Minecraft Alpha 1.1.2_01 Diary

2026-01-29

Not much progress today, but plenty of screenshots! Got a bit trigger-happy with the screenshot key.
Started my session off today with a journey to the top of the monolith! While up there I wanted to show off the weird holes dotted around it:

Don't fall!

That caption is a legitimate warning because I fell down one of these while trying to take a screenshot. 😭 I had to grab a water bucket and go retrieve all my shit!

While up here. I figured I'd snap a pic of the little enclave I planned to travel to today:

A little oasis in the glitch in the matrix.

Glitch in the matrix is an apt descriptor - being at world height means the lighting is a bit fucked. There's some sheep up here.. and they're entirely unlit. Pitch black!

Spooky!

Well, until you punch them for their wool. That's how you get wool in alpha, by the way. No shears in this version, only violence. This sheep was fucking GREEN!!

I don't think that's natural.

This is one of the very few gameplay changes made in the Alpha-Env mod. See, Minecraft Classic had coloured wool. It remained in the game throughout Indev, but was unobtainable due to dyes not being added - something that wouldn't come until Beta. With no way to obtain coloured wool blocks, Notch removed them in Infdev. This means that in Vanilla Alpha, they actually don't even exist in the game's code!

I like the approach taken here by Alpha-Env to add the coloured wool back: rather than filling the game with dyes, which would feel very un-Alpha, the dev has instead made some sheep spawn as coloured sheep. Fun! A majority of sheep spawns are normal white sheep, but I have seen two green sheep and a red one. They do regenerate their wool, and this green sheep has yet to despawn, so I think you might be able to farm them somewhat? Of course, with the punching-to-get-wool process, there are... casualties. So it could be risky business.

Going back to our dear beloved monolith, I also snapped screenshots of the underside to this structure. I think what happens with the monoliths is that the chunks somehow shift upwards towards the height limit. But the space below these chunks doesn't generate properly.

The underbelly.

Rather than solid stone going all the way to bedrock, there is an eerie, empty void. Void is the right word, too, as the monolith error seems to prevent any bedrock generating. As you can see, my monolith has water filling the area beneath it, but I have seen images online of monoliths with empty holes going all the way down forever; bottomless pits where you're guaranteed death AND a loss of all your items if you fall. But I am fortunate (?) enough to have a bit of a safety net in the form of this subterranean lake. An eerie, inky, infinitely deep lake...

It's a long, long way down...

And down I went! Not into the creepy lake, but down from the monolith's top to the hidden enclave! There was some water down below for me to drop down into.

Feeling a little boxed in!

Turns out I need not have bothered taking this route - I built a tunnel to the outside world, which turned out to be incredibly short. I suppose I wouldn't have known where to mine from the outside, but it felt very anticlimactic when my grand tunnel to this hidden area was only a few blocks long.

It's no Channel Tunnel.

Don't worry, I'm still going to jazz it up a bit.
Before I do that, though, I AFK in my house while watching a YouTube video, waiting for the night to pass. I can hear zombies VERY close by, which strikes me as odd; I've definitely lit the area around my house!

Oh.

Well, I guess maybe I need to light my roof up. Bit of a pain, I feel like a roof littered with torches will look ugly. If you're expecting a follow-up screenshot of my roof with torches on it, then you're out of luck. I immediately forgot to do this.

What I did instead? Spiced up the tunnel! Yay!

If lava can't penetrate glass, why didn't the people of Pompeii simply hide inside greenhouses?

This feels like a quintessential Alpha base decoration to me. Stone tunnel with lava columns behind glass? Instant classic. I couldn't resist.

At this point I decided to call it a day. After such little progress, that may seem silly, but this did take me a while! Alpha is a slower pace compared to modern Minecraft. Admittedly not that slow, though. I have done barely anything today. Here's the problem, dear readers: I tunnelled through to the little hidden enclave, eager to start building... but I sort of forgot to come up with an idea of what to build. Oops.

My first thought was a big wizard tower, but after my lavacast tower going to the top of the monolith, it felt a bit "been there, done that". Another tower? Brave stuff, Alice.

