Explore the World That’s Home to Minecraft’s Most Notorious Urban Legend

Minecraft may be a fun, creative outlet for many, but it also houses its fair share of secrets, some of which are a tad creepy.

PCGamesN reports that one of the weirdest Minecraft tales of all time has come to life—sort of. Minecraft community Minecraft@Home has located the seed in which the chilling non-playable character (NPC) “Herobrine” was first “sighted” by a streamer over a decade ago.

Seeds are codes Minecraft uses to generate different worlds. Saying there are “a lot” is an understatement, as evidenced by just how long it took to find Herobrine’s world. 

The story dates back more than a decade when a streamer known as Copeland claimed to have spotted Herobrine, a creepy-looking character with blank, white eyes, inside his own world. The NPC was doing strange things, like digging small holes and ripping leaves off trees. This ”sighting” then took on a life of its own, with stories about Herobrine “haunting” players proliferating on the web. Many insisted Herobrine was an in-game version of Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson’s dead brother. Just one problem: Notch never had a brother. 

Ultimately, Copeland admitted to crafting Herobrine himself. He took a liking to the character after it first appeared on 4chan’s /v/ board and decided to place Herobrine in his own world. This required a great deal of Photoshopping and planning, but in the end Copeland was able to fool legions of Minecraft fans into thinking he’d just witnessed Herobrine appear out of nowhere. 

The seed in which Copeland placed his Photoshopped Herobrine is real, however, and that’s what Minecraft@Home stumbled into this month. You can explore it exactly as it was when Copeland first “spotted” Herobrine in 2010.  

So far, it doesn’t look like Herobrine’s origin location has yielded any new revelations. But here’s the information you need to take a spooky little trip:

Seed: 478868574082066804Version: Java Alpha 1.0.16_02Alpha coordinates: X=5.06 Y=71 (72.62 eye pos) Z=-298.54Modern coordinates: X=5.16 Y=71 Z=-298.53Camera angle: RX=93.75 RY=-1.2

If exploring the seed sounds too scary, watch the Minecraft@Home folks look around instead.