This is an excerpt from an email sent to my mom in January 2024. It has been edited to remove personal details and explanations of Minecraft and wiki stuff y'all already know about. Hope you enjoy :P
I started playing Minecraft in 2013 and I still frequently play it to this day. The way I approach playing the game, however, has significantly changed over the course of 10.5 years. I've always primarily played the game in Creative mode. On the occasion I've played Survival mode, I've never progressed very far - I've never traveled to any dimensions besides the Overworld, and I've never encountered any of the game's bosses.
I discovered the Minecraft Wiki in early 2014, and I started making edits to the wiki later that year. By late 2014, I had created an account and quickly became one of the most active contributors to the site. The main things I did during this period were reverting disruptive edits, making small copy edits to the wiki's many articles in compliance with the style guide, and some other maintenance-type edits that nobody else was doing on the same level I was at the time. Due to the way wiki editing works, I was able to teach myself the fundamentals of HTML and later CSS. Going into 2015, my activity on the wiki gradually decreased due to burnout, and since I got enrolled into a public school later that year, I decided it would be best to take a break from the Minecraft Wiki to focus on school and other things. This break mostly lasted for over five years.
My approaches to playing Minecraft can be split into two different time periods: 2013-2020 and 2021-present. During the former time period, I would primarily build short Mario Kart-style tracks, make crude data visualizations of stuff not related to Minecraft, create some small buildings, connect said buildings with roadways, build some large animals, and mess around with the game's redstone mechanics a bit - all of which in Creative mode worlds that are no longer around today. Despite me taking a break from the Minecraft Wiki for a few years, I did anything but take a break from Minecraft itself. I would occasionally add small bits of information to the wiki and revert the random unconstructive edit I noticed during the break, but that was about it until late 2020.
By this point, I was no longer burnt out from wiki editing and became active again. Probably wasn't a good time to do so considering I had just started college a few months prior, but who cares about that, am I right? During the first couple months of this return, I did the same exact things that got me burnt out from the wiki several years ago: reverting edits and doing maintenance. But then, something occurred on January 22, 2021 that marked the beginning of a large shift in how I played Minecraft as well as how I edited the wiki.
On that day, I was reading an article about an old placeholder block that was no longer used by the game. The first thing I noticed was that the article was not very style guide-compliant, so I started editing the page with the goal of just cleaning it up. As I was editing it however, something about the article just felt... off. Because of that, I decided to figure out how to play older versions of Pocket Edition, hop into versions of Minecraft dating to 2012 and 2013, and attempt to obtain this placeholder block in the way the article outlined. In doing so, I found that a good chunk of the article had been completely incorrect for eight years, but I couldn't do anything else with it at the time because I had no information about what this block might have actually been used for.
I naturally didn't want my research into this block to start and end there, so I began to extensively play old Pocket Edition versions in an attempt to get any sort of information about what the block was used for. It quickly became apparent that the wiki's documentation of Pocket Edition was sorely lacking, so I now had this second goal of getting Pocket Edition documentation on par with Java Edition's. The second goal quickly progressed forward, but I still had no information regarding the placeholder block. I downloaded a hex editor so I could look at the game's save files and see if I could gather any information on the block that way. The answer was right in my face, but my less knowledgeable self didn't know that at the time. About two years passed with nothing new about what this block was used for.
It's not like nothing of importance happened during that two-year period though. I continued to get more knowledgeable about the game with each passing day. I continued adding Pocket Edition documentation to the wiki. Using the aforementioned hex editor, I figured out how to perform basic inventory editing in most versions before v0.9.0. All of this was done while I continued to revert bad edits and clean up wiki articles.
In July 2022, the wiki's admins took notice of everything I had done over the past about 20 months, and one of them decided to nominate me for adminship. I quickly hopped into that discussion, strongly opposed me becoming an admin, and then continued on with my regular wiki activities like that discussion never took place. I didn't explain why I opposed adminship at the time, but I did have three primary reasons for doing so:
- I was just about done with my college courses and figured I would be getting a job not long afterwards. I would have only been an admin for a few months at most before the time I could spend on the wiki would be cut in half.
- Regardless of any real-world commitments, my activity on the wiki had started declining after mid-2021, and I had made little progress on Pocket Edition documentation over the course of 2022. I came to the conclusion that I was starting to burn out from wiki editing again, and felt that adding administrative tasks on top of wiki editing would only accelerate this burn out.
- I was not confident in my ability to properly handle the administrator toolset. This is still the case as of writing this, but I believe I would be able to learn from any mistakes that might occur, just as I had done from making some questionable edits several years ago. However, I was considering the short-term impact at the time and that thought did not occur to me.
Not much notable occurred during the rest of 2022. The amount of time I could spend on the wiki did indeed get cut in half due to starting a job, and next to no progress was made on the Pocket Edition documentation front.
In January 2023, some dude named Sl1mJ1m slid into my DMs on Discord and stated that they found out what the placeholder block I talked about prior was used for. I quickly found out that this guy has put a lot of work into Omniarchive and is one of the most notable figures in the Minecraft Discontinued Features community. This guy apparently found out what this block was used for accidentally while looking into something else, and I realized the answer had been right in my face for two years.
Seems I still didn't know enough about Pocket Edition; time to get back into documenting it. I read up on how this game saves worlds and how it's changed over time. I figured out inventory editing in the earliest versions of Pocket Edition from 2011. I figured out how to externally edit various world settings like the game mode, the time of day, and the world's spawn point. I looked into several glitches in these older versions that could be exploited to make the game do things it was never intended to do. At this point, I no longer simply want to document Pocket/Bedrock Edition, I want to destroy it. I want to see every last mechanic this game has to offer get dissected, broken down, and exploited on the same level as Super Mario 64.
This drive to break Minecraft combined with the goal of documenting Pocket Edition inevitably led me to the Minecraft Discontinued Features (MCDF) Wiki. I quickly realized that this wiki's documentation of Pocket/Bedrock Edition was also sorely lacking. You already know what I had to do next.
Using the knowledge that the MCDF community has collected since 2020 as well as the knowledge I've independently gained since 2021, I've been able to contribute quite a bit to both the Minecraft Wiki and the MCDF Wiki. I was given the patroller user group on the Minecraft Wiki in September 2023 after being long overdue for it. I was also finally able to rewrite the article on the technical-not-placeholder block in December 2023 using the information that Sl1mJ1m provided along with some additional research that I was able to do now that I knew exactly what I needed to look for. Here's the article before the rewrite if you want to compare the two. I am still actively working on documenting Pocket/Bedrock Edition for both the Minecraft Wiki and the MCDF Wiki to this day.
Minecraft is of course not the only game I've played a ton these past ten years; I'd inevitably get bored of doing the same thing for so long. But it is the only one that I can say has played a vital role in my development and growth during this time.
In the time since I wrote that email, I've created several more content pages on the MCDF Wiki, learned even more about Bedrock Edition, and have become an administrator here. As long as I have an unquenchable thirst for breaking Pocket Edition and documenting as much of my findings as possible, I intend to do everything within my power to make this wiki a better place for everyone!
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