Dwarf Fortress is one of those extravagant passion projects that has burst into the Internet consciousness. It is a free to play game where you play an adventurer or a fortress full of dwarves in a randomly generated fantasy world. The simulation is deep, with new games creating multiple civilizations with stories, mythologies and artifacts.
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Minecraft is the best selling video game of all time
Minecraft is the best selling video game of all time! It has sold 238,000,000 copies, enough for the entire population of the UK to have more than FOUR copies EACH!
The rarest item in Minecraft is the dragon egg. It only appears when the Ender Dragon has been defeated, at which point the Dragon Egg will appear at the Exit Portal!
Minecraft promotion: the numbers
According to Statista, 200 million copies of the game were sold in May 2020. More than 10 million copies have been installed from Google Play alone. On average, the game costs $6.99 or €7.99. As of December 2020, Minecraft, as usual, ranked #1 in the paid app charts in the US, Canada, Mexico, UK, Switzerland, Spain, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Japan, South Africa and dozens of other countries around the world.
The game often becomes an Editors’ Choice. Minecraft is usually the leader when it comes to being featured: In December 2020 alone, it was featured 1,200 times in daily picks from over 50 countries on the App Store. Generally, for paid apps, featured traffic helps a lot. During the pandemic, the number of new Minecraft users has increased by 25%.
But it is not accidental
The repetition of some groups of letters and numbers, as well as the palindromic nature of parts of the string, indicate that Notch’s cat did not do this. The code is meaningful or specifically designed to appear meaningful. If Notch is playing with us, he’s putting a little effort into it.
A Reddit user “got this in a block search using an offset 0 1 2 3”. I don’t know what that means, but the results give the letters “I H A T J V R, E E R V V U, I H E V, E G R L E U G”. Overall there doesn’t seem to be an anagram of any single English word or phrase to be found, but I can already spot “I HAVE GLUE,” “I HATE GRUEL,” and “I HEART RIGEL”—Rigel, of course, being the brightest star in the constellation of Orion. A clue perhaps? No, almost certainly not. Sigh.