Minecraft Beta's Last Unsolved Mystery 

4000 creepers managing to crash an entire server and make it a sort of mystery is the funniest thing I've ever seen honestly

hundreds of creepers appearing out of nowhere and inexplicably transforming into cows just has to be the funniest minecraft mystery I've ever seen

Q: How many cows? A: A cowsand

9:29 the long pause followed by "The cows are everywhere" had me in tears

Creepers spawn in overloaded masses due to a known glitch Get replaced with cows due to a different bug Then get converted into a horde of zombies, which then die, leaving behind feathers as that was their item drop prior to rotten flesh being added Old Minecraft truly is an elder horror beyond comprehension

I love how you make everything spooky just to suddenly drop “the cows are everywhere”

it's a bug that was also covered in one of bugmancx videos in the "minecraft the journey" series. In some versions mob spawnpoints are bugged and makes them spawn thousands of mobs on one single block. Edit: it's Ep 114

My friend: naw bro, I made this farm without cheats! The farm: 9:38

The random feathers around the place would fit with the "zombie apocalypse" comment as the corruption replaced the cows into zombies, died by the day and dropped feathers around that version before the world was saved

I actually believe their PC could of blue-screened, probably ran out of memory trying to load immense amounts of mobs simultaneously. Having between 2-4Gb of RAM on avg I can totally see that being a plausible issue.

"a bovine tsunami" not the words i was expecting to hear today but im definitely not upset

"we find something very different indeed" and then t h o u s a n d s of cows are staring you down

"This is it; the freezing occurs when these cow pockets are within simulation distance."

As you were mentioning all the files and the server log I was thinking: "Wow, this is a really well made ARG". But is not. The most plausible reason: it corrupted while downgrading.

Imagine having your entire world get cursed by a bug where cows spawn in the thousands and take over like a whole army

Bro, how do you keep finding all this obscure stuff no one ever heard of? Keep going cause it's really great!

The number E represents entity counts, the first number is the number being rendered at once, and the second number is the total the *client* is aware of. At 9:55 that is 22 thousand cows. As others have stated, there used to be a bug where entities spawned under certain conditions did not count towards the mob count. Minecraft always tries to aggressively maintain around 70 hostile mobs (probably different in older versions.) So it would spawn a batch of creepers, the hostile mob count wouldn't increase, so it would spawn more later. At some point either through save corruption or update corruption the entity ID for these creepers got set to cows. I assume cows is probably the fail-safe ID for conversion of entities. The intense lag you feel is minecraft trying to calculate very very long ticks, trying to process entity collusion. This is why watchdog was later implemented forcing ticks to be limited to a maximum length of ticks. Funny enough, MCEdit would easily fix this, as it has the ability to delete entities in mass. I experienced a similar issue on one of the first servers I hosted. instead of creepers it was squids. A single chunk was multiple megabytes of squid. Entities used to also be saved at whole number positions which would often cause them to clip into fences and thus be able to break out of pens. This bug took many many tries to fix, and is probably still not fully fixed to this day.

I thought this was going to be some generic ARG, but that was actually really interesting. You definitely missed some huge aspects of it though. One of the biggest glitches that happened here was the strange "mob conversion", for lack of a better term. We see this in the written story (creepers turning to cows), but without the later evidence that just seems like a lie like the quartz structure. However, in save D there were feathers at all the locations of the cows, and at that point in time there were chat logs about a "zombie apocalypse" and zombies everywhere. Here's the kicker; in Beta 1.3 zombies dropped feathers. Given this, what happened now makes a little more sense: The corrupted world generated a massive amount of creepers, which then either converted to cows or despawned (since the cows were all stacked together at first, I believe the cows spawned separately after the creepers). The cows then lagged out the server quite a bit, and eventually unpacked. Then the final glitch happened; the cows converted to zombies (what was mentioned in the chat logs), and the zombies all burned in the sun and dropped feathers, shortly before Save D occurred. And the last thing; given this was some kid in 2011, the PC used at the time was probably horrible even by their standards. I find it hard to believe the PC wouldn't bluescreen near all those cows.

You briefly showed the Igloo. I find it fascinating how similar it looks to the actual igloos later added to Minecraft itself. The one in this beta savefile features a crafting table, furnace, bed (+ an extra one), ice as well as a ladder going down stairs. The layout is different, but that's a lot of similarities to the actual igloos we got.

