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Hello all BOINCers and Minecraft@Home fans,

As a preface, would like to subtitle this post the 'Beginning of the End (...of the Year)' update. You'll see why soon. This is a long post, and I hope all those BOINCing with us at Minecraft@Home will read and see this.

First, I shall give everyone an update on the events of the past two months since the launch of Trailercrack and the OneChunk Speedrun seed-finding project. All tasks have been completed as of Mid-November 2021, and all results have been collected as of December 2021! We still must go over the final results, or any missed results for both projects, but safe to say all your efforts and data are now collected on our servers, and all BOINC computing is on 'break' for the month of December, and possibly into mid-January.

Now, we have tried to stay to our promises of a 'Minecraft Trailer' 10th anniversary recreation video, which you can view our announcement of below. As said by Tomlacko, one of our major Discord administrators and contributors today, "The full remake, including the reveal of all seeds, will come out later when we're finished! (This might still take us a month or so, we'll see)".

Trailer Remake Preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kox1ZR8xJ5E

Additionally, we have an announcement regarding the results of the SSG Project (OneChunk). For a limited time, Minecraft@Home held the Enter-End World World Record of 17.5 seconds! All thanks to your computing power allowing us to find an insanely rare, easy to access End Portal seed. After loading the fresh seed, we literally were able to dig down and jump into the End Portal (one of the biggest challenges of Minecraft speedrunning). I would would call that a major time save and success. You can view this Speedy Steve in these videos:

Official Speedrun announcement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtPZIHqGYXo
Speedrun detailed by 'TheMisterEpic': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gvgf5cAAGY

Or, retrace our steps in the seed: -5362871956303579298 with Minecraft Java, Version 1.12!

I hope you all understand that there shall be some downtime while our team investigates the major changes within the Minecraft 1.18 'Caves and Cliffs Part 2' update. Some of which are critical to the now more difficult future of Minecraft seedfinding, but also brings us some hopes of wonderful new worlds with the drastically different and expanded world generation that it brings. These changes were revealed to us with the expansion of the seed-space (how many unique seeds that exist) from 44 bits (48-4 bits) to 60 (64 full bits, minus 4 again). In simple terms, this means we now have 65,536 times more work to do to find a single 'lost' seed. That's many thousands of times more possibilities than before.

Those familiar with our previous BOINC projects, or current ones may know the complex relationship between computational time, computational workload, possible acceleration of work and the seedspaces we must work with, or constrain for to complete our projects. The Minecraft 1.18+ RNG (Random Number Generator) algorithm itself has changed to one called 'Xorshiro' from my quick review of the latest discussion chats, and a method to 'skip' over full-RNG computation for our future projects has already been theorized and possibly in development.

It also appears that this new RNG is fairly easy to calculate beforehand, with results small enough that it is possible to create into a few-kilobyte sized lookup table that our computing devices can quickly compare the input and output results from. One may scheme that with newer, larger GPU or CPU caches and cores (See, RTX 4000/AMD RX 7000), these LUTs can be further massively distributed across the device to help provide some of the speedups we shall need to reasonably compute more results within this 60-bit seedspace. Our projects often find, or have weird, super fast optimizations that can turn multi-GPU projects into more solo, or CPU based tasks depending on the dedication, time and luck our MC@Home geniuses have during our projects' lifecycles.

This leaves us to the remaining tasks on hand for us to work on over the next month or two, which are:
1. Post new SSG results (One new possible candidate from Mid-November 2021 found)
2. Trailercrack trailer results (for the video thumbnail) final seed-collection from your BOINC results
3. Minecraft 1.18 SSG (ie, OneChunk2 & 12-eye portals) project creation and coding, for our next Long-Term BOINC tasks
4. Celebrate the New Year, and to 1.5 Years of Minecraft@Home!
5. Give all participants in the last two major projects badges

In 'Super Short': Minecraft Seedfinding will become potentially a lot slower as of 1.18, require more computers, time and coding until new tricks are found. We may have more CUDA and OpenCL (long-term) projects as well along the way. Thank you to everyone who has been with us, whether from the beginning, or the past few months to dedicate your resources to finding lost, new, or the impossible Minecraft seeds.


Now, for 'The End':
If you know anyone who may have some free time, and are good Java/C/C++ coders and/or interested in Minecraft, please let us know, or join us on the Discord at: [url] https://discord.gg/FVM4SPp [/url].

Many of us have spend hundreds or thousands of hours (and dollars) into this passion project of ours since June 2020, with occasional external assistance from both content creators, and even from Minecraft/Microsoft themselves. As we continue into the New Year, I'd like for you to keep in mind that some of us may not be able to dedicate as much time as we have over the first, or any at all. That includes myself, as one of the original MC@Home members and contributors. My own professional career has kicked off over the past few months and life has changed quite a bit, meaning I have not been as attentive and able to assist as I have before. I feel and read that the same is certainly been true with other members' lives, whether it due to changes in their own jobs, family, other hobbies or ongoing educational aspirations. As Minecraft@Home grew, so did we.

You may already know we are quite different than other BOINC projects, as we're almost fully open-source on Github, and both self or community funded by a bunch of mostly anonymous, worldwide and passionate Minecraft fans. A handful of our notable and contributing members are experienced professionals, but many of us (including myself) are much younger compared to other BOINC project teams and not affiliated with major academic or research institution. Especially as some of us do not have extensive educational and work experience outside a Bachelors degree (yet), if any degree at all! It's amazing what we've been able to accomplish over the past 18 months, especially the scale of our computing infrastructure and the increases of non-developing but active members of our Discord server, who all share the same passion and excitement for the interesting worlds of Minecraft, regardless of if they are lost or (re)found. Occasionally we have trouble with distributing our findings and announcements, but Youtuber experts and a few historical Minecraft figures have pitched in over the past year and a half to help us solve these problems- and to our relief.

With almost all of the historical seeds of interest found, and all/many of the recent Panorama (menu) seeds discovered by our Discord members' own quick computational projects, some questions may arise to what can we find going forwards? This situation, along with the reduced ability to dedicate our free-time to projects from external and internal factors means that we might have a slower period of announcements and minimal administration of projects in the New Year, until or unless new blood can be found or major, exciting discoveries are presented. There are so many techniques, tasks and knowledge one must keep in their minds when working on and with Minecraft@Home, making it difficult for some of us to both train and retain possible new members of our development, testing and project teams. Many are too inexperienced, young or busy to become accustomed to our project's (chaotic at times) development processes and cycles, and so it leads me to wonder personally what we can do to improve this, or how long we can continue running the projects. We're not having a computational resource problem, but a human (and hyena!) resource related one. Not enough meat in some places, we got the bones still in these big seedfinding steaks, but they're not as juicy or fresh as they once were.

Regardless, I feel I can say that we're not going away yet, or within the next half year. You and I may need to keep our expectations smaller and more realistic, and there may be chances that a lot of work done on an unknown, future project is for 'nothing'... aside from knowing that either some code is wrong, or that quite literally, something is truly impossible due to time, resources or lack of possibility of occurring.

Goodbye for now BOINCers, and enjoy your December 2021, whether freezing, festive or boiling hot-
Hyenadae/Hy & MC@Home team

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