Minecraft@Home

Minecraft@Home
File:Minecraft@Home logo.png Minecraft@Home logo
Project
Status	Active
Category	Gaming / Computational Research
Compute	GPU
Requires	OpenCL 2.0+
Development
Developer	Minecraft@Home community (philipp_de, maintainer)
Author	Tomlacko, Earthcomputer, Cortex, Neil, DutChen18, PseudoGravity, Philipp_DE, and others
Initial release	June 24, 2020  (6 years ago)
Repository	https://github.com/minecrafthome/minecrafthome
Software
Operating system	Windows, Linux
BOINC statistics
Stats as of	24 May 2026
Performance	10,385 TFLOPS (recent)
Active users	655
Total users	6,639
Active hosts	1,650
Total hosts	13,567
Metadata
Website	https://minecraftathome.com/minecrafthome/
License	Open source (server: PHP/Docker; applications vary)

Minecraft@Home is a volunteer computing project on the BOINC platform that enlists the idle processing power of volunteers' computers to research questions related to Minecraft. It is widely regarded as the only volunteer computing project to emerge organically from a video-game fan community rather than from an academic or research institution. The project officially launched on 24 June 2020 and has since attracted thousands of volunteers who have collectively delivered hundreds of petaFLOPS of compute time toward recovering lost Minecraft world seeds and probing the mathematical limits of the game's world generation.

Background

Minecraft world seeds

Every Minecraft world is generated deterministically from a single integer called a seed. Internally, Java Edition stores the seed as a 64-bit signed integer, giving a total seed space ranging from $-9,223,372,036,854,775,808$ to $9,223,372,036,854,775,807$ — over 18.4 quintillion distinct worlds. The game uses this seed to initialize a pseudorandom number generator (PRNG), specifically Java's linear congruential generator (LCG) with the recurrence relation:

$s_{n+1}=(25,214,903,917\cdot s_n+11){mod2}^{48}$

Although the seed itself spans 64 bits, only the lower 48 bits drive most terrain generation, which means the effective brute-force search space for many seedcracking problems is $2^{48}\approx 281$ trillion candidate seeds. The game's world-generation algorithm (based on Perlin noise and a chain of biome and terrain rules) is fully deterministic: the same seed, version, and settings always produce identical terrain. Because Minecraft is written in Java and has been fully decompiled, researchers can reverse-engineer the generation logic and use it to filter candidate seeds against observed landmarks — a perfect workload for distributed computing.

When the original seed of a screenshot or panorama is unknown, recovering it amounts to a brute-force search problem. Two worlds can appear nearly identical to a player yet originate from entirely different seeds; recovering the exact seed from a screenshot requires testing billions of candidates against terrain features (mountain profiles, biome boundaries, structure positions) extracted from the image.

Why Minecraft@Home?

Searching the full $2^{48}$ seed space sequentially on a single modern computer would take on the order of months to years for many projects. BOINC transforms that obstacle into a tractable problem by distributing the search across thousands of volunteers' machines running in parallel. Each volunteer's GPU or CPU processes a slice of candidate seeds, uploading results to the central server, which assembles and validates them. This is exactly the kind of embarrassingly parallel workload for which volunteer computing is ideally suited.

Beyond raw compute power, BOINC provides the project with a trusted framework for result validation (redundant replication guards against errors and cheating), cross-platform client support, and a credit system that recognizes volunteer contributions. As BOINC's creator David P. Anderson has documented, the platform harnesses idle consumer hardware that collectively delivers compute throughput that would be prohibitively expensive to purchase commercially.

Minecraft@Home is notable in the BOINC ecosystem for being a community-run project with no institutional sponsor, funded entirely by volunteer effort and donations, and for targeting a cultural and gaming domain rather than traditional scientific research. The project demonstrates that distributed computing methods pioneered for astrophysics and biomedicine transfer cleanly to reverse-engineering problems in computational game research.

History

SEED of Minecraft's title-screen background PANORAMA

Minecraft@Home grew out of a broader community effort to recover famous Minecraft world seeds that was catalysed in early 2020 by YouTuber SalC1. On 14 January 2020, SalC1 uploaded a video asking about the origin of pack.png, which sparked serious seedfinding work across several Discord communities. Community member Tomlacko simultaneously began researching the game's title-screen panorama, determining the game version and the exact Z coordinate from cloud patterns. His findings were shared on SalC1's Discord server, and a dedicated channel in a newly created Minecraft@Home Discord server was set up to coordinate the effort.

