The transcript of Dream's video How to get PewDiePie's Minecraft World seed...
Info[]
Video title: how to get PewDiePie's Minecraft World seed
Date published: July 14, 2019
Runtime: 6:51
People: Dream
Script[]
Dream: So. I've seen this everywhere, all over PewDiePie's subreddit. "Release the seed!" "Do /seed!" "Get PewDiePie to release his seed!" Despite this sounding extremely inappropriate and unfit for Minecraft, a thought popped into my head. Would it be possible for us to get PewDiePie's world seed without him giving it to us?
First of all, for those who don't know, a world seed is a randomly generated set of numbers that determine how your Minecraft world looks. Where the blocks are, where the biomes are, where the different structures are... everything about the world. Everything. And... to put it lightly, there's a lot of seeds. And when I say a lot, I mean approximately 2 to the power of 64, which is this number.
(On screen: the number 18,446,744,073,709,551,616, or 18 quintillion, shows).
18.4 quintillion. Not a billion, not a trillion, not even a quadrillion, a quintillion. And the challenge here is, can we reverse-engineer that number, that randomly generated number, without ever seeing it?
So, I went ahead and did the research, and in PewDiePie's entire Minecraft series, he pressed the F3 key a grand total of... one time. Yeah. One time, and that key is the key that pulls up the debug menu. The debug menu shows you information like your coordinates, what biome you're in, et cetera. And he's used it one time! I use that every single time I pull up Minecraft! And even though Minecraft seeds used to be shown on the debug menu, they aren't anymore. So we're left with a couple hours of footage and one split-second screenshot of the debug menu.
At this point, I was gonna give up. Because there's no way, from one screenshot, with little to no information, we would be able to find out the seed. But... I thought I would look up whether it's even possible to reverse-engineer a Minecraft seed in the first place. I mean, there are 18.4 quintillion of them. That's when I came across this MinecraftForums post from the user Taleden, from 2014. In the post, he said that "It is possible to discover a Minecraft world seed in less than a day using the locations of slime chunks, village wells, witch huts, desert temples, jungle temples, and other structures."
So, I kept digging, and I found out that it was indeed possible. There was another user, Hube12 or NeilPop, that posted a video on YouTube on how to reverse ANY Minecraft seed. His method was extremely similar to the one I found, except he used things from the End, like the End pillars and stuff like that. And funnily enough, Hube12 actually mentioned Taleden, the guy that I found originally. Luckily, in the description of his video, he linked to his source code, and an actual working example of code that can reverse a seed. And that's when the wheels started turning.
Where exactly did he look at his coordinates? I went back and watched his video again, and it was in a mine, right next to his house. So, I reversed his steps.
(A quick 10 second musical montage plays showing the video footage in reverse.)
He used a minecart, and I realized that a minecart travels eight blocks a second when boosted by powered rails. So I was able to time that and trace his steps right back to the front of his house. I had a set of coordinates that I believed to be the coordinates to the block in front of his door, without him ever pulling up coordinates in front of his door. And this is where PewDiePie starts most of his journeys, so that's when the thought hit me.
I could theoretically trace PewDiePie's steps from his house to all the different structures that he found. It's incredibly unlikely that I would be able to get the exact coordinates of a specific block anywhere, but... I wouldn't need to. I would just have to get a coordinate within a chunk. And for those of you who don't know, a chunk is a 16x16 area. So I quickly reviewed the footage, and I saw tons of different potential structures that could be used. PewDiePie does make a lot of cuts, so some of the structures seemed impossible to track, but others seemed entirely possible, like the village by his house.
I wasn't sure how realistic this was, though, so I contacted one of the posters on Discord, and after a couple days, he replied. I gave him the screenshot, and his reply was... yeah.
(On screen it shows the Discord reply saying "not really a lot of information to take off that picture")
I asked him how much structures would actually help, like one village, and he told me more information. So with this single village, we can bring the possible matching seeds from 2 to the 64 to 2 to the power of 60, which is actually a lot, so I asked him if we would be able to use biomes, which would be much easier to get. He told me yes, but not until we had already narrowed down the seeds using structures.
(On screen it shows a Discord message saying "you can't use biomes right away, it's way too slow. you can do 80k seed per minute with biomes, so that's like so little. 2.305843e+14 minute to compute the full 64 bits. not enough time in the world")
He said theoretically you could actually do everything using only seeds, but it would take millions of years. So I asked him what he would actually do if he was trying to accomplish what I am, and this was his reply.
(On screen it shows the Discord reply: "first gather the chunk coordinates of structure then set a lattice with the restrictions and hope that the space is small enough like 2^50 or so then compute the LUT and hope to get the end to pin it down to 2^32 or so then use the biomes gpu kernel and bruteforce those last bits")
And if you only understand a couple words, you're not alone, cause I was... I was very confused. So I moved on to a more understandable question, "If we had a village, another village, AND a raid outpost next to that second village, how much would those three things (just those three things) narrow it down?". And he replied "I guess 10 bits or so". And then he said something about hyperplanes alignment and I replied of course, "what is hyperplanes alignment?". He explained that essentially it's just how random a certain village placement is, so therefore it's random how much it would actually help us. Anyway, I basically had my answer.
Could I find PewDiePie's seed with only one pair of coordinates and some video footage? And the answer is, well yes, but actually no. Technically, it is possible, but I realized that I wouldn't be able to do it alone. So here's how you find PewDiePie's minecraft seed:
First, you take the original coordinates from the one time he looked at them. Then, you rewatch hours of PewDiePie content in order to get the coordinates to different structures, like villages, underwater chests, ocean monuments, so on. Then, get the coordinates to as many biomes as possible. Then, you run that program for a couple hours and see how many possible seeds it leaves you with. After that, you just manually go through the couple thousand seeds it most likely leaves you with, and you find out which one is PewDiePie's. And this has to be done specifically on 1.14.2.
That's how we can theoretically find PewDiePie's seed without him ever giving it to us.
I'm still actually gonna be attempting to find the seed myself, and if you do want updates on if I ever do find it, then make sure to subscribe with post notifications on, cause I'll upload a video on that if I do, but I thought I'd put this video out there just in case I never ended up finding it, and so you guys can help me out. Anyway, everyone like this video and make sure to spam PewDiePie with #PewDiePieReleaseYourSeed (ok, no, that sounds wrong) #PewDiePieGiveUsYourSeed (ok, no, that still sounds wrong (through laughter)) something, something about his seed.. (video fades out to a musical outro)