If you have suggestions, feel free to reach out to me! I know this blog doesn't have a comments section but the odds are if you're reading this right now while the blog is still in progress you definitely have some means of contacting me - Bink, Town email, Mastodon, Discord, the IRC server, etc.

Before I wrap up, I have one last little treat - not only does this mod enable IsomPreview, it also implements the isometric screenshot feature that previously only existed in Indev. It is a bit janky - this thing wasn't built for infinite worlds - but I think it is fun. See if you can spot my player model!

This feature would be so cool in modern Minecraft.

And with that, I bid you adieu!

2026-01-26

Starting my little Minecraft diary today!! I've already been playing on the mod for a while now (Alpha-Env, an Alpha 1.1.2_01 mod annoyingly only listed on the Modification Station Discord server) so I probably need to fill in the stuff I've already done!

So! I found a seed with a decent monolith structure not too far from spawn, then moved the world spawn closer. This mod allows you to choose a seed, which you couldn't do in this version of alpha! This mod adds very little to the game - mainly just a few bugfixes and quality of life stuff. It makes Alpha v1.1.2_01 a bit more bearable without being too much of an overhaul that it's fundamentally changed the game as it existed back then. If you're curious, here is a copy of the most recent changelog at time of writing, which should list all features.

So, what I've done prior to today is: build a house, do some mining, and plant some seeds. Here's my starter house in the shadow of the monolith:

Ooh, wow, so pretty, so breathtaking!

Today's project, which I basically made up on a whim, was to create a means to reach the TOP of the monolith (the common name for the errored chunks behind my house that form a plateau all the way up to build height).

I wanted to build a big tower up there, and I had an idea for how to make a rough base for one - lavacasting.
I set out a square pattern of cobblestone in the air, then poured lava over it. Once the lava reached ground level, I dumped water on top to create a giant cobblestone tower!

Buuuut it went a bit wrong. I think water and lava movement and physics are a bit fucky in this Minecraft version, so the tower was weird, uneven, and had random holes and gaps in it. Rather than fix it up, I decided to keep it this way - it sort of looks like a weird ancient ruined alien structure or something. I mean it mainly looks like an ugly cobblestone mess but I am suspending my disbelief. It's a cool crumbling tower left behind by an ancient civilisation. Snaking in and out of the ruined, crumbled holes I built a wooden path, randomly turning and climbing up the tower. In some places I made the path too deep so it looks a bit thick and weird but I can't be arsed to pillar up there with dirt blocks and fix it. Womp womp!

Here it is in all its shabby glory:

Ooh, wow, maybe a bit pretty, so breathtaking (because of the altitude mainly). Sorry the tower got a bit obscured by a cloud.

I have a bit of an idea of what I want to build next - explorations on top of the monolith have lead me to a weird little enclave inside the monolith. A small area where the terrain didn't mess up and it at normal height, surrounded on every single side by towering walls. I want to dig a grand tunnel there, and build something inside.

I didn't grab a screenshot of the little courtyard/enclave/basin, but I do have something a lot more fun: a screenshot of the isometric previewer! This mod adds back in the IsomPreview, or Infinite Map Visualiser, applet Notch built. He hosted the previewer on the Minecraft website, but took it down later on. Apparently it was still hidden in the code until snapshot 12w18a when it was nuked entirely during refactoring. Alpha 1.1.2_01 is, interestingly, the last version where it looks good! After this Notch added biomes, which programmatically change the colours of textures in-game based on the biome. So the base textures are an ugly greyish colour and a greeny-brown. You can read more about it here, where Sean DrinkyBird worked to resurrect it!

That tangent was all just to say that I have a screenshot of my world area from above in the Isometric Previewer. Look:

Ooh, wow, so isometric, so square!

I don't plan to write this much in every entry of this journal thing, and most may just be screenshots with a few sentences. But I feel I had a lot to establish in this first entry. I may write here every time I play, or maybe just whenever I finish a major project. Honestly this whole thing is just so I enjoy my time in the game more, enjoy my world more, and find a way to stay actively interested in this game I genuinely enjoy playing but abandon all too often. This is for me to have fun and enhance my experience ONLY!!! But I thought it'd be fun to share. Enjoy!