Minecraft’s greatest mystery was just solved. It took 13 years.

Minecraft’s greatest mystery was just solved. It took 13 years.

This is tominecon.7z, and for 12 years, Minecraft players were on a hunt to crack its password and reveal its secrets. Last year, the password was finally found, I made a video on it, and I thought that was the end of it. But since then, the story of tominecon.7z has changed forever. Minecraft’s greatest mystery was just solved. Alright, you might be thinking: if the password was found last year, how was the mystery just solved? And that’s a good question, but the history of tominecon is pretty crazy, so let’s do a quick recap. Tominecon was found way back in February 2012 by MrArroyo on MinecraftForum, and it caught everyone’s attention. A secret file about Minecon locked behind a password? Who wouldn’t be interested? So, for the next 10 years, off and on, players tried their absolute best to crack the code with no luck until May 2022, when out of nowhere, a man called DannyDorito swooped in to save the day by cracking the password once and for all: “thespicemustflow”. So, you’d think that’s the end of the story, but there’s one little detail I left out. Back in August 2012 while the hunt was raging on, Mojang noticed people were trying to break into the file, so they swapped it with a decoy, and no one really noticed for a full decade. Now that the decoy was cracked though, we knew we had to find the original, and that’s where the last video left off. A desperate plea to any of the 600,000 viewers like you, which is insane, for any info that could lead us to the original, the true tominecon.7z. And just 9 days later, that’s exactly what we got. This here is LimJahey, and wayyy back in 2012, he was around on a website called HackForums. Now, tominecon was discovered on MinecraftForum, but it spread around the internet pretty quickly, and after a few weeks, there was a huge thread on HackForums filled with attempts to crack the one and, at the time, only tominecon.7z. At some point, Lim here made his way onto the thread, downloaded the file, gave cracking it a try, and eventually gave up like everyone else. But 11 years later, with your guys help, he found my video. Maybe it was shared with him, maybe it just blew up so much he found it himself, who knows. But after all that time, he had still kept some old files from back in his hacking days. So, he found his old HackForums folder, dusted it off, and there it was: the real tominecon.7z. The moment he found it, he hopped into my Discord server, got in contact with me, shared the file, and that was that. The original tominecon.7z was finally found. Stage 1 of the hunt, cracking the decoy, took 10 years. Stage 2, finding the original file, took 9 months. So as we stepped into stage 3, cracking the original, who knew what could happen? I thought there was a very real chance we’d have the case closed by the end of the month, but sadly, we weren’t that lucky. February passed by with no progress. Then spring, then summer, then fall, then winter, and eventually it had been a full year with no updates. It was looking like tominecon.7z might have been stuck, just inches away from the finish line, but with no way to cross it. I mean, Mojang used a pretty easy password for the decoy and that took 10 years. With a real password, we could be chasing this code until the sun explodes! So, for me, that’s where my hunt ended. We might not have gotten into the real thing, but at least we found it and had a great time along the journey. I was satisfied. But someone else was not. This is RetroGamingNow. You might know him, because he’s a Youtuber that’s made a lot of great videos on Minecraft ARGs, lore, and other creepy stories from around the internet, and he’s made a pretty big name for himself doing it. So, 2 weeks ago, I was very surprised to see this message in my Discord – he had apparently mentioned me in a video, which was pretty cool! But the reason why is because RGN did his own deep dive into tominecon.7z and brought the story to a huge new audience. This is exactly what we needed. Before now, everyone that knew about tominecon had mostly lost interest, so there was no one pushing the hunt forward. But now, there were 500,000 people joining the hunt for tominecon – and one of them was Dinnerbone himself, who gave us some huge new info on the story of tominecon. So, with all credits to RetroGamingNow for getting this ball rolling again – and you should definitely check out his tominecon videos, they’re all linked below – let’s talk about tominecon.7z and what’s inside it. Now, Dinnerbone didn’t give us any info on the password itself – that was one of his rules – but he did give us some really big info about its contents and its creation, including an answer to my biggest question from the first video: why? Why make tominecon, why upload it publicly, and why make a decoy if it was just Minecraft 1.0 which had already been out for months by the time players found the file? And there’s a lot to cover here, so let’s go one by one: Why was tominecon.7z created in the first place? Well, according to Dinnerbone, tominecon.7z was, in fact, Minecraft 1.0 like we thought. Notch, Jeb, and Dinnerbone have now all confirmed that, and they’re basically the holy trinity of Mojang, so if they’re wrong, I don’t know who could possibly be right. But it’s also not just the release version of 1.0 –Dinnerbone was nice enough to send a picture of the first folder, and everything here matches up with the official 1.0 files up until .minecraft. Something in here is slightly different – but we’ll get back to that later. For now, all you need to know is that it was Minecraft 1.0, and it was brought to Minecon 2011 by a few Mojang employees, for example, Dinnerbone who used it to update Bukkit live during the Bukkit panel. Nothing too crazy. So how did the file get to the public? Honestly, it seems like Dinnerbone is just as confused on that as all of us. He doesn’t know who made it, who uploaded it, just that someone somewhere along the line messed up and accidentally uploaded it to a public list of files on Minecraft.net, and I doubt they’re gonna own up to it after 13 years, so… that’s that, I guess. And now the burning question, the one that I’ve really been curious about: why make a decoy? I mean, Notch, Jeb, Mollstam and Dinnerbone have all said that the file was just Minecraft 1.0, nothing sensitive, so why even bother? Well, Dinnerbone explains exactly why the decoy was made and why the password wasn’t given out: “We don’t care about the contents, at all. The password was the thing we were worried about, as it was reused for something else at the time. It’s long since been changed, and was never anything important, but that’s how things are.” So even though tominecon.7z was safe to play with from the start, its password was actually private because they were using it for something else. Nowadays, the password is completely harmless, but Dinnerbone made it very clear that he wasn’t going to give it out, partially because that’s no fun, and partially because we don’t really have a right to the password, harmless or not. BUT, he didn’t try to stop anyone from cracking it, just from encouraging them to try and hack Mojang, because that’s not a good idea. So, even after this interview, players were still on the hunt. My community, RGN’s community, even a dedicated Discord server for the search for tominecon. But in the end, it wouldn’t be any of them that would come out on top. Instead, out of nowhere, a very familiar name entered the ring and cracked the password. His name is Doge. If you’ve been on the channel for a long, long time, you might know Doge. Way back in 2020 and 2021, he was in a TON of my videos about rare Minecraft accounts, because he’s owned hundreds of them. But a while ago, he left the account community like me and was just living his life until a few days ago. With all the cape news and drama we’ve had over the last few weeks, he decided to pop his head back in for a second, joined the Fanclub discord where the capes were originally found, and noticed people were talking about a little something called tominecon. A locked Minecraft file that was lost for a decade and no one had cracked. Well, Doge just so happens to crack passwords as a hobby, so he decided to give it a shot with some old leaked passwords from Mojang.com: and all it took was one second to solve Minecraft’s greatest mystery. It turns out, tominecon.7z was actually using the same password as Mojang’s old email address: boxpig41. The password was changed over a decade ago and they don’t use it at all now, but tominecon.7z was made in 2011 and it never changed. For the first time ever, we’ve cracked tominecon.7z. Here it is. As promised, inside tominecon.7z is Minecraft 1.0, and that’s what we have here. Like I mentioned before, everything in this first folder checks out – we’ve got the 1.0 server files, a Minecraft launcher from February 23rd 2011, two Java installers, and a batch file that would launch all the installers. But inside .minecraft is where things get a little funky. As far as Minecraft 1.0 goes, every single file here is the same except for Minecraft.jar. And if you do a little digging, you find the single difference between Minecraft 1.0 and Tominecon 1.0: the number 16. Just 4 extra characters separate tominecon from Minecraft 1.0, but they’re more important than you might think, so let me explain what’s going on here. This line in the code deals with the server ID, which is used to encrypt the data sent between you and your favorite Minecraft server. But in tominecon.7z, it never adds the 16 to the end of the code, so it interprets the server ID as decimal, which looks like this, instead of hexadecimal, which looks like this. Now, that’s a problem. The server files send their ID in hexadecimal, as they should, and that’s what every other version of Minecraft uses. So what happens when Minecraft only takes decimal? Well, it could error, or it could cut the letters out and only accept the numbers. Either way, that would break the encryption between you and your server, meaning all the data sent between you is open to be stolen. That could mean passwords, private messages, coordinates, player data and a whole lot more you don’t want exposed to the average joe, all free for the taking. So, instead of risking a total catastrophe, Minecraft completely disables multiplayer. That’s what Minecraft 1.0 fixed, and that’s why tominecon.7z wasn’t released. Just 1 little number that could cause complete and utter chaos… and isn’t that kinda fitting? Tominecon.7z is just a tiny little file, one of literally millions of Minecraft files floating around the internet, and yet us goofballs have spent over a decade trying to crack it, realizing we had a fake, finding the original, and cracking that one – not to mention all the videos that I and RGN made about it, and the thousands of viewers like you that joined the search – before we finally got to the end of the hunt. But now that we have… man, it feels good. Minecraft’s greatest mystery was just solved, and we couldn’t have done it without you. Thanks for watching, and have a good one. Peace peace.

An ancient Minecraft leak, tominecon.7z, was lost for 13 years. But now, for the first time ever, we found it – and cracked it open. What’s inside this mysterious file? Let’s find out.

Watch RGN’s videos on tominecon.7z for more! ➵ https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrYwdz3-r9JJU1UvYK_w9ZVi2Bh6bg7bT

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[SOUNDTRACK]
Craft Case – Interruption
Hideki Naganuma – That’s Enough
Machine Girl – Heaven Central Authority
Van Sandano – Amalthea
Koji Kondo – River Safari
Koji Kondo – Volcano
pink – amelia
C418 – Chris
and one more I promise I’ll add soon but I forgot the name

[CHAPTERS]
0:00 – Intro
0:22 – Let’s catch up.
1:38 – tominecon.7z is found.
3:36 – The second hunt.
4:40 – From Dinnerbone, with love.
7:14 – Cracking the code.
8:48 – Inside tominecon.7z.
10:46 – Outro

bye love u