I actually remember this map from back in the day. I was scared as fuck playing this map although nothing was there, except edgy signs. Also there was an update video but I don't remember what spicycrap said (it was 10 years ago)

Oh no… It’s Antvenom’s worst nightmare

This is incredible. I've actually known about this map for 9 years, because I've used to watch SpicyCrap666 as a child. To this day, I still joke about Brabantia with my friends and talk about it from time to time (the day the archive was made was a great day for us). Seeing this video, and all the memories from Spicy and Brabantia, especially from a RU-vidr I really enjoy watching, was an amazing experience.

9:52 Love how RGN just breaks away from his formal tone and his confusion just intensifies

Reminds me of a bug I had on my creative world. The nether and the end doesn't exist in my world despite me going there in creative mode many times before. Even custom dimensions with datapacks I could enter, but the two vanilla dimensions were a no go. In fact the terrain is still saved and could theoretically be accessed, I was wondering how it happened and it intrigued me. It was a caused by a game breaking bug. The cause of it was due to the of the prerelease snapshots for saves and cliff part 1 corrupting the world generation file, causing it to be wiped and be blanked, minecraft at least tried to alleviate the problem by loading the last set of settings used or try to generate a new set of settings, but even that failed, possibly being a custom superflat world, or messed with datapacks. The world was impossible to open, 5 years and it was gone, but I never deleted it, because maybe when caves and cliffs part 1 fully came out, it would fix the bug with it's upgrade features. When it did nothing happened, it kept showing the error that the map generations settings have failed to load and gave me to option to 'disable the data pack' or go back to title. Since it was an actual vanilla minecraft issue, clicking the 'disable the data pack' button didn't do anything and it kept showing the error since there wasn't a datapack to disable to begin with. I was somewhat distraught, I had some good redstone stuff I made and command block things, as well as pixel art and random buildings I've created, but it was all for naught. When caves and cliffs part 2 came out, it strangely fixed the bug, the world was able to load without showing the error screen. However when I tried to enter the nether and the end neither portal worked. I fell right through the end portal, and the nether portal never transported me no matter how long I waited, not even in creative mode. So while i can now reenter my world it was only the overworld. I checked the reason and it was because the game only 'upgraded' the overworld to the newer overworld height, so it generated the relevant JSON data tags associated with such a change and it was a superflat void world just like before somehow 'fixing' the overworld. When I checked the generation settings the nether and end were not included in the map generation settings at all. They are still blanked out to this day. Funny enough I could 'manually' re-add the Nether and End via a datapack and could get them back again, but it was a silly bug regardless. And please, always backup your saves. That was the ONE time I didn't backup a save and nearly wiped a world.

Nothing better to watch late at night than an RGN video. I absolutely love these.

Definitely adding "bovine tsunami" to my vocabulary.

There were several explosion holes in the ground so the quartz grave could have been blown up, it could also have been snow or some other white block that he mistook as quartz, if any such blocks existed

Wow amazing video and efforts to research everything! One question though, how come you aren't a detective, seriously!?

the quality of this channel is unmatched

This post is a messege from an israeli player talks to an israeli youtuber which no longer active, i remember that episode in his channel as a kid and how his community tried to put the pieces together.. this episode was part of his series "The dark side of games" or in hebrew הצד האפל של המשחקים, i didnt think in my wildest dream that i finaly see this mystery solved.

WAKE UP! NEW RETROGAMINGNOW VIDEO! WAKE UP!

Brabantia??? lets gooooo this is such an old case, I remember back in like 2014, or 2015, maybe earlier in the Israeli MC community. What a nostalgia trip dude

Now we gotta for RGN to make a new video about the ACT II of mark101's new series.

Hopped onto RU-vid, in mood of watching RGN. Oh god, I saw a video that is 1 month old, thought he dropped a new vid the month ago. I was flabbergasted when I found out that this is still that vid exploring and explaining brabantia, but with changed name and preview...

SPICYCRAP666 MENTIONED

This was such a nostalgia trip for me! I used to watch Spicy's content so much all those years back, and with your videos being among my favorites lately... talk about a nostalgia trip :v Amazing content as always. ^^

WHY ARE RGN VIDEOS ALWAYS SO GOOD like actually creepy too

Having seen the original video covering this map and everything with the site post when I was a young kid (Originally covered by famous israeli youtuber in 2014), this is a really nice refreshing take on it and I love this video. Thank you

YEAH that the kind of mystery i love to see ! Like i understand for the other subject you are talking about but when i see you doing those "paranormal/mystery" videos i am glued to it even for hours.

This was incredibly interesting! Please do more deep dives into code and files like this, I couldn't look away

Honestly pretty refreshing to see a Minecraft mystery that wasn't fabricated

This is a really interesting minecraft mystery, really love your videos tho. You are probably the best youtuber out there that explains minecraft ARGs/Mysteries.

