Minecraft Discontinued Features Wiki:History

This page is to discuss the development and history of the discontinued feature/unobtained/exploiter community. This page does not discuss in-game information as most other pages do.

Pre-History
Pre-history refers to discontinued features before Puffingfish HQ started his Unobtained series. The Unobtained Series truly started the community aspect of discontinued features.


 * First Discontinued Feature: The first discontinued feature noticed was in Classic (Pre-Classic versions were not released until 2013). The specific version was Classic 0.0.12a_03, the 6th public version of Minecraft. The bug was reported by vdgmprgrmr on May 19, 2009, 04:50:22 PM on Tigsource. Archived Tigsource: "So... apparently having water and lava touching each other causes graphical glitches, and doesn't make sense. I had a cave with some water in the bottom, and lava above it, and you could see what looked like a second lava surface where the water was through the surface of the lava on the top, and the lava surface above the water was slightly lower (like normal liquid surfaces), which made it look really bad. Perhaps lava should become some kind of stone when it touches water. Also, the way the liquid surfaces work, the top of the water will stop if they reach a block that's just above the surface, and they'll be slightly lower than the top of a normal block that's on their level, so if you lo... It's that. I r nto liekz ti. (And yes, mipmapping please! Textures from afar make castles look ugly!) EDIT: And liquid physics are being really slow in places where being slow is really bad, like down narrow tunnels. I was digging (upward, deliberately trying to find water), found water, and expected either to immediately be engulfed, or to have one of those classic awesome running-through-tunnel-from-water things, definitely not just looking at the bottom of the water for a minute or two, then walking away. And I once saw an air bubble in water stay there for a very long time. Also, regarding block-sized air bubbles, I think it'd be cool that when they get filled in, they spawn a bunch of small "bubble" particles that float up to the surface really quickly. Note that I'm in block creation mode there, not deletion. Having building mechanics go screwy at weird angles makes it really hard to build my nefariously placed castles (and towers, no matter whether or not their parent castle is nefariously placed or not). Which makes me sad. I mean, this allows me to replace a block, but only being able to quickly replace a block at totally awkward angles doesn't seem intuitive." vdgmprgrmr reported that sometimes when water and lava touch they do not form stone. Notch responded that they should be forming stone, confirming this was a bug. This was fixed in Classic 0.0.13a making the touching liquids discontinued. The liquids would be recontinued later however. There is no evidence that vdgmprgrmr kept the discontinued blocks or even update the specific world.


 * Classic -> Indev Barrier: There is no vanilla way to update from Classic to Indev. MCEdit originally was created to facilitate this update and only later became the world editing tool. While this is not strictly vanilla, generally in the discontinued feature community it has been allowed as long as it is not used to actually edit the world and strictly for conversion between file formats.


 * Indev Chests: Indev chests were immediately celebrated by players as a cool way to play with the items that hadn't been obtainable before.


 * First Negative Items: The first recorded obtaining of negative items was on January 24, 2009 by Ladon. In a post about the new Indev Chests, Ladon wrote "Cool glitch: Get 99 types of block in your inventory, but not where you can place it. Find one more of the type. Press q. You get unlimited! And your pictures are nothing. I spawned 100 blocks above ground level, because there was one." The method was found by many other users independently in another thread. tgt114, mrfatcat, MCFUser2292, betasword, ShnitzelKiller claim to have found these glitches in a Minecraft Forum and others commented they were able to replicate. betasword in particular spent time to explain the entire glitches, first realizing there were two separate bugs causing this and also realizing that these items were likely negative items.


 * Indev -> Infdev Barrier: Just like Classic -> Indev, Indev -> Infdev had no vanilla method for updating. MCEdit can be used to somewhat update Indev to Infdev although this conversion isn't perfect. Because there were more colors in Indev and colors' removal all cloth is bleached when upgraded. Additionally, all items inside containers are not upgraded using MCEdit. This default schematic upgrade conversion is generally allowed in the discontinued feature community now as well so that older worlds can be ugpraded.


 * Unsaveable Infdevs: Early infdevs were unsavable and so the idea of discontinued features definitely didn't exist here. Sometimes discontinued feature players say that a saved world is what is discontinued in these versions because it can't be obtained in the version but could be obtained in previous versions.


