird shape that looks something like an ocean wave or a dragon or apparently a sewing machine. They kept it for a while, just changing up the colors and the logo’s font every so often. But then everything changed during the Nether update in 2020 when the Mojang logo became this, a funky little animated set of shapes that turn into the word Mojang. Despite this change, the old logo can still actually be found within the game itself in the form of the thing banner pattern, which is crafted with a piece of paper and an enchanted golden apple. In the alpha days, there were only two light sources you could build within the game, torches and glow stone. Torches are easy enough to craft, but getting your hands on glowstone was much harder back then. Each glowstone block would only drop one glowstone dust instead of dropping two to four like it does nowadays. And to make matters worse, the crafting recipe for glowstone used to require nine glowstone dust instead of just four. So, you’d have to mine nine blocks of glowstone just to craft one for yourself. Given how desirable these blocks were in early Minecraft, players had to really grind to collect enough for their build. And glowstone would eventually be rebalanced in beta 1.6.6. 6 to work how it does now, making it much easier to collect. Minecraft is half a game about mining and half a game about crafting. It’s literally in the name. So, obviously, the most important block in the entire game is the crafting table. Or is it called a workbench? Yes, when the crafting table was first added to the game, it was actually called a workbench, which just feels weird to say nowadays. This probably explains why so many older players still refer to the crafting table as the crafting bench instead. I think crafting table does a much better job of explaining what the block actually does since the word workbench could be used to describe pretty much any of the other workstation blocks as well. Buttons are some of the smallest blocks in Minecraft, which is probably why crafting a stone button literally just takes one piece of stone, but originally, for some reason, the recipe for stone buttons was actually two stone. So, you’re telling me that this is necessary to create this? Where’s the rest of it going? That’s just absurd. The killer bunny is one of Minecraft’s weirdest secret mobs, being a super deadly version of the normally peaceful rabbit, which can only be spawned with commands. It also has its own special texture that was originally going to be much scarier. The first texture for killer bunnies was honestly pretty similar to the regular white rabbit, but then in snapshot 14W34A, they were given this terrifying new texture with creepy dark eyes, blood on their faces, and blood on their paws. This was obviously way too violent for Minecraft, even for a secret mob. And the texture is tweaked once again to just remove the blood stains, man. And I thought zombie pigmen were the goriest mob in Minecraft. Turns out it was this rabbit. Currently, droppers are one of the cheapest redstone components to craft, only requiring seven pieces of cobblestone and a single piece of redstone. But when they were first added, the recipe looks like this. Exactly the same as it is now, but with a hopper in the middle instead. Hoppers are already one of the most expensive redstone components on their own, requiring five iron ingots to craft, but it’s kind of worth it given how useful they are for moving items around automatically. Droppers aren’t nearly as useful since they can only move around items when powered by something. So, making them slightly more expensive than a hopper really made them feel like a useless redstone component. Fortunately, this was changed in snapshot 13w04A before droppers were officially added to the game and they became far more worth it to craft. When Endermen were initially added, they were very different. Everyone knows that they used to have green eyes instead of purple and used to have smoke particles instead of purple particles. But what many people don’t realize is that these original Enderman didn’t make their iconic Enderman sounds, but instead sounded like zombies. Take a listen. In addition to that, they also burned in the daylight like zombies, making me think that Mach probably just reused a lot of the original zombie code when he was first making them. Between all of the different wolf variants, colors, and shades of wolf armor, there are a total of 822,735 and 72 different kinds of wolves you can have. And even more if you take into account the six different personalities wolves have now. But way back when wolves were first added, there was literally just one. Yeah. No color dying, no texture variants, just one wolf in the whole game. So, if you wanted to tame multiple wolves back then, you’d probably end up getting them confused with each other at some point, especially considering name tags weren’t added until version 161. This did make it much easier to prank your friends, though, hiding their real wolf underground and replacing it with a perfect duplicate that they can’t interact with. Mojang has made it so much harder to commit my crimes. I’ve always thought it’s kind of weird that you can punch things like glass blocks and cactus without taking any damage. I mean, Minecraft isn’t exactly known for its realism, but you would think that since touching a cactus deals damage to the player, you should probably get hurt when trying to pick it up, right? Well, apparently Mojang thought so, too, since this was actually a feature of the cactus block when it was first added to the game. Every time you started punching a cactus to break it, the player took half a heart of damage. I guess players probably found this feature a little too annoying, so it got immediately removed in the next update, but I think it’d be funny if it still happened today. Before leather was actually added to the game, we were still able to craft this set of brown armor. So, if it wasn’t made from leather, what was it called? Apparently, it was called cloth armor, and it was actually crafted with wool. The idea of creating wool armor that actually protects you from damage is honestly pretty comical, and I’m not sure what Notra thinking when he added this to the game. In survival mode, you can only hit mobs that are three blocks away from you. But in creative, you can actually hit mobs that are up to five blocks away. But that’s nothing compared to how it used to be when creative mode was first added. Back then, you could hit mobs from insane distances like this. It was pretty fun to be able to snipe mobs with your sword like this. And honestly, I don’t understand why Mojang removed this feature from creative mode later on. Do you remember this old command? When playing in creative mode, if it suddenly started raining, you’d have to run the command toggle downfall to make it stop as opposed to the modern equivalent/weather clear. Additionally, in order to swap between survival and creative mode, you need to type /game mode zero or slashgame mode 1 instead of game mode creative or game mode survival. Interestingly enough, you can actually type game mode one in Bedrock Edition to go in creative mode and it still works. I guess it really is a better version after all. Did you know that a diamond sword used to kill a player in just two hits? That’s right. In Minecraft Alpha and Beta, diamond swords dealt a whopping five hearts of damage. In fact, all of the swords did extra damage and they were pretty overpowered. This was eventually changed due to the addition of enchantments in Minecraft version 1.0 in order to make the process of getting an overpowered sword take a little more effort than just finding two diamonds. Now, a diamond sword deals 3.5 hearts of damage. And since spam clicking was removed in version 1.9, I’d say weapons are much more balanced compared to how they used to be. Back in Minecraft Alpha, furnaces were kind of the perfect block to use as a secret chest. That’s because they used to have the stone texture on top instead of having the unique furnace top texture we know today. This meant that by just placing a furnace in the floor of a cave base, you would have a completely invisible storage spot for your valuables. I mean, it does only have two slots of storage. So, if you have a lot of valuables, I guess you’ll need to make a lot of furnaces. When stairs were first added to Minecraft, they were totally unfair. If you misplaced a wooden or cobblestone stair block and wanted to pick it back up, it would drop a wooden plank or cobblestone block instead. This meant that placing down and then mining a stair block would effectively lose you resources since it takes six blocks to craft a stair, and mining them would only give you four blocks in return. This stayed in the game all throughout alpha and beta and would only be fixed when the game officially released in 2011. Enchanting was first added in Minecraft version 1.0, the first four release of the game out of beta. But bookshelves were added all the way back in the Minecraft survival test before Minecraft even entered its alpha stage. This meant that for the first two years that bookshelves existed, they were pretty much just decorative, serving no purpose at all. Additionally, the book recipe used to just require three pieces of paper without needing any leather at all, making it much easier to actually put together an enchanting setup for the first few versions of the game. The old sounds for bows were earpiercing. Instead of the softer arrow launching sound we hear in the game today, the old sound was super crunchy and mechanical sounding, which was honestly pretty jarring. I do like the old arrow landing sound though. It was super satisfying and sounded like an arrow landing in an old cartoon. It’s pretty annoying that the only way to eat mushrooms is to craft them together with a bowl, creating mushroom stew, which is, by the way, unstackable, meaning you either have to fill your entire inventory with mushroom stew, or you just have to keep two stacks of mushrooms on you at all times and craft your food whenever you got hungry. But originally, mushrooms were actually directly edible. No bowl required. Eating a brown mushroom would heal two and a half hearts, whereas eating a red mushroom damaged one and a half hearts, which was pretty powerful for blocks that just generated on the ground. In the first test version that added armor, it was effectively just a cosmetic for players and mobs and didn’t actually provide any protection. Zombies and skeletons were able to spawn with armor on, but they didn’t take any less damage. Additionally, the armor only existed as a helmet and chest plate with no leggings or boots, and the chest plate didn’t even fully cover the torso. I guess that explains why it doesn’t provide any damage protection. Anvils have got to be the most expensive out of all of the regular workstation blocks where furnaces are just crafted with stone and crafting tables are just wood planks. The anvil requires three iron blocks and four iron ingots for a total of 31 iron just to craft one. And it isn’t even a permanent block. You can only use it about 25 times before it has to be replaced. But believe it or not, this recipe used to be even worse. When the anvil was first added, the bottom row of iron ingots was also iron blocks. So that meant it took a total of 55 iron to craft an anvil back then. And guys, this was before the caves and cliffs update. So you couldn’t just climb to the top of a mountain and get as much iron as you want. You had to grind down in the mines for it. So it’s good they made anvils cheaper, but it’s still crazy to me that they’ll break after 25 uses. I don’t have time to collect all this iron. Speaking of, although the recipe for flint and steel hasn’t technically changed from when it was first added, still requiring one flint and one iron, one important thing that has changed is the fact that