I find it funny how you give this the ARG spooky editing and yet it works so well for this

i really needed that closure. im waiting a whole decade for that closure. thank you for putting my thoughts and theories to rest.

Yahoo, Retro is back! And what a fun little mystery to unravel indeed; I think you said this once in a previous video, but it seems that a big part of the mystery of early Minecraft creepypastas is no longer possible to recreate due to our understanding of bugs. Inexplicable occurrences, such as chunk errors or mob spawning issues, would have been strange and frightening to young and/or inexperienced players, who would have blamed them on supernatural phenomena. Additionally, Minecraft itself was a new game then, lending more credibility to the mystery. Now, we can simply attribute these things to incompatibilities between updates and corrupted data. The naivete is gone. But hey, at least we still have these leftover gems to explore, and we can suspend our disbelief with ARGs and relive the romance of the haunted Minecraft world. Thank you so much for uploading!

Okay, I'm less than a minute in and this is crazy coincidental. This morning I had a long wacky dream that took a lot of turns. One of the main turning points happened to be when me and my group were in a hotel coming up with a game plan. A villain showed up and I escaped the hotel. When I came back, there was an obscene amount of Minecraft mobs (Before this, Minecraft was not involved whatsoever). Most of the mobs were Zombies but some were Creepers as well. I could barely walk without taking damage because of the severe density of the hoard within the hotel.

Keep it man you’re easily my favorite RU-vidr and I constantly binge watch your vids

This is my favorite Minecraft channel, it gives such a mysterious vibe and a very unique feeling, something no other Minecraft youtuber has. I would actually love to watch all his videos over and over.

Retro never fails to make it go all over the screen

the thumbnail as an album cover would go HARD

Seeing some of the chat log and the players just chatting is kind of giving me the feels. (did not read all of it though.)

dude your videos are always so high quality and interesting, I love your video style, keep up the crazy good videos!

We had the same things back on Beta 1.9.6 but with skeletons instead of cows, after that I figured I should use /stop instead of just closing a server window

The main thing you left out here is why did the cows seemingly originate as zombies towards the beginning of Brabantia C, and then turn back into them by the start of Brabantia D? Clearly the "zombie apocalypse" in C followed by thousands of feathers (zombie drop assumedly from them burning in the daylight) a week later alludes to the cows instead having been zombies at 2 seperate periods in time.

This is interesting to me because it reminds me of an incident that me and my younger sister experienced when we were children. We were playing on a LAN survival world, and we had set up our homes at an NPC village. One day, when we got onto the LAN server, we found that there were pigs EVERYWHERE. We don't know what had happened to cause them, and yet, they were there. We couldn't even go up close to them to kill them because our games lagged to such a degree that it was unplayable (our computer systems back then were really crappy). So we resorted to going into Creative mode and shooting them with arrows, and eventually, I got the idea to drop Splash Potions of Harming II on them from above. We did kill them all in the end, and there was XP and raw pork littered all over the ground. Our games still lagged like crazy when we tried to collect any of it, though, just due to the sheer amount of them clustered all over the place in a 30-block radius. At the time, we had thought that Herobrine had done it. Especially considering how, while we were trying to kill the pigs, there were a few times where we died (to hostile mobs or something, I can't remember), and every time we died, a message came up in the chat that said "Ouch. That looked like it hurt." We thought it was Herobrine taunting us, so we were sending messages in the chat, yelling at Herobrine to go away and leave us alone. Looking back on this incident now, I know that it was likely just a glitch or bug, but us thinking that Herobrine was the cause of it is honestly pretty funny to me.

*_We had the SAME problem in unmodded single player!_* My then-sister had a world that was lost to a tsunami of sheep. The moment you loaded the world a sheep would suddenly start duplicating themselves and splitting off into hundreds of other sheep until the game crashed. Our corruption happened in 1.7.3 on the Minecraft website, and it's honestly calming to know that we weren't alone in this experience. With a little googling, I couldn't find anyone else who had the same problem.

i know that this is probably my 4th comment on this video already, but eh whatever. just wanted to thank you for covering this! I used to be obsessed with this mystery back then when spicycrap uploaded his video about it, so to be reminded of it again was really surprising. i feel like this video sent me back in time lmao also, as far as i remember, spicycrap never uploaded an update video to this. I used to check his channel a lot to see if he ever ended up covering this mystery again, but he never did.

Imagine if someone released a book from this video. Exploring a Cursed Minecraft Beta Server (brabantia.rar): Perfect for Minecrafters Kids and Adults, Top Builder Ideas, Graphic novel.

