Entity Zero

Many know of the infamous Minecraft entity "Entity 303", an old tale of a Herobrine wannabe. Many also know that that Entity is pure and utter bullshit. Of course, this does not leave the world of Minecraft free of such terrors, all sunshine and rainbows. No, in the creation of Minecraft, an entity much worse than conceivable came to be. And I know of this story,, because my father worked at Mojang.

Around the time Minecraft's structure was just being created, 2010, Indev, Infdev, Alpha, there were talks going around the small staff at Mojang at the time of including a major enemy in Minecraft, worse than spiders, worse than creepers, something that would truly challenge the player or terrify them. Something humanlike, but in the uncanny valley. This is where the project codenamed "Annihilation" came to be. Annihilation itself started out as a few useless zeroes hidden in the code of early Minecraft versions, both as an easter egg and as a future reference for where the developers would write code for the entity.

Work on Annihilation began mid-Beta Minecraft, where features really began pumping into the game. The skin for the entity was procedurally generated, much like a Minecraft world, using grayscale colors and shades of red. The skin that came out of this computation looked nothing like a human, yet was pasted onto the Steve model. At first, the entity was given the not-so-terrifying AI of a zombie, but over time, Mojang workers adapted the zombie AI into something more like the Enderman AI we see today, not terrifying but incredibly unnerving.

The entity was being distributed behind-the-scene in Minecraft versions now, but of course was not able to be spawned using any stock game feature (spawn eggs wouldn't exist until after beta and release 1.0). The only way the entity could spawn was if exactly 8 zeroes were entered as the seed. Annihilation could only spawn at a specific coordinate in this "zero world". Even I did not discover what that coordinate was.

As Beta progressed, and as Mojang began to write out the official story of Minecraft, as it would be in 1.0, the staff locked the code of Annihilation entirely while working on features such as The End and the dragon that inhabits it, saving the entity for a future post-release update. The main developer of Annihilation, my father, noticed that the complex Java code of Annihilation had reverted to just zeroes in it's place, yet the entity would still spawn in a zero world at it's coordinates as intended in a test environment.

Annihilation was left almost abandoned following the release of Minecraft, where Mojang took a little break themselves from Minecraft, knowing their game had finally reached it's moment. However, in the rush to release Minecraft at Minecon 2011, no one in the developing team found the bug in the code that allowed Annihilation to merge itself into the main branch of Minecraft's code, giving it access to every bit and byte of the game.

Upon returning to their desks at Mojang office, the Minecraft team noticed that the code of Minecraft, which was a specific number set at Release, had grown exponentially in their absence. My father took a peek at the code he had written, and noticed that Annihilation had completely overhauled it's own code, even extending it using Minecraft's procedural generation engine and grabbing bits from other AI's code. When he tried to edit this code, it would immediately revert to zeroes and cause an error in the environment, before going back to Java code once again.

There was no one to blame for Annihilation going out of their hands. The Mojang office had been locked with the room empty before Minecon. My father was commanded to cease work on Annihilation until further notice, only attempting to find ways to remove its code from the game. Mojang couldn't afford to release versions of Minecraft with Annihilation's unplanned release, so Jeb took a few steps to at least lock the code of Annihilation so that it couldn't be ran in a Minecraft environment.

To the Mojang staff's relief, they were able to release Minecraft 1.1, the update that added spawn eggs, without any code for an Annihilation spawn egg, furthering their retention of Annihilation from the public. One night, however, Notch himself discovered the lie that would cause my father to lose his job. According to my father, Annihilation had plugged itself into my father's Mojang user, and edited the code for it's name, changing it to zeroes, making it look like he was the one to attempt to bring Annihilation back. Notch would not take any bullshit, and fired my father, removing him from the Mojang staff.

I had become an avid player of the game my father contributed to, excited for whenever he would come home to play it with me or tell stories about what goes on at the Mojang office. However, the day he got fired, he came home, went to his room, and slammed the door shut. No matter how much I pleaded for him to come out, it felt like he was too humiliated to even look at his son's face.

On April 30th, 2012, a user whose name is still unknown posted about a Herobrine-like entity on the Minecraft forums. The OP post went like this:

"I had created a new Minecraft world on versions 1.2.5 on the peaceful difficulty, intending to immerse myself in the serenity of a Minecraft world void of the fear of deadly creatures. Spawning into the world, I found myself on an entirely flat chunk of grass, surrounded by chunks of cliffs and hills. Thinking this would make an interesting moment on a seed showcase, I hit F3 to view the seed, only to discover it was one zero. I recorded this fact anyway on Notepad, along with my system time at the world creation, 12:00 PM, April 30th, 2012 (Minecraft uses the system time for its world generation algorithm if no seed is manually inputted). There were convenient steps on a cliff chunk facing me, which I climbed up to the plateau above. As soon as my head passed the edge of the plateau, I noticed a gray figure sprint at superhuman speeds away from me, just catching a glimpse of it. Thinking it was a figment of my imagination, I continued forth. My next sighting of the figure would be much later in the game. I prepared to venture back down my mine, in pursuit of diamonds. Oddly enough, the game had been crashing to 0 fps and, upon viewing the F3 menu, 0MB RAM usage every so often, which I thought was due to background processes on my computer which would subside soon enough. Even with the logical answer, I became nervous, my reflexes ready to snap at any button in front of me if something were to happen. And just as expected, I snapped my player's head towards my mine to find all torches missing, and the entity fading out at the bottom of the diagonal cavern. I hit print screen fast enough to capture the only evidence I have of its existence. Look at it, and look at it closely.

Following this sighting, my world began to exhibit quite strange behaviour. My strip mines at the bottom of the diagonal mine I sent would eventually begin crossing the same lava cavern over and over again, no matter how far I horizontally mined, same ores and everything. I would begin experiencing constant crashes, with the crash logs being entirely zeroes (no help obviously). I keep pushing my Minecraft's allocated RAM up, but still get huge lag spikes and RAM crashes."