Pets & Spawners

Whose dog is that

Chests on TWiTcraft don't say who owned them — but pets do. When a player tamed a wolf, an ocelot or a horse in Minecraft 1.7, the game wrote the owner's name into the animal, and the animal is still standing where it was left. So this is the one kind of property on the server that can be handed back: 3,136 dogs and cats belonging to 319 named players, 2,300 tamed horses, and 1,433 animals somebody bothered to name.

The biggest kennels

Sitting dogs and cats stay exactly where they were told to sit, which is why so many survived: they were parked at home. The same pets counted in both the October and December 2013 snapshots are only counted once.

The horses

Horses came to Minecraft in July 2013, three months before the old map was frozen, and the server fell for them: race tracks, a horse-racing exhibition, a horse hunt. Every tamed horse stores its speed, jump and health as bred, so the fastest and highest-jumping horses ever bred on TWiTcraft can still be ranked. The most-used horse names were Lotus Blossom (×11), Surprise (×10), Electric Blue (×9), Applejack (×8), Cinnabelle (×8), Cloudy (×8) — breeders naming litters.

Fastest on the server

Highest jumpers

Every named horse

Jokes with a name tag

Name tags arrived in 1.6 and the server immediately used them for comedy: creepers called BOOM!!!, mobs renamed Dinnerbone so they walk upside down, sheep called jeb_ that cycle through every colour, iron golems posted as the Airfield Sentinel, and a zombie army of Goobghanistani Infantrymen.

Spawners

A mob spawner is the cage-shaped block that dungeons and abandoned mineshafts are built around, and the thing every grinder is built on top of. There are 27,824 of them across the archived worlds — almost all cave-spider spawners in the endless mineshafts under the old survival map.

World by world

The densest clusters

Where several spawners sit within twenty blocks of each other. Most are tangles of mineshaft; a cluster of pig or blaze spawners is a farm somebody built. On the living spawn world the old grinders can be watched running again — though modern Minecraft only spawns mobs in total darkness, so some 2013 designs stay quiet.

How this was made

Entities and tile entities were read out of every region file with the scan behind the Library and What They Carried. A tamed wolf or ocelot carries its owner's name in 1.7 NBT (Owner); a horse carries OwnerName, plus its speed, jump strength and health attributes. Wild horses are not included — only tamed or named ones. Spawners are counted from their tile entities (MobSpawner). Coordinates open the map at the animal's last position.