The History of “Locked” Chests in Minecraft

In Minecraft we have a chest a double chest a minecart chest a traps chest and an Ender Chest at one point you could even make a triple chest but what about a locked chest yep at one time locked chests were actually a thing and today I’m going to tell you literally everything about

Them April 1st 2011 was approaching and at the time Notch the main game developer was planning to release Minecraft Beta 1.4 which added cookies wolves a new Minecraft logo and locked chests so basically these chests were intended to be an April Fool stroke actually the first ever Minecraft April

Fool stroke as notch didn’t really have time to announce Minecraft 4D in 2010 because he was in the middle of a move so upon loading a new world in this version on April 1st 2011 and yes your PC’s time has to to be on that exact date these so-called locked chests would

Spawn in the world but you would usually have to walk around a while to find one they were also indestructible except for explosions which is how someone could actually obtain one you could even combine them together to make a double locked chest and they even lit up at

Night upon right clicking one of these chests a popup would appear Steve Co supply Crate you need a Steve Co supply Crate Key to open this you can pick one up at the Minecraft store wow so I guess pay to win servers weren’t the first to

Come up with crate Keys it was Notch anyways if you clicked go to store it would load this web page welcome to the Minecraft store here you could buy crate Keys a name change which actually ended up becoming a free feature in 2015 a creeper saddle a secret Griefer identity

Which I guess you could just use alts for that an enlargement pill a response from support and some placeholder items now obviously this shop was a joke as if you tried to actually buy stuff you would just get a Velociraptor jump scare but if your cart amount went over 10,000

You’d be prompted with this message that says if you’re prone to seizures press cancel I guess this also serves as a warning to you guys watching this but if you clicked okay the whole page would go berserk this April Fool’s Day joke was filled with references from Team

Fortress 2 like their Manco Supply crates and Jurassic Park now valve who owns Team Fortress 2 didn’t really like Notch’s joke and apparently spoke their about that to him so a day later Notch posted on his blog giving the advice to not joke about valve also that day the

Site got a multicolored Banner that said April fools then a few days later on April 5th a small patch to Beta 1.4 was released that disabled any locked chest still in the world from being used and would eventually Decay like leaves now if you think that this is the end of

Lock chests well you’re wrong you see even though they all disapp Up and eventually replaced which is exactly what happened to the lock chest as Minecraft release 1.3 added emeralds so the developers decided to use that slot in the file for the new emerald block texture thus making the lock chest already an almost completely forgotten April Fool’s feature looking like this

Eventually March 13th 2013 rolled around with the Minecraft 1.5 patch and the terrain. PNG file was getting so cranked that the decision was finally made to load each block texture from an individual file this resulted in the locked chest texture changing to the standard missing texture as there was no

Reason to make one for that block then release 1.6 came which changed the missing texture texture which resulted in this at this point it was pretty apparent that the days were numbered for the locked chest in a development version of release 1.7 locked chests were first made imposs possible to hold

As an item and can only be placed with/ set block one pretty interesting fact about this update is that their alpha numeric ID was also replaced with this making it the longest block ID in the history of the game finally when stained glass was added it happened to use the

Same numeric block ID as the locked chest which effectively marked the official removal of the item this means that theoretically if you updated from a beta 1.4 world that contained locked chests to release 1.7 all those chests would turn into white stained glass pretty cool so that’s the history of the

Locked chest April Fool’s joke it lasted way longer in the game than it was supposed to but that’s good for us because it makes an interesting video all right happy April Fool’s Day everyone I’ll see you Later

Yep, Minecraft used to have Locked Chests in the game! In this video, I’m going to talk all about that.

27 Comments

  1. So when it became impossible to /give yourself a locked chest, you could still take one out of a chest and have it in your inventory, couldn't you?

  2. As a side note there's also a tag that can only be accessed with commands that lets you lock chest so that you need to be holding an item with a specific name to open them

  3. Today, you can add the nbt key "Lock" to a chest. If it's there, only an item with the same name can open the chest. For example if I add the following NBT data on the chest block entity:

    {Lock:"My Key"}

    then I need an item with the display name "My Key" to open it. This doesn't only work on chests, a few other containers support it too.

  4. I remember that it was easy to pick a wrong chest with Too Many Items Mod as they were next to each other so you get a non-functioning chest.

  5. It's worth noting that Valve gave Notch a unique hat in TF2 due to them being fans, that hat had a hidden 20% damage vulnerability stat that is potentially linked to this April fools event.

  6. Holy shit I can't believe even my date has to be set to 1.4.2011, that actually means I've played Minecraft on that day as I vividly remember that. What a massive throwback

  7. i'm pretty sure you can still lock chests today using a command. I know it's not the same thing, but useful if anyone want's to use it on a custom map.

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