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Comment by jtchang | Hacker News Reader

Having never played minecraft what does that mean? Is this like discovering the exact number on which everything is based in the entire minecraft generated world?

I assume with this seed you can predict everything else that is seemingly random within the world. The location of items/loot etc and spawn times? Since if you know the random seed to any "random" generator it really is no longer random and you know the entire sequence. i.e. this is the seed to the PRNG

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It has no real impact on everyday gameplay other than being a bit of trivia. The seed does indeed allow you to predict the vast majority of gameplay behavior of a particular map, but only that map. This particular map was used to generate an icon that was used as part of the GUI in Minecraft.

Yes, exactly. The procedurally generated world is predictable* if you know the world seed -- land forms, structures and items/loot spawn the same way each time. You can specify the seed when creating a world, if you like.

There are certain things that are nondeterministic, such as where mobs spawn (that depends on player position, etc.) or how they behave.

* There may be parts of world generation these days that are nondeterministic even with a known seed; I'm not too up to date with recent world generation changes.

There are a few blocks like bees hive that aren’t fully determined by the seed. That can only be determined within a certain location accuracy the rest is random at runtime when the player enters that area. But the block does persist after that.

One thing that is theoretically deterministic but not in practice is the location of dungeons. These generate in spaces where there is an appropriately sized gap between the floor and the ceiling. Normally these would be determined solely by the terrain generation (and therefore the seed), but it is possible to push blocks into lazy-loaded chunks before the dungeons have generated yet and force them to generate in different spots.

Video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iaU1TvIQqM

I interpreted your question differently than the current answers so just to elaborate: it's just a random image and this seed has no special meaning. Discovering it just means they've found the world where the image was taken, which has been a Minecraft "legend" since the start. The world itself has no significance and is just like any other world.

Every world you start is based on its own seed, which is not hidden. The achievement here is that they reverse engineered the seed for that world based on an image.

As someone else said, it's a fun bit of trivia.

You can pull up the seed at any time after creating a world, and can manually set whatever seed you want when creating a new world.

You’ve got it right. This “seed” is a seed in the sense of a random number generator. It only controls generating the world, however, it does not control the behavior of NPCs.

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