The BOINC-backed Minecraft@Home project went live on 24 June 2020, with the panorama application as its inaugural workload. At launch it was GPU-only, with OpenCL support for NVIDIA hardware; AMD support followed within days. The panorama seed was found in under 24 hours of distributed runtime, representing approximately 93 days of single-machine processing time compressed into one day — a total of 54.5 exaFLOPs of computation.

Following the panorama success, the community turned to pack.png and multiple other targets. By 2021 the project had recovered seeds for the Herobrine screenshot, the Skull-on-Fire painting, and several Minecraft menu backgrounds. The project continues to run as of 2026, with active applications searching for large veins of diamond ore in Minecraft 1.21.

Goal

Minecraft@Home aims to answer fundamental questions about Minecraft's world generation by:

• Recovering the original seeds of famous Minecraft worlds, screenshots, and panoramas that have been lost or were never publicly known.
• Exploring the absolute statistical limits of world generation, such as the tallest cactus that can naturally generate, or the largest natural ore veins.
• Recreating iconic Minecraft scenes from cultural history for the community to revisit.

Methods

Each Minecraft@Home project follows a broadly similar workflow. Researchers first study the target — a screenshot, video frame, or in-game image — to extract constraints on the world: the probable game version, biome type, exact coordinates derived from cloud positions or grass colour data, and characteristic terrain features such as tree arrangements or block proportions. These constraints are encoded into a filtering application that can rapidly reject candidate seeds that cannot match, before running a final terrain-check against the handful of survivors.

The filtering applications are compiled as GPU kernels (using OpenCL), because GPU parallelism is ideally suited to testing billions of simple mathematical operations per second. The BOINC server distributes work units — each covering a contiguous range of candidate seeds — to volunteers, collects the results, and validates them through redundant replication. Source code for the server infrastructure is publicly available on GitHub and uses Docker containers to allow community members to run a local replica of the full server stack.

For projects where a brute-force sweep of all $2^{48}$ seeds is needed, the work is divided into segments distributed as individual BOINC work units. The pack.png project, for example, exhausted all segments and found its target in the final 5% of the search space.

Results

Since its launch in 2020, Minecraft@Home has completed or advanced the following notable projects:

Main Menu Panorama (Beta 1.7.3)

The rotating background that greeted Minecraft players on the title screen from version Beta 1.8 through Release 1.13.2 was the project's first and founding target. Tomlacko identified the panorama's version (Beta 1.7.3) and Z coordinate from cloud metadata; the BOINC application found the seed in under 24 hours after launch on 24 June 2020, compressing roughly 93 days of single-machine work into one distributed day.

Pack.PNG (Alpha 1.2.2)

Pack.png is the small hill-and-waterfall image that served as Minecraft's default texture-pack icon from Alpha 1.2.2 (November 2010) through Release 1.13.2, and continues to be used as the default server icon. The search began in January 2020 and involved extensive reverse-engineering of block proportions, dirt-layer thickness, sand-distribution patterns, and AI-upscaled versions of the low-resolution source image. After eight months of work by two teams, the seed was found on 5 September 2020 — in the last 5% of the search space — by BOINC volunteers niraami and zombie67, whose machines processed the decisive work unit at 04:04 UTC. The seed is 3257840388504953787, and the hill can be found at coordinates X=49, Z=0 in Alpha 1.2.2a.

Even Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson and technical director Nathan "Dinnerbone" Adams attempted to assist the search but were unable to recall the original seed.

Skull-on-Fire Painting (Alpha 1.1.2_01)

Minecraft's craftable "Skull on Fire" painting, created by artist Kristoffer Zetterstrand and added in Beta 1.3, depicts a mountain scene from an actual Minecraft world. Zetterstrand shared his original screenshot (taken 12 October 2010 at 13:22 UTC+2) directly with the Minecraft@Home team. Using that screenshot and reverse-engineering the terrain, community member andrew_555 (Kminster) independently derived the seed and shared it with the project on 10 September 2020, just five days after the pack.png announcement. Two valid seeds reproduce the terrain: -1044887956651363087 and -6984854390176336655, both in Alpha 1.1.2_01, at coordinates X=-249.65, Y=91, Z=-29.04.

