25 hours in Beta Minecraft

31 Jan, 2026

I realize that this is kind of a long one. TL;DR for busy readers: university student gets bored, plays old Minecraft, is forced to slow down and be creative, has more fun than expected. Also, this post might not make a lot of sense if you have zero familiarity with Minecraft. Sorry!

In the past two weeks, I have sunk 25 hours into a 14-year-old version of Minecraft.

As a casual Minecraft player of more than a decade, I’d always played on the latest version and never considered otherwise. I got my start on Pocket Edition Alpha in 2014¹ — thanks to YouTube Let’s Plays — and switched to Java Edition when my friend gifted it to me in 2020.

When I was 8, the monsters in Survival mode frightened me; so I threw myself into Creative mode, in which I tried to build the city of my dreams². A few years later, convinced by my friends, I decided to give Survival another chance. I realized that it was kind of fun, so it became my main game mode.

But for the past few years, this is how I’ve been playing: boot up a Survival world — old or new — and mess around until I ran out of things to do, at which point I would get bored and abandon the game for weeks or months.

Well, you can’t really run out of things to do in Minecraft. By its nature, it is an open-world sandbox game with near-infinite world generation and unbridled player freedom. Also, each game update would bring shiny new features into the mix — and who doesn’t like novelty?

The main issue was decision paralysis. There were so many things I could do, and the enormity of it all was overwhelming. At the same time, I was increasingly underwhelmed by the new features. New weapon, new structure, new mob — been there, done that, now what?

It seems inane, then, that I would keep succumbing to the urge to come back to it. At times, I craved simple escapism; at others, I was struck by fleeting bursts of inspiration, only to emerge deflated when my skill level wasn’t as I hoped. Frankly, I was sick of this Sisyphean cycle. I so badly wanted to enjoy this game that had been a constant throughout my formative years, but all I seemed to do was disappoint myself.

By chance, I had stumbled upon r/GoldenAgeMinecraft. Older Minecraft versions have remained available through the official launcher or other means³, and there is a thriving community of enthusiasts. A recurring theme in the sub is that old Minecraft provides a simpler, objectively better experience, more in line with the game’s original vision and aesthetic. To be honest, I was skeptical as to whether it was mere nostalgia. Not expecting much, I set up Beta 1.7.3⁴, the most frequently recommended version, and hit Create World.

As I spawned in, I fell into the familiar Survival gameplay loop. Punch a tree, make a crafting table and tools, get stone, make a bed, the works. Although these steps are nearly instinctual to me at this point, I ran into a few roadblocks on my first attempt.

1. No sprinting. In later versions, I would tap the Ctrl key and be able to move 30% faster, swiftly hopping from point A to point B. Now, I was limited to walking, which felt more like wading through slime.

2. No food. Not really — pigs offer the most quickly available early-game food in this version. But I kept trying to get food from the animals in my immediate vicinity, not realizing that cows and sheep and chicken wouldn’t drop any food. With the lack of a hunger bar (and a good amount of wool for a bed), I assumed I would be fine for the night without food until…

3. The nightmare mechanic hit me⁵. As the sun set, I naively put down my red bed crafted from white wool in the open — oh, nostalgia — and clicked it until the screen started fading to black. After an idyllic, if unremarkable, first day, I expected to skip the night and be greeted by a nice sunrise…

Only to be jumpscared by a fucking zombie that had teleported to the foot of my bed and was trying to eat my face. Over the course of trying to sleep a few more times (the definition of insanity), my HP was rapidly depleted and I was met with a game over.

It turns out that you straight up can’t use beds in this version without sheltering yourself with a nice, enclosed, lit-up house. As I respawned at my original spawn point, now defenseless and still unable to run, I decided to resort to the oldest trick in the book: dig down and seal myself underground for 10 real-life minutes until the sun rose.

After this temporary setback, I began exploring the world in earnest. The terrain generation is unlike that of newer Minecraft. Modern worlds look more “grounded” in reality (as much as a block game can be, anyway), with a stunning variety of landforms and colorful biomes⁶. In Beta 1.7.3, however, dirt and stone unashamedly jut out from ground level in jagged, blocky formations. Cliffs, overhangs, and floating islands abound. There is a modernist appeal in its boldness; it makes no attempt to imitate the natural world.

There is also the fog obscuring the edge of the render distance, which numerous r/GoldenAgeMinecraft users lamented the loss of. It definitely creates a liminal atmosphere; I see how Herobrine might have arisen out of it.

It didn’t take me long to build my first shelter, a hideous cobblestone box that was rapidly dismantled once I finished building my current house. I didn’t really have a plan for the new house; I only knew that I wanted it to look somewhat medieval.

The roof design was mostly improvised. I wasn’t completely happy with it at the time; I wanted to add upside-down stairs to the bottom outline of the roof to smooth it out a bit. Turns out that was impossible, along with upside-down slabs; I had taken this feature for granted.

