The Story of Minecraft's Abandoned Tutorial Level

Here's a cool video someone shared on my Discord server. It shows "old" footage of the Minecraft tutorial world. Unfortunately it isn't real, but still really cool! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fI_E-7wlMM

When i was younger, i never searched up recipes for some odd reason, i think my computer at the time was really bad. I wanted to make glass in minecraft but didn't know how, so i asked my mum how glass was made in real life, which lead to me trying to put sand in a furnace and it worked to my surprise.

its incredible how such a complex game functions without a real tutorial

I remember back in the day not knowing that zombie pigmen were only aggressive if you attacked them… I spent like 2 years too scared to ever enter the nether as I would always long shot them with a bow and then be destroyed immediately after. I like that the game was not a set path and anything could be done

Game design as a whole is pretty difficult. There is an art to it, and Minecraft somehow miraculously did it with ease back then. The player is never truly lost, sure they could be stumped at times, but never lost. The idea of a tutorial does break the idea of what Minecraft is about but the tutorial isn't about holding your hand the whole way, you still explore and learn things on your own. That's truly magical.

I am also glad a tutorial wasn't added, feels like I would have less great memories of watching old minecraft series and let's plays. Also I think the lack of tutorial added to the mystique of the game, which is all but lost now.

I remember when the addition of a crafting recipe book in the game itself was legit a controversial change. Good to see the weird aversion to making the game actually understandable to new players without relying on external material wasn't just a community thing, it was deep-rooted in the development of the game itself.

The old console tutorial levels were great showcases of the game's features with a cool little hint popup to explain what things were used for. I wish Bedrock and java had something similar for new players to explore

The console tutorial world was so fun! With all of its secret areas to explore outside the main area! I wish they had kept it in the update

The joy of being able to teach a new player to Minecraft is a rare thing nowadays. Lotta people just had their friends directly show them around, was fun

It's crazy how much I knew about minecraft before even first playing it. Minecraft in that case is probably very unique. A sandbox that was so popular that everyone and their mom knew about it. So many people were making let's plays. Everyone knew how to play.

I remember playing the tutorial level on xbox360 many many times as a kid. There were lots of easter eggs in that map, my favourite being every single record disk (as in Spieluhr/Jukebox) were hidden around the map. Very fond memories, sad the PC players never got to experience that

Although there's never gonna be a tutorial world added to Java now, I'd really love to see more official Minecraft worlds in the future like how legacy console had mash up pack worlds every so often for players to explore

Kind of a stretch for just this video, but did you ever consider looking into the code of the old versions to see if there was ever any actual unused code connected to the disabled tutorial button? Or any unused code related to a tutorial at all?

I've been wondering for a while why the missing texture appears as a solid purple texture in your videos on petrified oak slabs and invalid items. Is it an Optifine thing?

I remember playing Minecraft for the first time and feeling utterly lost for over an hour, dying dozens of times during night cycles as I tried to figure out basic mechanics. The real sticking points for me were: a) How do I make light? b) How do I make food? I was able to figure out the tree punching and the crafting bench pretty early. I never tried punching stone, but I can imagine I might have been surprised to discover you couldn't punch stone. I would have guessed initially that a tool only made you better at punching. It took me a while to figure out not only did you need the tool to be efficient, you needed the tool period. I was able to guess at the recipe for a tool by playing around with sticks and planks (both of which are pretty obvious to make once you get wood). But I was not able to figure out quickly how to make a torch. I was guessing at the time I needed some sort of fire mechanism, but having not discovered flint I couldn't figure out how to make "fire" - presumed to be a necessary component. Nor had I found coal at that point, nor did I feel safe enough to try to go anywhere in the dark. I presumed that if I tried to hide in the dark in a hole, that I would be (and here I reveal my age) likely "eaten by a grue". I didn't realize monsters couldn't spawn close to you. So I tried essentially avoiding monsters, but this left me very hungry and it wasn't obvious how I got food. Once I got coal, and once I figured out a torch - which took at least an hour - things progressed pretty rapidly. A lot of things were discovered by accident as I tried to figure out what I could make. The bed recipe was intuitive once you got wool, for example. But wow did figuring out that torch recipe feel like something that needed to be explained to you.

Important to add: the minecraft website back in the day had a tutorial page, which simply embedded a bunch of youtube videos. Problem was, the page was rarely updated. When I started playing about the time when 1.0 came out, some of the tutorials were still from the days of minecraft alpha (which I of course didn't understand back then, and got me very confused!)

Console Edition still has so many features that are so good and not in the current versions, like Mine games, custom flat worlds and of course tutorial worlds

I wonder why the button was labeled "Mods and Texture Packs" when you couldn't actually apply any mods from that menu. Funnily enough, resource packs can be used to mod the game to some capacity, but those were added after the button was moved to the Options menu and renamed accordingly.

I think the lack of a tutorial is def is one thing that makes Minecraft well, Minecraft. Everybody remembers that first time creating a world and being thrown in with no help from the game.