Minecraft Weekly Roundup: Pack.png Seed Found, Minecraft Live Goes Online, RTX Maps Expand

Plenty has been brewing across the cube-shaped universe this week. From a decade-old visual mystery finally getting solved, to Mojang locking in the date for its biggest annual stream, here is the catch-up.

The Pack.png Seed Has Been Cracked

For years, players have wondered where the default server-selection image, known simply as Pack.png, was actually captured. It is one of those tiny details that quietly haunted the community once enough people noticed it.

The puzzle is now put to rest. Content creator SalC1 tracked down the original seed used for that screenshot, which is no small feat given the absurd number of seeds Minecraft can generate.

If you want to see the spot yourself, fire up a world with seed 3257840388504953787 and head to coordinates x: 49, z: 0. Bring snacks. There is something oddly satisfying about standing exactly where an iconic image was framed.

Minecraft Live Returns, Fully Digital This Year

Mojang has confirmed that Minecraft Live, the rebranded successor to MineCon Live, is happening despite the pandemic flattening pretty much every large gaming event on the calendar. The solution: take the whole thing online.

The stream will let viewers send questions to the Mojang team, get sneak peeks at upcoming features, and generally hang out with the people behind the game. Mark your calendar for October 3rd at 12pm ET.

Here is the official trailer for the event:

Minecraft RTX Gets a Bigger Map Library

Real-time ray tracing in Minecraft has been one of the more eye-catching tech demos of the past year. Lighting, reflections and shadows behave the way they would in the real world, which gives the blocky landscape an almost surreal beauty.

Until now, most of what players could explore in RTX came from the original Mojang and Nvidia Beta worlds. That changes this week, with community-built RTX maps arriving on the Minecraft Marketplace. The new selection opens up a lot more variety for anyone with an RTX-capable GPU who has already burned through the Beta content.

You can grab the new maps directly from the Marketplace, and Nvidia has a comparison gallery showing how dramatic the visual difference can be once ray tracing is switched on.