 * Permanent Worlds: Infdev 20100327 is the first version that can be saved and upgraded all the way to the present version using only vanilla methods. This constant compatibility was crucial to the development of discontinued features in older worlds.

History
A YouTuber by the name of PuffingFishHQ released a video titled: [https://youtu.be/y5jQAJPIJVU Getting a Spawner & End Portal Frame in vanilla Minecraft Survival!!! | Unobtained Episode 1] on November 5 of 2019 and this video introduced the idea of collecting discontinued items (referred to as unobtainables in the video). The idea was to update a world through specific versions which have specific circumstances making the collection of "unobtainable" items possible. The idea stemmed from seeing old gameplay and wanting to have that nostalgia, but to make it interesting enough to entertain a modern audience. Due to that the idea for the series sat dormant for quite some time until Puff got the idea to collect discontinued items from this page on the Official Minecraft Wiki. The series had continued for 13 episodes (videos) until the series had ended. Due to a shoutout to the series by a youtuber by the name of RaysWorks, the 13 episodes blew up and because of this season 2 was born with much more research. A post made on PuffingFishHQ's Channel called many users who would later become a pivotal role in the search for more bugs and discontinued features. Many minecraft players joined the hunt and the first major document was created on google docs a download can be found here of a text file. However maintaining organization on the google doc proved to be difficult. A discord user and youtuber by the name of BlueCrab2 had an idea to create a Wiki for the unobtainables. Originally Puff was against this idea but after seeing what the beginning of the wiki was like, the idea was pretty much a fully agreed upon within the founding community. While discontinued features had been sought after before this, the popularization of the focused playstyle on collecting these is used for the transition from the "Pre-history" of discontinued features to the contemporary history that now had a dedicated community.


 * Wiki Foundation: The Minecraft Discontinued Features Wiki used to document the discontinued features was founded on May 5, 2020. The idea was posted on PuffingFishHQ's Discord earlier the same day by bluecrab2. Bayugoon first supported the idea 10 seconds after the initial posting. Bixy, llyr , and PuffingFishHQ also joined in discussion about the optimal organization of this proposed wiki soon after. Arriving at the compromise to organize by feature type and version. After the discussion, bluecrab2 sent a Miraheze request to create the wiki that was promptly approved 7 minutes later at 17:16 UTC that day.


 * The First Wiki Page: Besides Main Page the first page on the wiki was Bedrock (Item) (Originally called just "Bedrock") This was the only page created on 5 May 2020 (UTC) but the four next pages to be created on 6 May 2020 were (in chronological order): Green Shrub, Silk Touch Shears, Barrier (Block), and Infinity and Mending Book/Bow.   These pages were created by some of the first users to join the wiki User:Bluecrab2MC and User:Bayugoon.


 * The April Fools' Boom: nasko222 joined PuffingFishHQ's server approximately around May 28, 2021. He introduced the concept of using a new type of version, April Fools' versions. This was initially controversial, as these versions were only meant as jokes and not to be exploited. However, they are Mojang versions and so were generally accepted. This set in an explosion of discoveries that progressed from the earliest to most recent. Starting at 2.0, the Battle Sign, Super Hostile Mob, and Fools' Coal were found. It was discovered that 15w14a could be updated to by naming the world "AF15 Existence". In 1.RV-Pre1, Powered Black Glazed Terracotta was found. In 3D Shareware v1.34, Potion of Luck, Multishot 2-12, Uncraftable Potion, Uncraftable Tipped Arrow, Open Barrel, and God Horse were found after upgrading was found possible with the name "shareware". The largest number of discoveries were found in 20w14∞, the April Fools' snapshot that came out earlier that year, after Sl1mJ1m discovered the worlds could be updated by changing level.dat to special_level.dat. All these discoveries took place in a matter of a few days around May 30 - June 2, creating lots of excitement about all the new possibilities within the community. PuffingFishHQ decided not to use any of the new April Fools' versions, especially considering his series had already passed several of the April Fools' versions by that point. PuffingFishHQ did post a video about nasko222's world during the craze though. Less obvious discontinued features, such as, Phantom Tipped Arrows and Untamed Llama with Carpet would trickle in the following days.