the recipe is now shapeless. Originally, if you wanted to craft a flint and steel, you had to put the iron ingots diagonally up and to the left of the flint. If you arrange them any other way, it wouldn’t work. This is in contrast to the way it works now, where you can actually place the flint and iron ingots however you want in the crafting grid, and it will always give you a flint and steel. It’s a small change, but it makes crafting just a bit less annoying. Most people know that Minecraft 1.14 overhauled every texture in the game, giving the game its unique and iconic look we know today. But fewer people know that this update overhauled the names of some items, too. For example, these three items used to be called rose red, dandelion yellow, and cactus green. This was a muchneeded change since it was possible to get both red and yellow dye from sources other than dandelions or rose bushes. I mean, imagine crafting your lapis lazuli into dye and getting an item called cornflour blue. Yeah, that’d be weird. Though, technically, there unfortunately still isn’t a way to get green dye from anything other than a cactus. So, I guess that one would have been fine. Do you remember when diamond blocks used to look like this? They were so ugly and players used to build their entire houses out of them. However, in Minecraft’s texture update, they finally were upgraded. Iron, red stone, and lapis don’t feel majorly changed, but they just look a lot more modern now. Diamond and gold blocks both have this nice shiny texture that looks like it’s glittering in the sunlight, which feels a lot fancier than the weird ambiguous textures it had before. And then the emerald block has the most extreme change, being completely redesigned into this beautifully patterned block that honestly looks incredible when used as the eyes of a statue. As compared to the original Emerald block, it’s no contest. Sure, the new block looks good, but you still shouldn’t build your houses out of them. Pigs were one of Minecraft’s first passive mobs, and their derby outward-f facing eyes set the standard for how other mobs added to the game would eventually look. But did you know that originally these eyes were actually facing forward? That’s right. This was how pigs could have looked in Minecraft. Having one of these guys staring at me while I’m trying to build would definitely make me uncomfortable. He looks like he’s about to start talking to me. Most people know that the anvil has a 50 character limit, so you can’t have a name longer than that. However, previously the limit was actually smaller at only 35 characters. That feels like it would be more than enough room for renaming your items. But the reason it got increased is because there was almost an item added to the game that would exceed that 35 character limit. You see, when copper blocks were first added, the first oxidation stage that is now called exposed used to be called lightly weathered, meaning it was possible to craft yourself some wax to lightly weather cut copper stairs totaling a whopping 41 characters. This forced Mojang to increase the anvil renaming limit. But ironically, they ended up just renaming the item later on. So, extending the character limit wasn’t even really necessary. But hey, I’m still glad I now get to name my items things like this. This was the original puffer fish texture. This goofy looking flatfish not only doesn’t look all that great, but also barely looks like a puffer fish. Then, when it got updated to be this bright yellow little ball, it was certainly better and more identifiable, but still felt a little off. It wasn’t until it was completely changed to better resemble the actual puffer fish mob that it finally felt like this item was in its final state. It does make me a little sad though, knowing that for as cute as this guy is, he’s actually dead. Minecraft is constantly getting new colors of wood nowadays with the community excitedly speculating what the next new color will be. I’m personally hoping for green, but there was once a time where differently colored wooden planks weren’t even a thing in the game. Before update 1.2.4, before every type of log would just be crafted down into this tan colored wooden planks block. Building already feels hard enough nowadays, but you’re telling me that the only color option players used to have was just oak. Well, at least it wasn’t birch. Building a household of random all blocks like diamond and gold is a core experience for every Minecraft player. And these structures were a big part of early Minecraft’s identity. Something about building a big ugly gratuitous scan house still just makes me feel good inside. I feel powerful. Nowadays, the Nether has lots of things to do. There are five unique biomes, 11 mobs, and two dungeons for players to explore. But back when the Nether was first added, it looked something like this. Pretty similar to the current Nether, right? Well, this is literally all there was. One endless biome filled with lava and netherrack, a few gas, and zombie pigmen, and that was it. There wasn’t any structures, no rare biomes, and no interesting mobs to hunt. And even the mobs you could kill didn’t drop anything of use. The gas didn’t drop any gas tiers for brewing regeneration potions because this was before the game even had potion brewing and zombie pigmen did drop cooked pork chops back then. But since fighting them is so dangerous, it’s a much better idea to just farm pigs back in the overworld. Ultimately, the only useful things you could find in the Nether were infinite lava and glowstone blocks, just barely saving this entire dimension from being completely useless. When the endmite was first added, it was literally just a retextured silverfish. It was just given a purple recolor and its weird little spiky hair things were removed. Is that hair? I never really know. And to be honest, I don’t want to know. Anyways, a few updates later, the Endermite was given its own unique model, making it its very own brand of disgusting bug. Minecraft mobs aren’t that scary, but this this is scary. The original drowned texture used to be a half zombie, half skeleton mix with an unsettling magenta hue. Honestly, this version of the drowned feels like it would fit in better in the Nether than the ocean, if you ask me. It looks more gory than zombie pigmen do. It’s definitely for the best that they change the drown texture to be more green and blue. Not only do these colors look better in the oceans and rivers, I’m also not waking up in a cold sweat every night thinking about my recent aquatic adventures. Believe it or not, just filling a bucket of water could easily ruin your base back in the day. You see, when you would fill your bucket from the ocean, instead of immediately filling in the hole and making the water look correct again, it would just leave this ugly flowing water animation in its place. And if you kept picking up even more water, the problem would just get worse until you have a terrible patch of glitchy looking water completely destroying your gorgeous beachside view. This was due to the fact that flowing water wasn’t actually able to spread and replenish itself unless it was on top of a solid block. So, if the water was more than one block deep, it would never regenerate. Fortunately, this was changed in Minecraft 1.5, and all of our deep oceans, rivers, and lakes could now be reliably used as infinite water sources without causing any damage. Old Minecraft terrain generation used to be much simpler, and as such, it was far more common for structures to generate improperly. For instance, most mine shafts that generated in the world would often burst into parts of a cave and then leave the wooden supports floating in the air. Nowadays, mine shafts not only look nicer, but when they generate in a cave, they’re given wooden floors, either hanging from chains or supported by tall posts. It’s much better than having them float, and makes them way more fun to explore as well. Only some players remember that the villagers original name was the testificate. It was a name used in a few beta versions that didn’t seem to mean anything, but the term stuck around in the Minecraft community for a long time, often being used to refer to villages a long time ago. Now, it’s just a relic of the past that few modern players probably even remember. Throughout its history, there have been plenty of small inconsistencies in Minecraft. And one pretty interesting example would be the block of lapis lazuli, or should I say the lapis lazuli block, as it was originally called. You see, most minerals in Minecraft are able to be converted into a compressed block form for easier storage. And almost all of them start with the words block of block of iron, block of gold, block of diamond, block of redstone, etc., etc. But the one oddball out was a compressed version of Lapis Lazuli, which was instead just called the Lapis Lazuli block. In the 1.1.7 update, they fixed this inconsistency for Lapis, but weirdly enough didn’t change it for the other compressible blocks like the slime block. Not to mention how the block of quartz and the block of amethyst can’t be uncompressed after they’ve been crafted. So, should probably be called quartz block and amethyst block instead. Right, this is getting confusing. So, we all know about Minecraft’s new wolf variations that were added in 1.2. 20.5. But this actually wasn’t the first time wolf variations were added. Back in the one block at a time update, you were able to name tag a wolf to Mars and get this adorable brown wolf texture. And in the vote update, you can name a wolf King Bog, which is one of the developers usernames, and give your wolf a crown. The crown might be a bit much, but I’d honestly love to be able to have this cute brown puppy in the regular game. I guess the new woods wolf variant will have to do. Minecraft mobs used to look all the same, but now we finally have different types of wolves, cows, pigs, and chickens that all have texture variants depending on what biome they spawned in. We still have the original mob textures for mobs that spawn in plains or forest biomes, but now we’ll get mobs for hot biomes and cold biomes as well. They even went as far as to give the hot and cold chickens their own unique egg items. Is there anything special about these eggs to make them different in any way? No, it just means we can’t stack them with each other, making the inventory issue just a little worse with each and every update. Carrying around food already takes up one or two slots in your hot bar. But what if it took up one or two rows in your entire inventory? Well, that was a reality for many Minecraft players back in 2010 when Minecraft was still in beta. Food simply did not stack unless you used cookies, but those would only stack up to a maximum of eight. That being said, food was much more OP back then because instead of filling a hunger bar, food would just instantly heal back some of your hearts. So, you didn’t need to have nearly as much of it on you as you do nowadays. It was kind of like holding on to a bunch of instant healing potions. Though, some people think potions should stack, too. So, maybe this is still kind of an annoying difference. The old glass texture in Minecraft was barely usable. I mean, sure, you can see what they were going for. The white lines are supposed to make the glass appear shiny. But honestly, it just looks like your cat scratched the window one too many times, and now your view of the outside world is covered in white pixels. When you compare the new and old glass textures, there’s a clear winner here. Get it? Clear. The new glass texture is mostly just a frame, and you can actually see through it. Feels like it’d be obvious, but hey, it only took them 10 years to eventually figure it out. Bat changes were totally unexpected. In 1.20.3, In 20.3, bats were given a complete redesign from the ground up. The old texture was way too HD