With a constrained block palette, it was difficult to get the exact effect I wanted in terms of texturing and visual interest. Paradoxically, I found it liberating to be freed from sky-high standards of today, set by more than a decade of builders honing their technique. Also, in modern versions, players might need to traverse thousands of blocks to hunt down an elusive biome or structure. In Beta, the limited variety in biomes also made collecting all the necessary blocks much more accessible.

I have plans to fill up the immediate area as I go. I feel that the abundance of stone and gravel could possibly lend itself well to gargantuan brutalist structures, so I got the idea to recreate some real-life architecture. I would also like to add some big pixel art and sculptures; I feel that colored wool is woefully underutilized in modern Minecraft builds. (Fuck a theme, am I right?) And of course I would need big bridges, minecart railways, and waterways to connect everything, because one does not run or fly in Beta Minecraft.

I suppose the most distinct philosophical difference in Beta is that there is no end point, no point at which you become all-powerful⁷. There is no Ender Dragon to slay, no elytra to get ahold of for flight, no villagers to torture for OP enchantments.

Say you get diamonds — so what? That pickaxe you build cannot be made unbreakable; it is destined to crumble into nothingness. Each time a piece of armor loses durability, the amount of damage reduction decreases in turn — heavily damaged diamond armor is absolutely worthless compared to intact leather armor⁸. You can’t even round up pigs to farm them, because they despawn when you leave the area. As long as you keep playing the game, nothing stays forever except the land and your own creations.

In modern Minecraft, after spending hours upon hours going through the typical path of progression, it is easy to hit a point where you’ve done everything there is to do to “make number go up”. Congratulations, you are now immortal. Yet it doesn’t feel deserved, exactly. It can be tedious, but there’s no skill involved in rerolling villager trades or blowing up netherrack underground for netherite. After building a few farms by copying tutorials off YouTube, you hardly even have to worry about most resources.

So what do you want to do? You might zoom around the world, killing time by exploring and finding new stuff to play with. The world is wonderfully stunning, filled with creatures and people⁹ that make it feel straight-up alive. Yet there is a separation between you and everything else; you clearly occupy a position above them all, but you cannot communicate with them, not even with the villagers who appear to have a whole civilization but only mumble among themselves. You feel lonely among the crowd. You can glean hints of lore, but they don’t point towards any coherent history. The world is all yours, but also far beyond your reach.

In Beta, there is much less. As the development phase suggests, the game is literally incomplete. The world is a blank slate for your creativity, but you are still beholden to its rules and (at times arbitrary) limitations. You belong to this world. Perhaps there is something unsettling in its liminality, but it doesn’t matter. You will find comfort in the toil of mining at a torturously slow pace with your unenchanted pickaxe, only to replace it with the diamonds you just dug up, and have another go at it.

All in the pursuit of imparting yourself into the world, one block at a time.

Addendum: is new Minecraft really “worse”?

I certainly enjoyed my time playing Beta Minecraft. However, I think it is a very different game from modern Minecraft, and not fully comparable.

It is a testament to the developers’ hard work that the game has received so many updates over the years. I have said so multiple times, but I really do think it is visually amazing, especially after Caves and Cliffs.

I found myself missing a bunch of quality of life features:

• Shortcuts/mouse gestures for inventory management and crafting
• Sprinting
• The recipe book
• Stacking food items
• Field of view and brightness settings — the game is just so damn dark!

I have gained a newfound appreciation for modern Minecraft. It feels much smoother to play, and it is so much more beginner-friendly. There was an achievements system, but it was very bare-bones, and did not provide very many hints at all. It used to be the case that guides were basically necessary to make any progress, which led to the creation of the Minecraft wiki. Watching AboutOliver beat Minecraft completely blind, I realized how much external knowledge I had taken for granted, and how many elements existed to guide players.

The downside of so many people working on the game, and accumulating so many changes over the years, is that there is an unfortunate lack of direction and some bloat in the game as it is. But the beauty of Minecraft is that most things are optional, beyond doing the bare minimum to defend yourself. You can easily choose to adopt a more “old school” playstyle if you wanted. For example, part of my issue is that I don’t have the skillset to make full use of the ten billion aesthetic options in the new game, so I get overwhelmed by it. This would not be an issue if I recognized this, stopped being so harsh on myself, and deliberately went for simpler builds. A change in mindset is all that is needed, really.

An aspect of gameplay I haven’t touched on much is survival multiplayer servers (SMPs). The loneliness of Minecraft no longer becomes an issue when you’re collaborating and joking around with a bunch of friends. Whether it’s dumb inside jokes or an elaborate roleplay storyline, you’re in charge of your own lore.

Old Minecraft is a very different vibe for sure. I see myself continuing to enjoy both Beta and current Minecraft, and perhaps going back to revisit some other versions as well if I can find the time. I also look forward to trying out some mods for Beta like Better Than Adventure, or some tweaks that fix the genuine grievances I have. I might update my blog with whatever I do; no promises, though!

#blog