There's a fascinating technolibertarian metaverse dynamic to Minecraft anarchy servers, where gameplay is driven by an arms race of normalized cheating. Players

There's a fascinating technolibertarian metaverse dynamic to Minecraft anarchy servers, where gameplay is driven by an arms race of normalized cheating. Players are careful about what screenshots they share online, as this concern is the reality there. There's kind of a similarity to a future real reality where the entire Earth has been autonomously scanned: the terrain of the entire map of a Minecraft server is known to all, since the seed for procedural world generation can be reversed from nearby terrain, and reverse engineering of the world generation has resulted in several methods of determining in in-game coordinates of a player taking a screenshot (terms to search: trees, texture rotation, bedrock). Related are the impressive endeavours that determined the seed of the screenshot used in the game's splash screen and the seed of a 128px (tiny) screenshot used in the UI. The top comment of the first link explains it better than I could here: Minecraft's “Pack.png” Seed Reversal Methodology https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24621303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24621303 – 2020-09 (97 comments) Minecraft@Home https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23895789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23895789 – 2020-07 (75 comments) There've also been few server exploits for locating other logged-on players: Nocom – 2b2t Minecraft server exploit using Monte-Carlo localization https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29615428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29615428 – 2021-12 (80 comments) It's interesting how the anarchy server hacking scene is sort of like science, except with the god-like abilities of reverse-engineering the game's binaries. edit: fix cut off sentence