for how small the mob is, and its face also barely resembles that of a bat. The new bat is just better in every single way. It’s even got a fancy new animation that makes it flap its wings a lot more like a bat and a lot less like a hummingbird. Can you believe it only used to be able to create five Minecraft worlds in total? For a game where you can build anything, the idea of limiting how much a player can build is pretty odd. I mean, if you think about it, every world is technically infinite, so you could just keep walking until you find new chunks. But I think if this limitation existed today, would all still be pretty irritated. One of Minecraft Alpha’s most annoying features was the fact that leaves were permanent. This meant that when you chop down a tree, all of the leaves stayed floating in the air. So, if you wanted to clear out parts of a forest to build your house, you have to manually punch every leaf one by one until they were all gone. This was so boring and not fun at all. Also, the leaf decay mechanic was pretty essential to prevent Minecraft from becoming a leaf punching simulator. Although wood planks feel like a default material in Minecraft. For a long time, most types of wood planks didn’t even exist. Originally, every type of tree in Minecraft would just craft down into a block that just looked like oak planks. Whether it was a spruce log, a birch log, or a jungle log, they all turned into this generic plank block. And it wasn’t until the 1.2.4 update that they each got their own unique texture. From here, the potential of Minecraft building began to really unfold as we got things like slabs, fences, and stairs in all sorts of new colors. Could you imagine how Minecraft buildings would look today if Mojang decided to stick with just one plank type for all logs? It’d be a beige nightmare. Zombie pigmen used to drop cooked pork chop when they were first added to Minecraft. This kind of made sense since they were pigs that lived in the lava filled Nether. So, I guess they’re already walking around pre-cooked. That’s kind of gross to think about. E. Anyways, for the official release of the game, these mobs have their drops very appropriately changed to be gold nuggets and rotten flesh instead. I refuse to believe a creature that looks like that is dropping anything that’s freshly cooked. While most of Minecraft’s texture update was a resounding success, there are a few new textures that are just plainly worse than the originals. For example, take a look at the potato. The original potato had a wonderful shape, excellent shading, and some really iconic shapes on them. Looks like a face if you ask me. See that? There’s There’s two little eyes and a mouth. Anyone else see that? Looks like a fat baby. Just me? Okay then. Anyway, now the new potato is just an incredibly generic shape and pretty much lacks any identifiable features at all. I mean, it’s just a potato. It doesn’t have to be that exciting, but it still feels like this was an overall downgrade. Did you know there used to be a button for adding mods built into Minecraft’s menu? Seriously, this button that says mods and texture packs was on the title screen for a while, making it seem like they were planning to expand the game support for mods. Instead, they eventually just removed the mods part of the button, tucked it away in the options menu, and renamed texture packs to resource packs, and we can still only really use mods if we’re using a mod loader like fabric or forge. Although, if you consider data packs to be mods, then I guess they did eventually make this idea into reality, just not in the way anyone expected. The lower half of the end portal frames texture is the same as end stone, but for the longest time, this texture didn’t actually seamlessly connect with the actual endstone block. It was modified in the 1.19 update to be a bit of a smoother transition. But if you think about it, this was kind of an unnecessary change. I mean, the only place endortal frames can actually spawn is in the portal room in the overworld. Currently, the sound creepers and TNT make when exploding sounds like this. But originally, this sound was very different. Take a listen. It used to sound a lot more bassy and compressed, like it was from a ’90s game or something. Maybe this fits in with Minecraft’s old retro aesthetic, but the art style has come a long way, so it’s probably good they’ve tweaked the sound. When the VEX was first added to Minecraft, it was illegal. It was such a small mob, but it model had the same pixel density as a full-size player. It looked very out of place with its HD textures and almost like something you’d find in a mod. So, the model change in 1.19.3 to make the Vex more closely resemble the Allay not only improved how this mob looked, but also kind of added some law implications to the game as well. Are the Vexes just corrupted versions of the Allay turned evil by evokers? Minecraft’s tutorial is pretty lacking, but apparently that’s mostly by design. Direct guidance on how exactly to play Minecraft was intentionally left out of the game early on to allow players to explore the games themselves and decide what it is they wanted to do. This was fine for the most part, but the one thing that really felt ridiculously unfair was the fact that there was so many crafting recipes in the game and there was no official place to see them all. Sure, you had the community wiki, the Minecraft forums, and countless YouTube videos talking about recipes for new items. But the fact that the recipe book wasn’t added until 1.12 really makes me wonder how on earth most players even survived in the past. Like, don’t ask me how to craft a daylight detector. Nobody knows that off the top of their head. Do you remember when cobblestone used to look like this? It was one of the first blocks added to the game, so it had a pretty basic texture. And honestly, a lot of people considered it to be pretty ugly. Over the years, its texture was tweaked to have a lot less contrast. And although it’s probably better for building now, I still kind of miss the old cobblestone block. Finding monster spawners to create mob farms used to actually be surprisingly easy. This is because they spawn so close to the surface, so you can probably hear the mobs inside and easily locate one by ear. But even easier than that, if you just head on over to a desert, chances are pretty good that you’ll find a monster spawner that has caved in. Since sand is a falling block, I really miss discovering these in my world. It always felt so cool finding one of these in the old game. Did you know you can get Minecraft for free? Don’t worry, I swear this is legal. If you just go to classicmcrafter.net, you’re able to play the original web demo of Minecraft. Back when there were no mobs, there wasn’t any health, and the world wasn’t infinite. All you could do was walk around and place and break blocks. It was a much simpler time. And although it practically has no features, there’s a certain piece that comes from playing this version of the game. Striders are creatures meant to live in the lava. And whenever they’re not in the lava, they get cold, so they turn purple and start shaking. That is unless they’ve had their brains removed. You see, it’s possible to summon any mob without any AI. When you used to summon a strider with no AI, it would still turn purple and shake when out of the lava. But now, when you summon a strider with no AI, it will always be red no matter what. You can dunk him in an ice bath and he won’t even be bothered. This guy is literally unshakable. Phantoms fundamentally changed how players think about sleeping in their Minecraft worlds. Previously, whether or not you slept in your Minecraft world was entirely your choice. But after the addition of phantoms, you have to sleep in order to make them stop spawning. You don’t get the choice of just fighting your way through monsters or spending the nights in caves. Sometimes you just have to skip the night to make the phantoms go away. This was so invasive that Mojang had to add two gamer rules to the game for players to deal with phantoms. A player sleeping percentage game rule that allows players in multiplayer to sleep without needing every online player to be near a bed. And a do insomnia game rule which literally just disables phantom spawning. Yeah, I’m keeping that one on. You might think that stone cutters were added in the village and pillage update in 2019, but you’d be mistaken. As it turns out, the block has its origins all the way back in the alpha of Minecraft Pocket Edition, where instead of being a slab with a spinning saw blade on top of it, the stone cutter was instead this furnace-l like block with a few saw details on its sides. While it was used for cutting stone in the alpha stage, this feature was scrapped for the full release of Minecraft Pocket Edition, and the block lost all functionality despite staying in the game. And while you’ve got to respect the classics, the new stone cutter is definitely a major upgrade in terms of block design, user interface, and functionality. The only place it loses out on is its crafting recipe since the original stone cutter literally only costs four cobblestone. Now we’ve got to shell out three smelted stone blocks and an iron ingot. Inflation, man. Minecraft still has cave sounds, but you don’t seem to hear them as much as you used to back in the day. Back in the day, it feels like you couldn’t go mining without hearing at least one of these terrifying noises. And if you’ve ever played the game before 2020, you’ve probably heard one of the rare low-pitched versions of cave sounds that got removed in the 1.16 update. As much as I miss these old sounds, I’m glad I can go in caves nowadays without having to change my trousers every 30 minutes. Desert temples have experienced a lot of changes ever since their debut back in Minecraft 1.3.1. Desert temples used to generate as colored wall detailing instead of colored terra cotta, which made the orange shapes on the outside of the temple too bright and saturated. It also meant that what was supposed to be a sturdy ancient sandstone could now easily catch fire, leaving these ugly holes on the outside. Thankfully, this was changed in Minecraft 1.8, and now the temples spawn with a much less flammable terra cotta blocks, which are a little more desaturated, too. I personally liked crafting a bed from desert temple wall, but for some reason the monsters inside the temple didn’t want me sleeping over. If you play alpha versions of Minecraft, you’ll probably notice that the lighting looks a little rough. That’s because the game didn’t have any smooth lighting back then, and changes in brightness were really blocky and obvious. Back then, many players played with a mod called better light to improve how the game looked, and Mojang reached out to the mod’s creator in order to implement a similar system into Minecraft. Getting help from modders happened many times in Minecraft’s earlier development, but this was the only time a modder was given their very own custom cape as a thank you for their contribution to Minecraft. And honestly, I think it was justified because I absolutely cannot play Minecraft without smooth lighting enabled. Everybody knows about the totem of Undying, the funny little villagershaped item that effectively makes you immortal. But it didn’t always look like a villager when it was originally added. This was how the totem of Undying looked. a funny little guy with weird little arms and two tiny eyes. I’m really not sure what this totem is supposed to resemble, but having such a bizarre item constantly sitting in your offh hand was kind of a strain on the eyes. So, it’s good that it was eventually updated in Minecraft 1.14. Though, every hardcore YouTuber just changes the texture to their own skin anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. If you remember Minecraft’s old mob AI, you probably know just