The Herobrine World (Alpha 1.0.16_02)

Herobrine is a long-running Minecraft creepypasta — a supposed ghost of Notch's brother, depicted in an eerie screenshot circulated from around 2010. A project to find the original screenshot's world seed began on 5 September 2020. After months of debugging (including discovering that a mismatched leaf block in the terrain recreation had been causing the filter to fail), andrew_555 (Kminster) found the seed on 16 January 2021. The seed is 478868574082066804, in Alpha 1.0.16_02, at coordinates X=5.06, Y=71, Z=-298.54. Because Alpha 1.0.16_02 predates Minecraft's in-game seed-entry feature, visiting the world requires manually editing the level.dat save file.

In the changelog of Minecraft Launcher version 2.2.176x, released shortly after the seed was discovered, Mojang included their traditional joke entry: "Removed Herobrine from Java Alpha 1.0.16_02."

1.13-1.16 Menu Backgrounds

Following the Beta 1.7.3 panorama discovery, Minecraft@Home located the seeds for all four remaining menu background panoramas introduced in versions 1.13 through 1.16, completing the set of known Minecraft title-screen worlds.

Tallest Cactus

Cacti in Minecraft normally generate between one and three blocks tall; occasionally two cacti can spawn in adjacent chunks and, due to growth mechanics, effectively "stack." Minecraft@Home's Kaktwoos (and Kaktoos) applications systematically search all chunk seeds for unusually tall stacked cacti. The current confirmed records are a 22-block-tall cactus in normal overworld generation (seed 11343195073417814, version 1.14.4, at coordinates 14,955,936 / 64 / -3,750,655, found by volunteer SirNapkin1334) and a 24-block-tall cactus on a superflat desert world (seed 93257619645605).

Smash Backgrounds

When Nintendo added Steve (from Minecraft) to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the in-game Minecraft World stage featured six background images. Minecraft@Home launched a project to recover the original Minecraft world seeds behind each of those six backgrounds.

Minecraft Trailer Recreation

The original Minecraft promotional trailer, one of the most-watched pieces of Minecraft content ever created, is being recreated scene by scene by locating the exact in-game seeds and camera positions used in each shot.

Large Diamond Vein Search (Active, 2026)

As of May 2026, the active BOINC application is "1.21 Find large veins of diamond ore," which searches Minecraft 1.21 world seeds for exceptionally large naturally generated diamond ore formations. The application had over 718,000 unsent tasks queued and was being processed by nearly 200 active users per day at the time of writing.

BOINC statistics

Screenshot from the Minecraft End

The following figures were recorded from the Minecraft@Home server status page on 24 May 2026:

Statistic	Value
Users with credit	6,639
Users with recent credit	655
Computers with credit	13,567
Computers with recent credit	1,650
Recent compute throughput	10,385.26 TFLOPS
Total historic compute	241,900.05 TFLOPS-days
New users (last 24 h)	19
New computers (last 24 h)	8

Technical notes

The Minecraft@Home server is implemented as a set of Docker containers that together constitute a standard BOINC server environment (scheduler, feeder, transitioner, file-deleter, per-application assimilators, and result validators). The server software runs BOINC server release 1.2.0. Applications are GPU-accelerated via OpenCL (requiring at minimum OpenCL 2.0 and the cl_khr_fp64 double-precision extension) and target Windows and Linux; CPU fallback modes are not generally offered, as the GPU kernels provide orders-of-magnitude higher throughput for the seed-testing workloads.

The project's source repositories under the GitHub organization include the server stack, the individual research applications (such as kaktwoos, kaktoos, and OneChunk), and a branding repository for project assets.

Project team

Minecraft@Home is a volunteer community project with no single institutional home. Key contributors to the founding projects include:

• Tomlacko — project originator; identified panorama version and coordinates
• Earthcomputer, Cortex, Neil — wrote biome and terrain-checking code; located the panorama seed
• DutChen18 — built tools and mods for data gathering and seed-checking recreation
• PseudoGravity — reversed tallgrass colour data to identify biome values in the panorama
• Philipp_DE — hosts the server infrastructure; operates the recreation Minecraft server and screenshotting bot; maintains the BOINC project
• andrew_555 (Kminster) — independently derived both the Skull-on-Fire seed and (after months of debugging) the Herobrine seed

The full list of contributors to each project is documented in credits spreadsheets linked from the individual project pages on the Minecraft@Home website.

Community discussion and coordination takes place primarily on the Minecraft@Home Discord server. The GitHub organization is at github.com/minecrafthome.

See also

• BOINC
• Volunteer computing
• Minecraft
• Procedural generation
• Pseudorandom number generator