A History of Minecraft
This was written by me nearly a year ago on the Minecraft forums. I recently uncovered the file and decided to put it up here as well.
Part 1: The End
Millions of years ago, there was a planet much like Earth. Its inhabitants were closely related to humans, and they lived in a golden era. Their name for themselves and their planet is lost to time, and so whenever they are mentioned now, they are referred to simply as the people.
In that age, the people had constructed wondrous feats of magic and engineering, including huge castles able navigate the skies, made of mythical elements, and orbs made entirely of light that one could use as both illumination and companions. The progress of the time was remarkable, and more wonders were being discovered daily. But it could not last.
The demand for new discoveries was such that the people were experimenting with dangerous forces that they did not understand, half completing a project before putting it into the world as complete. There were, of course, the few lonely voices of reason that tried to slow the massive development, but they were ridiculed and brought to shame, and then labeled as unimportant and forgotten. Their doom, then, was certain.
The cause of the collapse seemed benign enough, at first; for it was a discovery that allowed anyone to become as they wished, to transform into a bird and go flying, shrink themselves down to the molecular level, and to undo any damage done to themselves with a thought. However, the way this was achieved was unstable, and the consequences horrendous.
The richest of the people had been able to afford the ability first, before it had been complete enough to bring to the public, and these were the ones who went completely mad, transforming into beings measuring in miles, and laying waste to anything they could. Most of them eventually found each other and would battle for many days, until one made a mistake and died, transforming back into its original human-like form. The ones who had gotten the ability when it was released were transformed into bizarre, alien creatures, and stuck in that form with no intelligence remaining. The ones who had gotten it the latest were the most unlucky, as they were transformed into the shapes of various creatures that were terrestrial, but had enough intelligence left to them to know what had happened. These poor souls either ended up twisted with hatred, and resembled a huge spider or a person's carcass, or they wound up with the forms that were of humans, but key parts of the anatomy were wrong, and their ability to communicate was severely limited.
Then there were the people who were either too poor to afford the ability, or had held out getting it. Most of these people were killed by a mutation that was most like them in form, or the stronger mutation was transferred to them via one that resembled one of their carcasses. The largest groups of survivors numbered only a few hundred, but still had their memories. By the time they had gotten to safety, the biggest of the mutations had wiped themselves out, and the rest were only seeking out and killing people or mutations that most resembled them.
Part 2: Into Darkness
Eventually, a group of a few thousand humans had banded together to create a place of safety. Brick by brick, they built as they hadn't build in many hundreds of years, by hand and mechanical synthesizer, a stronghold that was hidden deep below the reach of any transformed powerful enough to break in, and defended at all times by mechanical constructs built out of iron, the strongest metal they still had in quantity.
The people expanded their stronghold outwards until it was large enough for almost ten thousand people, and then created vast libraries of research, hoping to one day be able to either escape the mutations entirely, or vanquish them once and for all. They created magical weapons forged of a blue crystal and enchanted from the life forces of defeated mutations, and rode out on horses, the most reliable form of travel they still had, searching for other groups of survivors of the collapse. After many generations of searching and building, the people populated three strongholds, and were dedicated to finding a way to break free of the creatures who held kept them from venturing outside of their walls of stone. Their civilization may have collapsed, but the people still knew how to progress. Their first breakthrough was in portal technology, and they created a portal made out of a material resembling obsidian, but incredibly strong. The material was the only one found that could withstand the stress of a hole in reality.
Groups of people ventured through the portal hoping to find an alternate world that resembled theirs, but never came back. The people finally sent a hundred of their strongest warriors to investigate, but only three of them came back, one of them holding the head of a dragon. Another exploration party found themselves on a barren stretch of land floating in the emptiness of the universe. An alteration of the original portal was created to travel within the dimension, and the people found nothing but more barren lands, but with multitudes of a strange purple plant. Finding it edible, the people tried to colonize the world, but found that only material already there would not dissolve.
And so another civilization was set up in the dimension that seemed to have been shattered in a sad end, with buildings built of the yellow material the islands were made of, and eventually purple bricks made of the edible fruit.
Part 3: Shift
The dimension was at first called The End of a World by its new inhabitants, but eventually shortened to The End. Most of the people had already gone to the End, with its absence of mutations. The people discovered how to do wondrous things there, and built amazing ships that would zoom through the endless void, mapping a seemingly infinite number of islands, none distinctive from each other. The ships were fueled by the plants that the people had named Chorus Plants, on account of how they seemed to whisper when eaten, and would then transport the user instantly to a random location around them.
The dimensions slowly shifted away from each other for several years, and it soon became a rare time when the portal would open, but no one really minded, for the inhabitants of the end were self-sustaining. There was only a skeleton crew of people left in the strongholds when the portals finally stopped responding all together, and they lamented the fact that they had not gone over to the End.
The effect of being cut off from the world they had originated from only became apparent after many, many generations. The diet of chorus fruit and complete isolation from their home world eventually manifested itself in the ability of the people there to transport themselves the distance that eating the fruit had, and control where they ended up, and they eventually became able to communicate by thought across vast distances. Long after, they would be able to cross the inter-dimensional plain, their diet would manifest itself in the form of their bodies, and they would forget language.