how terrible it was. Mobs would often just walk in a straight line towards you and wouldn’t even try to walk around walls. But this made it pretty easy to outmaneuver most mobs by just walking around a building, causing them to get stuck and leave you alone. The original golden apple texture was so iconic. But of course, like many of the textures in Minecraft’s texture update, the golden apple got a complete redesign. And while yes, I’m a bit nostalgic for that classic Apple design, I have to admit that the new Apple design is a lot cooler looking. There used to be a way to see through walls and find caves, and it wasn’t a bug. Originally, when hitting the F3 key on your keyboard, every mob would show its mob ID above its head as a name tag. And just like player name tags, these could be seen through walls. This meant that by just hitting F3, you could look for name tags beneath your feet to find mob spawning underground in cage. And if you saw a large clump of name tags, then congratulations because you probably found a mob spawner. This has got to be one of the most overpowered features that Mojang has ever intentionally put in the game. Do you remember when you could save on materials by cutting your ladders in half? Seriously, just by placing one block gaps all the way up to the top of your ladder, you can create a ladder that functions completely normally for half the resources. Unfortunately, this trick no longer works. But hey, maybe it’s for the best. A ladder with a bunch of gaps in it does look pretty darn ugly. Originally, there was no way to skip the night in Minecraft before the addition of beds in beta 1.3. You just had to survive the night, fighting off mobs and lighting up the darkness. It was pretty brutal, and it really makes me realize just how easy the game is when you can always see through the night. I mean, maybe if they removed phantoms, I might actually want to play at night. Who knows? Mossy cobblestone is pretty easy to get a hold of nowadays, but there was a time where it wasn’t actually craftable, and the only structure it ever spawned in was a monster dungeon. This made the block incredibly rare. So, building your household of mossy cobble was kind of a flex, but now you can farm it so easily, it’s practically worth nothing. I guess that’s inflation for you. Cookies are kind of a niche food nowadays, but they were considered a rare item when they were originally added. Since cookies are crafted with cocoa beans and cocoa beans used to be rare loot only found in dungeon chests, they were pretty hard to get a hold of. Then once you did actually find them, there wasn’t a way to farm them yet. So if you wanted even more cookies, you’d have to go out and find another dungeon. That’s a lot of work for a food source that honestly isn’t even that good. But hey, I guess it’s a flex. Most players know that the prismarine block is animated now. It slowly turns from blue to green over time. It’s a bit subtle now, but it was far more noticeable back when it was originally added in Minecraft 1.8. It was darker and noisier, kind of resembling a blue version of Netherrack, and the color shift was much more obvious. This made Prismarine a much harder block to build with since its appearance wasn’t very consistent. So, it does make some sense that the color shift was later changed to be subtler, but I also think it’s too subtle. Most people probably don’t realize it has an animated texture. An obscure detail in the original Minecraft trailer is this Steve. No, not that Steve. I’m talking about the version of Steve that’s kitted out with both mossy cobblestone pants and a stone shirt. We never got this variant of Steve in the official release of Minecraft. There was only one default skin, the basic Steve skin. It’s a shame because when it comes down to choosing between basic jeans and mossy cobblestone pants, there’s a clear winner. We may not have gotten Stone Steve, but Mojang did eventually add Alex as a secondary default skin and then a bunch of new variants in the 1.20 Trails and Tales update, adding some muchneeded variety. Nowadays, water is famous for being able to stop the player from taking all full damage, no matter how high up they’ve fallen from. Now, water has always stopped fall damage if it was deep enough, but there was a time when water that was only one block deep didn’t actually provide any fall damage prevention at all. So, if you’re a modern mcrafter who wants to try playing a bit of beta, maybe don’t try doing any bucket clutches because it probably won’t work out how you expect. Some Minecraft items are so useless that even Mojang forgets they exist. Drawing Minecraft’s texture update, which supposedly updated every texture in the game. A few things were intentionally skipped. Some of these were just because Mojang thought the texture didn’t need to be changed at all, like the creepers texture, but some of these seemed to just be because they forgot, such as the clock. The texture update happened in Minecraft 1.14, but it wasn’t until Minecraft 1.1.7, over 2 years later, that the clock was finally given a new appearance. I guess I can understand that it’s a more complicated item to retexture since it effectively has 64 frames of animation, but it does feel a lot like the clock was just overlooked as something worth retexturing for a while. I mean, it’s hardly even worth crafting, so I really don’t blame them. Setting your spawn point at your bed is a fundamental Minecraft mechanic. And while it’s as easy as just right-clicking it nowadays, it didn’t used to be so simple. Because when beds were originally added, the only way to actually set your spawn was to fully sleep through the night. So if there were any monsters nearby, preventing you from going to bed, you’d have to actually fight them in order to guarantee you could set your spawn. And you couldn’t just wait for the day either because when the sun comes out and the monsters go away, you can’t sleep anymore. So setting your spawn is once again impossible. This really made it hard to justify building your base too far from spawn. So, I’m personally very thankful that setting your spawn point isn’t as much of a pain as it used to be. The end poem is iconic, but honestly just way too long to read. I don’t think I’ve ever even read the entire thing through once. It just scrolls way too slow. It literally takes over 7 and 1/2 minutes to just sit and watch the poem gradually scroll its way across your screen, which is just too much of a commitment. But if you hold space, there’s actually now a way to speed up how fast it scrolls and potentially read the whole thing in a more reasonable amount of time. But personally, I’m probably just going to continue skipping straight past it to respawn. In the past, it was impossible to damage multiple mobs at once using a sword since this was before the sword’s sweeping edge existed. So instead of instantly killing a bunch of pre-damaged mobs with one sword swing to collect all of the XP, you had to individually kill all of the mobs from your skeleton farm one at a time. Say what you want about the 1.9 combat update. It definitely made using these farms much more manageable. During Minecraft Live in 2020, archaeology was announced, and you craft not one but two different brushes to dig up sniffers and pottery shirts. In the presentation, Mojang showed off an oxidized and nonoxidized version of the brush. Why? We’re not really sure. And as much as I think having your oxidized brush be cleaned when you’re struck by lightning is hilarious, I can’t imagine this item would have served a more important purpose. And it’s probably not a major loss that it was never added to the game. Do you remember when Minecraft was simple? That the ultimate end goal was really just finding diamonds and making some diamond tools. Seriously, before the ender dragon or villagers or enchanting, all we could really do is slowly get better tools, dive deeper into the caves and try to build cool houses. It was definitely a much simpler time, but that’s what was so great about it. You could really just do whatever you like, such as continue mining a ridiculous number of diamonds. Minecraft sunsets are sort of peaceful, but they didn’t used to be. In older versions of the game, the sun set like this with the whole world getting suddenly darker one level at a time, as opposed to the gradual fade we’re familiar with today. And it almost felt like someone was slowly turning off the lights in a room one at a time. And although that’s pretty unrealistic for light coming from the sky, it was pretty terrifying. Nowadays, Minecraft’s menu screen has this slick, highquality logo and a panoramic background that changes with every update. But you might remember that the original menu screen looks like this. just dark dirt blocks in the background and a Minecraft logo that’s just made out of stone blocks. The letters in the word Minecraft would animate in every time you came back to the main menu, which was super satisfying to watch. And I honestly wish the current menu did something like this. All it does is just sit there do something boring letters. Did you know that Minecraft has a dark mode? Well, sort of. There are several settings in the accessibility settings menu that you can enable to have a dark mode menu. Simply enable the monochrome logo and then turn on high contrast mode. Immediately, you’ll then be greeted with this new black Mojang loading screen. And then you’ll see that all of your menu buttons have this black, cyan, and magenta color scheme. The only thing this is missing now is a matching color scheme for all of the inventory screens and workbenches. When fences were first added to Minecraft, they were actually full blocks. Well, obviously they don’t look like it, but if you hover your cursor over a fence block, you’ll see that its hitbox is actually much larger than the fence itself. This meant it was very easy to accidentally bump into the invisible edges of the fence block when trying to walk near them, which was super annoying. To make matters even worse, these old fences didn’t even connect to solid blocks. They could only connect to each other. So, if you wanted to have a fence connected to a building, well, enjoy the ugly gap. Remember Minecraft’s old super glowy lava texture? It felt a lot more hot and goopy, like a lava lamp, as compared to the current lava texture, which just looks like a lake filled with melted cheese or baked beans or something. The old lava had such a vibe. I want to touch it or drink it or something. Hot. Just like how there used to be just a few variants of villagers, there was once a time where there was only one variant of zombie villagers. Instead of having a different texture for every single type of villager that could exist. The original zombie villager just wore the same clothes as a zombie with a green-skinned villager shaped head instead of the usual zombie head. Not only was it weird that the villager’s clothes just suddenly instantly changed into a teal shirt and blue pants, but it was also deeply uncomfortable seeing a villager wear short sleeves. The only thing worse is learning about this secret villager texture in the game’s files that depicts the villager in shorts and a tank top. Put your clothes back on, man. Do you remember how annoying it used to be to break wooden doors? It used to be possible to open wooden doors by either right clicking them or left clicking them. meaning that if you tried punching a door to break it, it would open up, stopping you from destroying it, unless you’re specifically aiming at the door’s hinge. This wasn’t the biggest deal, but it did give a lot of older players a muscle memory to always break doors at their hinge, which I’m sure some people still instinctively do to this day, myself included. Do you remember when the creative inventory looks like this? Instead of being organized into tabs, it was just one super long list of every item in the game. And the item versions of blocks had this weird lack of shading that made them way brighter than they actually look in the world. It may be a small thing, but I much prefer the way blocks look in the inventory nowadays. It’s a lot more accurate and doesn’t burn my eyeballs. Do you remember how terrible boats used to be? Not only were they painfully slow to the point of being nearly useless, but they were also so unbelievably fragile and lightly bumping into any block would cause your boat to shatter into sticks, wasting all of the wood it took to craft it. Maybe the reason these boats were so slow was just because they didn’t have paddles. I mean, what was Steve doing before? Paddling the boat with his hands. Sounds like this is your own fault, buddy. Fences in Minecraft are 50% more expensive than they used to be. Originally, in order to get a wooden fence, all you need to do is put six sticks into the crafting table. Now, we have to also add four wooden planks to specify what color fence we want. It makes sense that they had to change the recipe to account for having fences in any color, but come on, man. This was such a deal. When creative mode was first added to Minecraft, the developers decided to help get you started in every new creative world you create by putting a bunch of random blocks in your inventory. Maybe some people found this useful to quickly get to building something cool. But I think in general most people probably prefer to chuck everything out and start with an empty hot bar which they could fill with whatever blocks they wanted to build with themselves. I don’t know. I never really understood the point of this feature and I was glad to see it get removed. Let me know if you ever actually just use these default blocks to build with. I bet you’ll say no. Doesn’t it feel like there are barely any passive mobs that spawn in Minecraft nowadays? That’s probably because nowadays Minecraft has a passive mob cap which limits the number of passive mobs that can spawn in every chunk. This wasn’t the case in older versions of the game, and passive mobs would continue spawning anywhere in the world, so players would always be able to find food and wool without having to walk for very long. So, I have to feel bad for murdering every animal I saw on site. They were better times. Carrots and golden carrots have similar textures, but when they were first added in snapshots, they looked completely different from one another. The golden carrot was one long skinny carrot, whereas the regular carrot was a big bundle of carrots. It was a little confusing to have two similar items be visually depicted in such different ways, especially when one just looks like a regular item and the other looks like a literal bundle of five items. But of course, when officially shipped in the full 1.4.2 update, carrots and golden carrots ended up having nearly identical textures, which carried over into the 1.14 texture update, too. I mean, if they didn’t think golden apples needed a unique shape as compared to regular apples, I’m not quite sure why they thought carrots would need one. Nowadays, Mojang tries to make Minecraft a very ethical game and discourages players from harming innocent animals. But originally, the only way you could get wool off of a sheep was by punching it. This was a bit different from other mobs where you got loot from them by actually killing them and putting them out of their misery. The best way to farm wool was to just punch a sheep, wait for it to grow the wool back, and punch it again, continuing the cycle until you slowly beat it to death. Obviously, that was way too cruel to keep in the game. So, thank goodness the developers gave us shears. Sorry, Sheepy. My bad. Minecraft’s fire is very forgiving, but it used to be just as rampant and dangerous as real fires are. If you were lucky enough to generate a lava pool in a forest, well, the forest fire would spread so quickly that you had no shot of putting them out. Best thing you can do is just start gathering materials to build a house in some recently flattened land. Most YouTubers play Minecraft on its brightest setting to make the game easier to watch. But originally, Minecraft was so unbelievably dark and had no way to adjust its brightness. This made exploring any cave feel like walking around in a pitch black room where your torches only let you see a few steps ahead. Honestly, it was a completely different experience, one that was much scarier and more immersive. And it makes me wish Mojang found some sort of way to bring that feeling back to the game. And no, the deep dark doesn’t count. It’s just too boring. You’ve probably seen a lot of people build their portal in this 4×5 shape, which is the smallest possible portal you can build in Minecraft. But this isn’t just for conserving resources. It’s also because in the past it was impossible to build a portal that was any bigger than this where nowadays you can build portals up to a whopping 23x 23 blocks. The portal structure used to only ever work in this one shape. So if you built a portal room that was an odd number of blocks wide. You’d either have to rebuild the room to be an even instead or just put two portals in the room to compensate. There aren’t many items in Minecraft that are immune to being destroyed. The Nether Star is immune to explosion damage. Netherite items are immune to fire damage and that’s it. Since there aren’t many examples, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that there was a way to actually destroy any of these damage immune items via a bug. You see, no matter how many items you put inside of a Shulker box in the past, the whole thing would get destroyed the moment it touched fire, a cactus, or an explosion, or your Netherite gear burned up in an instant. So, to make this make a little more sense, Mojang changed the behavior of Shulker boxes in 1.17, causing them to spill out their items when destroyed instead of just disappearing immediately. This means that your fireproof items won’t just immediately burn, and even some of your other valuable items might have a better chance of jumping out of harm’s way. When creative mode was first added, it wasn’t perfect, and one of the key missing features was having mobs be neutral towards you. Sure, you were invincible and couldn’t take any damage, but as far as the mobs were concerned, you were still something they could attack. So, they would just hopelessly chase you like needy fans, this isn’t a huge deal for mobs like skeletons, zombies, and spiders. But obviously for creepers, this was an absolute nightmare since you’d just be minding your own business, building a house in creative mode, and then a creeper would pop by to ruin everything. Since food in Minecraft used to just be used to instantly heal back a few hearts, it actually lacked any sort of proper eating animation. So instead of gradually taking bites out of a cooked pork chop, you just instantly swallow the entire thing whole. Sure, it might be a more efficient way to finish your food, but uh you might end up with a summer cake later from not chewing. Bows in Minecraft are pretty good, but they’re nothing like they were in Minecraft indef back then. Not only did they have infinite durability, but they also had no charge time, allowing you to spam arrows as fast as you like. These arrows traveled at their maximum speed, so they were really overpowered, so it makes sense that Notch decided to make the bow require a bit of a charge time. Still, it might be nice to get functionality like this back into the current game in some balanced way, like a quick fire enchantment. Creepers actually used to be a lot scarier when they were first added. Nowadays, a creeper gives you a lot of heads up to let you know he’s about to blow you up. It makes a little sound, stands perfectly still, and starts flashing white. But originally, creepers would just run up to you, start walking to the side of it, and then blow up super quickly. This almost never felt fair, and it made fighting a creeper a much more terrifying experience. Almost guaranteed to result in your builds being destroyed. I’m glad we don’t have these creepers in the game anymore. I almost have a hard time enough with the new ones. Did you know that you need to be able to change your render distance by just hitting F on your keyboard? Seriously, instead of modifying your render distance in the video settings menu, you used to just tap a key on your keyboard to cycle through a few different preset render distances, allowing you to quickly swap between low render distances for performance and high render distances for screenshots. Eventually, this key was removed and probably for good reason since I imagine hitting the F key is pretty easy to do by accident. Now F is bound to item swapping, which is why I always accidentally end up with a pickaxe in the wrong hand. When sponges were first added, they looked less like an actual sponge and more like a block of Swiss cheese. Later, when the block was given functionality, its texture was changed and it looked a lot more like a sponge than it used to. Mojang could have left the block like this. But then in the texture update, where the entire look of Minecraft was given a refresh, they decided to change sponges into this. Yep, it’s a cheese block again. More subtle for sure, but still straight cheese dog. Do you remember the pain of enchanting in older versions of Minecraft where all of your levels would be taken from you when you enchant one item? Currently, only a few levels are taken along with your lapis. But originally, if you did a level 30 enchantment, all 30 of your levels were just gone. Not to mention, the original enchantment limit wasn’t 30. It was actually 50. So trying to upgrade all of your gear to the maximum level was an insane grind and repairing your items was a pain, especially considering mending didn’t exist yet. So all of your tools would eventually break anyway. Honestly, maybe the game was better off like that. Creative mode feels like one of Minecraft’s main game modes, but back in Minecraft beta, it didn’t even officially exist. The only way to play something like creative mode was to use mods that gave you infinite items. But uh I never did that. I was got my items legit. Using a shovel on the ground to create path blocks is one of the easiest ways to give your Minecraft build some nice looking roads. But it used to be much more annoying to actually create them since originally path blocks would only ever be created if you specifically used a shovel on a grass block. This meant that if you had one block of dirt in the middle of your path, you’d have to somehow get grass to spread onto it if you wanted to flatten it down with the rest of its surrounding blocks. This was obviously way too annoying. So Mojang eventually allowed us to just create path blocks using any dirt-like block, including coarse dirt, podzol, and mycelium. Just don’t ask where the yellow grass comes from when doing it on a dirt block, your guess is as good as mine. Flowing water is able to push entities around, but weirdly enough, flowing lava wasn’t previously able to do this. For the longest time, if a player with fire resistance stood inside flowing lava, they would just stand perfectly still. This was probably an oversight by the developers who thought there was no point in making lava push mobs since they’re likely going to die so quickly. But when it came time to do the big Nether update in 1.16, they realized that the sheer number of fireresistant mobs probably justified giving lava this feature. And now making mob farms in the Nether is significantly easier than it used to be. Pigs seem pretty useless nowadays since they only drop pork chops, which aren’t even the best food in the game. But originally, pigs were super useful because pork chops were the only food in the game. Not every mob dropped meat in the beginning. Cows just gave you leather, chickens gave