The creepy music and ominous monologue about the amount of cows "a tsunami of cows" combined with the cows and their ridiculous, goofy faces all looking at you makes me burst out laughing 😂

I experienced something like this when I was a kid, but with chickens, in beta 1.7. I also saw a weird "cube" appear, though I remember it being made of either dirt or cobblestone, I can't remember if it was a chunk error or what (But it seemed smaller than a chunk), but right next to my house there were hundreds of chickens spawning. I took pictures, but i never figured out how to upload them because I was a dumb kid and eventually lost that laptop :(

Amazing video. Cant wait for you to cover the Minecraft PSX (PS1) arg

This is so mysterious I’m not even that far in and I already can’t stop watching

I feel like the constant videos being released is hinting to a big video coming out soon, I think he's trying to keep us interested and then boom, hit us with an awesome video

Always look forward to your vids so i have something to look at when im bored 😄

When you hear “I’ve stumbled across” you know you’ll be getting something good

Bro solved world hunger in Minecraft

9:29 I was interested in and enjoyed the entire video, but this part you did with the cows is just golden. a sea of cows; a bovine tsunami.

Always a great day when RGN uploads!

I am glad to see this mystery resurface with discussion after 10 years :)

9:24 was genuinely a creepy moment paired with the music, the beta Minecraft's night and that unimaginable sea of cows

From what I managed to put together. -Cow spawns got bugged from the downgrade then upgrade of the world -There were no mass Creeper spawns they just missremembered the spawns -Cows somehow turned into Zombies (thus the hoards mentioned in chat) -Zombies died in the sunlight and in Beta they dropped feathers -Probably made up the structure to get interest so they could get answers, or was remembering another sevrer event that was probably done by a player

Lol I totally thought this was an ARG video. I was wondering when the creepy fictional stuff was finally gonna be introduced all the way up until the halfway mark when I was finally like "Wait, this is just a real glitched world? They were asking for help in earnest?" Haha great video as always though!

I am honetly am shocked a creepy corrupted minecraft world was actually real.

I clicked so fast, I love these videos- I'm gonna enjoy this one dude!

I live for these kinds of videos thank you Retro 🙏

this is a great video! looking forward to see more videos like this!

I've seen this happen before in bug man's let's play

You should make a second video about Mark101

Yes another retrogamingnow video! I have something to listen too while grinding in terraria lol

These videos are so good... keep it up mate!

When aliens didnt need the cows anymore:

My god I remember I used to be subscribed to spicy crap 666. It was literally just because I thought his name was funny as I couldnt understand anything he said except for the swear words. that is a blast from the past.

You don't know how much I needed this 😢😢❤❤🎉🎉

FINALLY. I love your videos. You made my day!!!

Spicycrap666

I think the only true embellishment is likely the Quartz structure mentioned. It is possible that they were playing on a weaker system with 4GB of RAM (not uncommon in 2014) and the system BSoDed when attempting to load after exhausting the memory.

i mean, how does he always stumble upon things?! "today i casually stumbled across a nuclear bomb"

At first I thought it was just another elaborate ARG, but this is actually more interesting. I remember sometime around 2016-ish on my own minecraft world where I had updated it, only to find that a random chunk from elsewhere in the world had inexplicably copied itself and replaced another chunk that had a structure I had built on it. I was creeped out at first, but then I was mad that the thing that I built had been deleted and replaced with a random world chunk.

Ah, obscure minecraft mysteries, exactly what I subscribed for

I definitely experienced this in my series as mentioned by a couple of other commentors. I also discovered the bug, but in Beta 1.8, and dug into the details in MCEdit and NBTExplorer to work out what was going on. Something was causing the game to spawn in passive mobs at the same precise location but multiplied to thousands. I encountered the issue numerous times and had to routinely address it unti lthe problem eventually went away.

This is one of the most perplexing Minecraft videos I’ve ever seen. Well done

you explained the list of the server's errors like you were reading the timeline of the Chernobyl disaster

Goodness, i'm absolutely loving this series. I'm so glad I authorized the invasion of Brabantia all those years ago.. Who knew that it would spark a gem on youtube like this?

Rtg never fails to make his fans bust all over the place! ❤❤🥰

bro going from a mysterious, possibly supernatural minecraft mystery to a sea of beef boys was the funniest 180 ive had in months. "Cows and cows and cows and cows" and "a bovine tsunami" were my favorite quotes.

I love your theories their so fun to watch

can we just appreciate how retro fills us with content?

me when "I stumbled across":

I really thought i was clicking a lame arg video lmao this is great

Average cow farm of that one friend: