I made a game that uses the Luanti "voxel" engine (MC-likes games of course, but also transposition of other genres), and even programming that is bit of a chore but that's the price to pay to play the game you want to play (there's much more to that than just programming/modding; game design is a rabbit hole).
But I think that it would be more rewarding for those who are curious about programming to start modding, especially in Luanti because it is relatively well documented and it's Lua. In a way, making it rain with the programmable particle spawner the engine provides is a loot box locked by an API, with hints on how to open it in the docs ;-)
Game engine design is a rabbit hole :)
Game design is the ultimate lockbox - you're unlocking an entire imaginary world which has some platonic existance in your mind.
And since you mentioned Luanti, it deserves to be much better known as a credible open alternative to Minecraft. You could do a lot worse then designing/prototyping your game with Luanti as the game engine.
I like watching videos about these contraptions people build. Wouldn't dream of making on myself.
Tl:dr; It was a release file for their Minecon event. It was never meant to be public. Obsessing over a password protected in a company's S3 bucket is weird and crosses many limits.
More like a reverse-streisand effect. They were honest about the contents of the file, it was Minecraft 1.0 and not interesting, but the community didn't accept the explanation.
I think the house analogy fails because you cannot duplicate a house, take it somewhere else, and attempt to break into it there. If you could, that would undoubtedly be seen as a violation.
Unsure why it took the community so long to crack the file.
Ouch
Take for example, the infamous 2B2T Minecraft server.
Exploits and game breaking mechanics by virtually impossible to discover bugs, and the no rule against hacking and cheating, have led to things people didn’t think were even possible in Minecraft over the servers ~15 year history.
It's similar in format to communities that obssess over "lost media." The inability to pirate or get access to something becomes an obsession. Even if the piece of media exists in an archive somewhere, that doesn't matter to them because it's about the fact that they themselves don't have access to it that has become the obsession.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Thanks for the heads-up!
They used "boxpig41" for the original and "thespicemustflow" for the decoy. Both of them contain the jar and assets for Minecraft 1.0, but the original also contained an ordinary copy of the Minecraft launcher, so that the files could used to run it during a live event even if internet access goes down, hence the larger file size.