you feathers, and sheep gave you wool. This made pigs super useful. But that glory didn’t last long. As pretty quickly, Mojang decided that other mobs should give the player food, too. And now pigs are pretty much only good for riding. And I’m not even the best at that either. Useless pig. Enchanting already feels like it takes a lot of luck. But when enchanting tables were first added, it was literal gambling. The current enchanting tables allows you to preview one of the enchantments you could get on your item. But this didn’t always exist. You just had to crush your fingers and hope that whatever you’re about to spend all of your levels on is going to be worth it. And it’s Aqua Affinity. Great. Thanks. One odd thing about the original cactus block was the fact that it had black spines. I mean, if you look at almost any cactus in the world, you’ll probably notice that it has white spines. So, these black spines didn’t feel super true to life. So, the block was changed to have white spines to be more realistic. And later on, it was also updated to grow flowers on top of itself, making the desert significantly nicer to look at with the cactus flowers and dry grass combined. Though, apparently, farming these cactus flowers is kind of a pain. So, good luck getting enough of them to use in a custom build. There are over a thousand items in Minecraft, and that number just keeps going up with every update. So, the fact that the creative inventory has tabs and a search bar makes it much easier to find the blocks and items you’re looking for. But originally, the creative menu was much simpler. Instead of being organized, every item in the game was just in a single massive page, and you just had to memorize where every item was in the list. To be fair, these items were kind of sorted, but it was still a huge pain to navigate. I don’t know how anyone built anything back then without going absolutely insane. A pivotal Minecraft mechanic from before the 1.9 combat update is sword blocking. Yeah, we used to be able to guard ourselves with our swords in order to take less damage. Nowadays, we can only block ourselves from damage with an entirely separate item that has to take up an extra inventory slot. The feature is so good that people still prefer to do PvP in these older versions just to have sword blocking back. I doubt we’ll ever see sword blocking return, but it’s nice to know that there are some people out there still using it. Flint and Steel and TNT were added around the same time. But believe it or not, TNT wasn’t actually ignited using flint and steel at all. Instead, you just punch TNT to ignite it. And flint and steel was explicitly used for creating fires. It was kind of weird how obvious it was that these two items should probably be related to each other, but Notch eventually figured it out and make TNT behave how it does now. If you’re wondering how you were supposed to pick up this old version of TNT since trying to mine it just ignites it, well, apparently you’re just supposed to punch it again. Not sure that’s great advice for actual bomb diffusing, but hey, what do I know? I guess in early Minecraft, Mojang wanted to make sure you didn’t lose certain items when you dropped them on the ground. Certain item forms of blocks would always render way too large when dropped as an item entity, which obviously made them easier to spot. But yeah, this was definitely a bug, so it got patched out pretty quickly. Structures that have good loot are something modern mcrafter might take for granted. As in earlier versions of the game, there was only one structure that ever gave you anything good, and that was the village of blacksmith. This building always had a chest with iron armor, tools, diamonds, obsidian, or food, giving players who found it a big head start in their survival world. It’s still an exciting structure to find for sure, but with so many other places where good loot chest spawn, finding a blacksmith really just doesn’t hit the same as it used to. You might think you could just use fence gates to go in and out of your farm, but back in this version of Minecraft, fence gates didn’t exist. So instead, players had to either break and place back their fences, place blocks near the fence to parkour in and out, or the ugliest option, use a regular door as the entrance to your farm. None of these options were very good, but most people would end up choosing the door option because while it looks absolutely terribly, it did happen to be the most convenient. But today, I think I’d rather stick with fence gates now that we have them. Charcoal is one of those items that’s pretty useful in the early game since it allows you to easily smelt items without needing to find coal ore. But then it becomes completely useless the moment you find one cave and you’re unlikely to ever make it again. This isn’t a huge deal nowadays since coal and charcoal look very different. But when charcoal was originally added, it literally looked identical to coal. This was annoying for a lot of players who would open their inventory and go to combine their coals into a single stack, only to realize that some of their coal was actually charcoal the whole time. It wasn’t a world-ending inconvenience by any means, but it definitely caused enough mild frustration that the texture change was deeply appreciated by the community. Everyone knows about Minecraft’s iconic pink sheep, which has an incredibly low chance of naturally spawning. But did you know that when sheep were first added, some of their colors were a bit off? The original pink sheep had this super light and desaturated color, making it look like cotton candy. It is pretty cute, but bizarrely, its color didn’t really match the pink wool block at all. The same was also true for the light blue sheep. But what was even worse was the orange sheep. Yeah, it’s literally yellow. Man, not really needs to get his eyes fixed. If you’ve been playing Minecraft long enough, you probably remember when zombie villagers looked like this. Instead of directly resembling their villager counterparts, zombie villagers used to just wear the same clothes as regular zombies. with the main difference being their head shape. It really made the mob feel like a pretty lazy tweak of the regular zombie and it stayed this way for nearly three years. When they finally changed zombie villagers to actually keep their villager clothes when they were infected, it felt like a huge upgrade to the mob, giving them their own identity. Thank goodness we no longer have to bear witness to the unholy sight of a villager wearing short sleeves and jeans. Minecraft has so many flowers with new ones still being added in recent updates. But for the longest time, the only flowers in the game were just these two, the dandelion and the rose. For over 4 years, if you wanted to bring life and color to your builds, these were your only options, making any flower fields just look like they were covered in splatters of ketchup and mustard. Thank goodness they eventually added flowers like tulips, lilacs, and eye blossoms because the game desperately needed them. Do you remember the crazy bug that made it possible to have an unbreakable diamond pickaxe? All you had to do was start breaking a block and then immediately swap to a different tool the moment the block broke. This means that if you can pull off the timing consistently enough, you’re able to mine as much as you want with a diamond pickaxe, but it’s putting all of the tool damage onto wooden pickaxes. Though, to be honest, actually trying to do this in a survival world is probably just too annoying to make it worth it. Glowstone used to be one of Minecraft’s most hated blocks since it was one of the only light sources back in the day, but its texture was so bizarre and hard to use in building. It wasn’t just a yellow block. It also had this gross green tint to it that made it look like it was moldy or something. I mean, the Nether was already pretty ugly. It wasn’t making that place look any worse, but it was really annoying that one of our only options for persistent lighting in our builds had to be this of all things. We did eventually get sea lanterns too, which gave us a simpler option. But thankfully, the texture for glowstone was also updated later on, making it much nicer to look at in general and not nearly as green as it was before. You might think that minecarts were the fastest form of transportation in early Minecraft before we had horses or elitra. But there was actually a faster way. Boats. No, I’m not talking about sailing in the ocean. I’m talking about building boat bridges. By blazing a series of boats all in a line, you can spam right click to instantly travel from one boat to the next, allowing you to transport yourself across pretty long distances in a matter of seconds. As an added bonus, building a couple of boats is much cheaper than crafting minecarts and rails. Ironically, boats are still better than minecarts today since they move so fast on top of ice. Seriously, why do we even have minecarts at this point? For whatever reason, Mojang cannot decide what to do with the cow’s horns. When cows were first added to Minecraft, they were black instead of brown and didn’t have any horns at all. But when they were eventually updated to look a little nicer, the developers didn’t seem to agree on where its new horns should sit on the front of the head, the back of the head, inside of the head, who knows? What I do know is the fact that cow should absolutely not have this weird new snout they’ve gotten in more recent updates. We’ve officially entered the darkest timeline. If you played Minecraft in beta, then you probably know that many of Minecraft’s main survival mechanics weren’t actually added until the game’s full release, including the hunger system. In the past, the player didn’t have a hunger bar at all, and eating food would just directly heal back some of your hearts. You may think that this made food much more powerful in the past, but there’s one missing feature that honestly makes food way better in the modern game, and that’s sprinting. Since having a full hunger bar let you sprint, it’s much easier to evade and escape from attacking mobs. Back in the day, players walked incredibly slowly. So, if you were facing off against something like a skeleton, your only options were to win the fight or die. And since food didn’t stack, you effectively had to fill your entire hot bar with food if you wanted to be able to heal yourself quickly. Yeah, I’m not going to be nostalgic about this one. Food is much better than it used to be. Minecraft egg icons used to all look pretty much the same, and it was almost extremely difficult to tell certain eggs apart. However, in the 2025 spring drop, every single spawn egg was given its own unique texture directly inspired by the mob it’s meant to spawn. Now, it’s much more obvious to see that this is a polar bear, and this is a panda. Minecraft has dozens and dozens of diverse biomes nowadays. It’s easy to forget that it all started with this simple forest biome. Bright green grass, bright green trees, and some small hills. Nothing crazy, but it still felt like home. Drawing Minecraft indev, axes used to look less like they were primed to chop trees and more primed to take into battle. That’s because it had two axes on the head, making them look extremely destructive and deadly. This was changed after just a few days to look more like the wood chopping axe we’re more familiar with today, as opposed to the original battle axe design. While I understand the change, I think it would have been pretty awesome to walk around wielding a battle axe. For the first 12 years of Minecraft’s existence, it seemed like the developers wanted us to play on the lowest brightness setting, as that was the default whenever you first launched the game. Maybe they wanted the game to feel spookier and give you more of a reason to actually craft torches. But