One of the most challenging and famous Minecraft world seeds has been discovered, with the process taking months in the making. The discovery team that aimed to find Herobrine includes andrew_555, aka Kminster, with the team as a whole kicking off their combined search efforts on September 5, 2020. The team stumbled upon Herobrine on January 16, 2021. Some “50 hours of developing and writing code” went into the process.

Herobrine is an urban legend in the Minecraft community. He appears identical to the default Minecraft character skin but features white, empty eyes. Essentially, Herobrine is the subject of a community-made creepypasta, yet has not been present in any version of Minecraft. “Note that Herobrine is not real,” a Reddit moderator explains — “this is just the seed used for the original creepypasta image.” In other words, Herobrine isn’t real, but the world seed certainly is.

To scope out the original Herobrine world for yourself, you’ll need to use Minecraft Java Edition and enable Historical versions in the launcher. Then, select version a1.0.16, and plug in the following information.

  • 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