most players just wanted ahead and boosted the brightness all the way to 100 so that they could see as much as possible. So, in the 1.18 caves and cliffs update, Mojang finally took the hint and increased the default brightness. Though, they only set it to 50% instead of the full 100. It’s better for sure, but honestly, I think I’d still rather just use a mod that gives me permanent night vision. Bone meal is one of the most powerful items in Minecraft, allowing you to speed up the growth of any crop. But originally, it was even better than it is now. Instead of having a random chance to make a crop grow by one level, bone meal was able to instantly grow any crop with just one item. This gave players a very good reason to hunt skeletons, since with just a few bones, you could quickly and easily get a ton of wood or food instead of having to wait for such a long time. Trust me, you haven’t felt real power until you’ve tried using bone meal before the 1.5 update. It’s crazy to think that for much of the game’s early life, players had to literally memorize every crafting recipe in the game. Or if you’re like me, you just Google a recipe if you needed to craft something. You see, the in-game recipe book wasn’t even added to Minecraft until the 1.12 update. For the first 8 years of the game’s existence, players had to strictly rely upon online sources like YouTube in order to learn how to craft anything in the game. This makes sense since for the longest time was opposed to adding any sort of tutorial to the game as he wanted players to naturally discover most of Minecraft’s features. Of course, Minecraft would eventually have so many items and mechanics that some form of in-game guides would eventually become necessary. And I think a combination of the crafting guide and the advancements menu is a pretty good compromise. Although it wasn’t even in the game for a very long time, the old Minecraft hurt sound is iconic. There’s something so satisfying about hearing this sound whenever you take damage. And even though it might not be a perfect fit for the modern game, I wish they consider at least adding it back to the game via the programmer art resource pack, which contains all of the old Minecraft textures. Add it or I’m boy cutting Minecraft. Since most of Minecraft’s early textures were just made by the programmers instead of actual pixel artists, some of them looked a little rough. And no texture was a better example of this than the texture for Netherrack. This block was incredibly noisy and gross to look at, making it not only completely useless for building, but also genuinely uncomfortable to think about stepping on. Thank goodness, Netherrack was later updated to look more like a redstone-like material instead of looking like something that’s honestly too gory to put in a kids game. The chest feels like it’s been around since the beginning of Minecraft, having undergone very few changes. But did you know that originally, instead of having a slightly slimmer block model with an opening animation, it was literally just a solid block? It didn’t animate. The double chest variant looked really weird and it wasn’t even rotatable. The latch just always faced west. I’m very glad we now have the new model in animation because the old chest just didn’t feel right. Nowadays, most mobs have attack animations like zombies swinging their arms up when they hit you and skeletons pulling back the strings of their bows. But back in the day, mobs didn’t have any animations at all. They just walked up to you and dealt damage when they touched you. Worst of all, the skeleton didn’t even hold its bow like an actual bow. Instead, it just showed up in its hand like a regular item, and an arrow would just spawn in front of it when it went to shoot at the player. It’s pretty fun to watch, but made the mob feel pretty incomplete. So, I’m glad they eventually had the sense to change the skeleton’s animations. Veteran players likely remember that it used to be impossible to place two chests next to each other. If you try to place a chest next to another chest, it would combine into a large chest, and then if you try to place a third next to that, the game just wouldn’t let you. This meant that your chest rooms would always have these awkward gaps between the chest which was really ugly and a huge waste of space. Eventually, we got the trapped chest, which can be placed next to regular chest. But every trapped chest you make costs one trip wire hook, which can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. So, you have to be really rich if you wanted to place your chest next to each other. It was only in 2018 during the 1.13 update that Mojang finally decided to let us place chests down side by side. 8 years after the block was first added to the game. I wonder what took them so long. When shields were originally added, they didn’t look quite right when placed in an item frame. They were originally very offcenter, making them look out of place whenever you try to use one for decoration. It didn’t necessarily make them entirely unusable, but having them now be centered is a much appreciated quality of life change. You may not have noticed, but throughout Minecraft’s history, this little texture has been on a wild ride. It was first added in the 1.8 8 update when the enchanting table was changed to consume lapis lazuli. Then in the snapshots for the 1.18 update, it was changed to this, losing some of its detail. Doesn’t seem that crazy, right? Well, then in the official 1.18 release, they changed the texture to this, which is just a completely desaturated version of the lapis lazuli texture. You think it would end there and that Mojang was finally happy with how this one tiny texture looks. Well, guess again. In update 1.20.2, two, Mojang decided to revert it back to how it looked during the 1.18 snapshots, ending up with the version of the texture that had the least detail. We’ll have to see if they’re actually happy with this or if they’re going to change it several more times in the next few years. Normally, the beacon is an item you can get as a reward for beating the wither, but for a moment, Mojang made it a reward for beating the Ender Dragon as well. You see, during the snapshots for the 1.9 update, which added end cities, the end ships in the cities generated with a speed beacon on it. This would have been pretty good loot to find on the ships if it wasn’t for the fact that a week later they were replaced with pumpkins. Then another week later, the pumpkins were replaced with a book called work in progress. And then 2 months after that, the book was replaced with an item frame holding a pair of elytra. So, if I had to pick between a beacon or an elytra, I think I’ll pick the elytra every time. I know it’s been talked about a lot, but I still can’t get over the fact that you used to be able to milk squids in Minecraft. It was just so weird. Like, I thought squids were supposed to shoot ink. Why are they making milk? I don’t know. Honestly, just talking about it makes me feel gross. Moving on. When slabs were first added to Minecraft, there was only one type of slab, the smooth stone slab. And the way you crafted it felt really bizarre. No, it didn’t take three stone blocks. It took three cobblestone blocks. Looking at this recipe nowadays feels really cursed. But if you think about how few items existed in Minecraft to create crafting recipes with, it kind of makes sense. Then of course, a recipe was changed to use the regular stone block in the 1.3 update. And then it was changed for the final time in 1.14, now being crafted with an actual smooth stone block. Which came first, the village or the villages? No, this isn’t some lame riddle. There’s actually an answer to this one. It’s villages. That’s right. Hey, before Mojang even added villages to the game, they added these creepy empty villages which made the world feel so dead and eerie when they were first added. Then, of course, villagers were later added to the game and we all realized there wasn’t anything to be afraid of in these villages at all. Except how villagers look, I guess. Do you remember the original design of horses? They were incredibly high detail with moving jaws, bendable legs, and 3D saddles. A lot of people felt like horses looked too modded, which makes sense since they were directly inspired by the horses from the Mo Creatures mod. And the mod creator, Dr. Zark, even helped to officially add them to the game. They stayed this way for 5 years until Mojang looked at the horse one day and suddenly realized it looks nothing like any of the other mobs in the game and gave it a complete redesign to be much simpler. This new design definitely fits into the rest of the game much better. But I have to admit, I’m still a little bit nostalgic for that original design. Look, they kicked their tiny feet. For the longest time, the fortune enchantment didn’t work on gold or iron since mining these blocks would only ever drop the block itself. But this all changed in the caves and cliffs update where iron ore would instead drop the new raw iron item when mined, allowing the fortune enchantment to finally actually work. But if you look closely at the raw iron texture, you might notice that it looks less like a hunk of raw metal and more like a hunk of raw meat. Seriously, the item looks more like it belongs with raw chicken and raw rabbit than it does with raw gold and raw copper. As for the raw iron block, that is literally a pile of potatoes. Ever since the elytra was added, players have always wanted the ability to disengage the elytra wings in midair. But the only way you could actually do it was by quickly opening your inventory and taking the elytra off manually. But now, we actually have the ability to instantly swap our elytra with a chest plate or just right- clicking it on a hopper. This makes doing fancy elytra maneuvers much easier and means that you can fly up in the air with your elytra quickly swapping to a chest plate, take out your mace to perform a smash attack, all without opening your inventory once. Or, you know, you could totally miss and just die. But it’s great to have the option. For most players, the item that creepers drop on death is called gunpowder. But to some Minecraft veterans, this item is still called sulfur. You see, when it was first added to the game, that’s what the item was called, and it could be dropped by any mob. It took over a year of sulfur being in the game for it to eventually be renamed to gunpowder, which definitely helps players understand what it’s for if they don’t know what sulfur actually is. Everyone knows now that a boat can be used to negate all fall damage. It’s a useful life hack, but just be sure not to do this in versions before Minecraft 1.7.2 because back then, falling from a boat was just like falling on your feet, which is to say very, very painful. Of course, it doesn’t really make much sense that the boat would save you from taking full damage. It’s just a plank of wood after all. Stairs used to be one of the most annoying blocks in Minecraft. I mean, sure, they made it really convenient to travel up and down your builds without having to hold the jump button, but the fact that they disabled your ability to sprint when you ran up them made stair blocks feel really annoying to interact with. It definitely felt like something about the game was broken. So, understandably, Mojang changed how sprinting works. And now, your sprint is only ever cancelled if you run into a block that’s too tall to step up. So, you can now sprint full speed up staircases, even if that might be dangerous in the real world. Baby zombies are one of Minecraft’s greatest threats since they’re incredibly fast, have a tiny hitbox, and have the same health and damage as a regular zombie. But, they used to be even worse since unlike their grown-up counterparts, baby zombies used to be totally immune to burning in the daylight. This meant that when the sun came out and most of the monsters went away, there would still be a few of these speedy demons mulling about, ready to ruin what was supposed to be a peaceful day. Now, I don’t say this every day, but I’m glad babies can burn. Now, if you were picking the default keybinds for Minecraft, what key would you pick for opening your inventory? Well, the letter I might be an obvious pick, but if you think about where it is on the keyboard, it’s a little too far away from any of the other keys the player uses regularly. Regardless, this was actually the original inventory keybind. And apparently some people still rebind the inventory key to I to this day since they’re so used to it. Personally, I think that’s absolutely foul. I keep inventory bound to caps lock. Beacons can be used in the Nether, and that’s thanks to a handy little feature where beacon beams are able to go through bedrock. But this wasn’t always the case. In older versions of the game, you had to find some way to destroy the bedrock ceiling if you wanted your beacon beam to shine through to the Nether sky. This original behavior did seem a lot more logical. But Mojang probably didn’t want players using bugs and glitches to break what’s supposed to be an unbreakable block just to set up a beacon. So, they needed to come up with some sort of compromise, even if it does seem a little odd. When you go to fight a boss in Minecraft, like the Ender Dragon, the name of the mob shows up above its health bar. But this wasn’t always the case. Back when the Ender Dragon was the only boss in the game, it originally just had the text boss health at the top of the screen. It was only after the weather was added in the pretty scary update that the developers realized it might be good to make the health bar’s title a little more specific and changed the ender dragon to say ender dragon and the wither to say wither. As an added bonus, if you can actually manage to get a name tag onto a wither, you can make the bus bar at the top of the screen say whatever you like. So maybe if you rename it boss health, you can feel like you’re still playing Minecraft in the olden days. Most veteran players probably remember how Minecraft’s villagers used to look. They were really basic little blocky houses that were just made of oak and cobblestone. And while they look okay in say a plains biome, they didn’t necessarily look as good in something like a tiger or a savannah. Fortunately, Mojang recognized this and completely overhauled villagers in the village and village update. Not only did this come with completely unique building styles for villagers in different biomes, but we even got cool new biome specific outfits for all of the villagers. This even included unique outfits for villagers born in swamps or jungles, even though the game doesn’t even have swamp villages and jungle villages. Maybe someday. Every Minecraft YouTuber you’ve ever watched has probably talked to you by using F5 mode and looking directly into the camera. Well, everyone except the people playing beta Minecraft back then, hitting F5 would only show you your backside. And it wasn’t originally possible to view the player’s face in the third person view. Just think, if they kept F5 mode like this, then we never would have had Camman 18. What a tragedy. The caves and cliffs update made Minecraft’s cave systems much more diverse and beautiful. But once upon a time, there were no cave biomes, and there were no variations of stone. All you had were these long, noodly caves, and the same stone texture continuing on and on forever. It may seem a little boring looking back, but these old caves were just so immersive and scary to me. Maybe that’s just nostalgia speaking, but you know what? I don’t care. Oh my gosh. Do you remember when you couldn’t use a tool to speed up breaking a crafting table or furnace? It was so painful. Even with a nice diamond axe, breaking down your crafting table feel, it was like it takes ages. And a furnace was even worse. If they never made these blocks faster to break, I probably would have stopped playing ages ago. Or I would have just wasted all my wood constantly crafting new crafting tables. Hey, I guess I already do that. When peaceful mode was first added, it wasn’t exactly all that peaceful. Although hostile mobs weren’t able to spawn in peaceful mode, it was still possible for neutral mobs like wolves to spawn. And when angered, these neutral mobs would still attack and kill the player. This was a pretty fun oversight for the game mode that’s supposed to make Minecraft a less violent game since there are few things quite as dangerous as being eaten alive by an entire pack of wolves. Of course, this was eventually changed and all neutral mobs had the hostile behavior completely removed when the game wasn’t peaceful. The Phantom went through several design changes where it looked more like a manta ray, more like a bug, and even one where it had a very nether-like color palette. The original concept also had this really goofy looking mouth. I think the design that they eventually ended up with was by far the coolest looking one, even if it is the worst mob in the entire game. Nowadays, people build all sorts of bases using the countless number of blocks Minecraft has added over the years. But back in the early days, you were pretty much limited to cobblestone and oak wood. So, it was hard to build a home that felt very unique. Because of this, lots of players ended up building houses into the size of mountains or transforming a cave into a stylish cave base. Not only is this the easiest way to quickly build yourself a home in the early game, but it also means you don’t have to worry too much about making a nicel looking exterior, and you can just focus on designing a nice interior. As for me, I was and still am just a dirt house guy. I like to keep it classy. Getting your crops trampled is one of the most annoying things that can happen in Minecraft. But it used to be so much worse. Currently, a crop will be trampled if a mob falls or jumps on the block. But originally, you could trample crops by just walking on them. This meant that you literally couldn’t collect the items from your farm without having to retail the land. Additionally, this also meant that any farms you made that didn’t have fences around them were pretty much guaranteed to be ruined by mobs walking by at some point, making it extra important to fence in your crops. Although many of Minecraft’s features have their roots in realism, when some of these features were first added, they weren’t actually accurate to the real world at all. For example, Minecraft’s sun used to rise in the north and sets in the south. Whereas the sun in the real world rises in the east and sets in the west. I guess when Notch was adding the dayight cycle, he really didn’t think much about which direction it was going in. And it was only fixed later on when the community pointed out that the sun’s rising direction wasn’t very realistic. Sometimes a community caring about realism is a pretty good thing. like when Mojang changed the item used to tame parrots from cookies to seeds. But in other cases, features like the fireflies have gotten completely removed. So maybe we should be careful about making Minecraft realistic in the future. When you cast out your fishing rod in Minecraft versions before beta 1.6, instead of using the current cast fishing rod texture, they just use the stick texture. This made it look like the fishing rod’s reel just disappeared while you were using the fishing rod and reappeared when you pulled the hook back in, which really didn’t make any sense at all. I mean, seriously, this is just a stick. Zombies are one of Minecraft’s first mobs, and as such, the item they originally dropped was literally just a placeholder. Feathers. Why exactly would a zombie have feathers in it? I don’t know. Maybe it’s stuffed like a pillow. Maybe it ate a chicken feathers and all. Could be anything. The better question is this. Why do zombies burn in the sun? Are they like vampires? Although these are technically called advancements in game, pretty much everyone just calls them achievements since that’s what they were originally called, and that’s the word most games use. For some reason, when they overhauled the achievement system, they also decided to rename them to advancements instead. You could argue that the rename makes more sense since most of the advancements in Minecraft are things you do to advance in the game, but I think I’ll stick with calling them what they actually are. Iceboat highways are one of the fastest ways to travel in Minecraft. It’s faster than minecarts and elytra by a staggering margin. But building one of these highways in older versions of Minecraft is an incredible waste of time. Ice was added to Minecraft back in 2012, but it wasn’t until 2016 that the physics of boats were overhauled and their quirky tendency to move faster on ice was added to the game. For those four years, the concept of putting a boat on ice as an alternative to minecarts was ridiculous, and it certainly wasn’t any better than literally just walking. Minecraft’s original death screen was pretty similar to how it looks today. But there was one very significant difference. Instead of the screen reading you died, it just said game over. This was maybe a bit misleading because the phrase game over might make the player think they’ve lost all their progress and have to start over, which obviously isn’t true unless you’re playing in hardcore mode. For that reason, I think you died fits a lot better for a survival game like Minecraft where you effectively have infinite lives. When the bamboo block was added to Minecraft, its texture was yellow, which was accurate to how bamboo looked in the real world. A green outer layer and a yellow interior. However, since they were also adding the stripped bamboo block, which was entirely yellow, players were a little disappointed that the top of the regular bamboo block wasn’t green. So, despite it not necessarily being the most accurate, Mojang decided to give in and make the block entirely green, giving us one more texture to build with. When the armadillo was first added in snapshot 23W51A, it looked like this. Look at those eyes. Yeah, for some reason the texture artists at Mojang thought that placing the armadillo’s eyes on the front of its tiny head was better than placing them on the sides. People pretty quickly started making fun of this design. So just a few weeks later, the texture was changed and we all quickly forgot about Derp Face Armadillo. You know, they say if its eyes are on the front of its face, it’s a predator.
From ISOMETRIC screenshots to crafting leather armor with WOOL, here are 204 crazy Minecraft Changes!
31 Comments
hope you enjoy the videoo
Nice video bro ❤
under 1 hr since 50 minutes ago liked too
your videos remind me of iDeactivateMC.
Im sorry grass planes?
40th
One hour gang
I knew almost all of these.. but just a few things like the torch being slanted, I didn't know
Can you plss make a minecraft hardcore series 🥺🥺🥺
0:10 bedrock torches are still cursed
Quality video
23:37 I think the reason Bedrock has the old gamemode command system is because it’s quicker for console players to type 0 or 1, than it is to type creative or survival.
I hear roblox oof Minecraft is trash just kidding roblox and Minecraft is the best
Whoa!
MINE LEAF ❌ LEAF CRAFT✔
You repeated several changes in the list
They unitalicised the torch
We did enjoy
invinciBULLLLLL!!!
2:01 check this out. With out emotion
i love ur vids bro 🙂
Nice video
ingÖt
Diamond❎
Goldmond✅
5:26
1:18:48
Players born after 1.21.6: ok
Players born before 1.21.6 😂😂😂😂😂😂
0:10 this is still in Bedrock
3:25 No in beta they Cook me!
1:08 the song name
6 hours 24 thousond views bro fell off
0:59 a wolf can't notice your are creative mode but thinks you are survival mode
1:29:09 do you mean version 1.0.0 or something like that in game i guess?