The Disc 11 Puzzle

The Disc 11 Puzzle
Puzzle
Season	Survival > S2
Started	2016-01-01
Completed	2016-03-21 (80 days)
Status	Complete
Designers	DaMarine
Builders	DaMarine,  Felix_J
Location	Overworld: ( -161,437 )

The Disc 11 Puzzle, also referred to as “The Disc”, was a puzzle created by  DaMarine during Season 2. Designed around uncovering the mystery surrounding the Disc 11 item in Minecraft, the puzzle was implemented using command blocks and served as an addition to vanilla Survival gameplay, requiring collaboration by the Slabserver community in order to solve.

Development

On January 23, 2016,  DaMarine shared a video proposal with the Slabserver staff team in their private Discord channel, which outlined the idea of hiding a puzzle within Survival Season 2. This idea focused around the community solving the unexplained mystery of Minecraft's Disc 11 item, which would be achieved by adding new functionality to their Survival world via command blocks. The overall goal was to create a new adventure that the community would have to collaborate on together in order to solve, and reward them with a way of obtaining Etho's playerhead.

This concept was inspired by the Minecraft Seecret Updates throughout 2010, each of which added several features to Minecraft without prior announcement. As these updates were also not trivially decompiled upon their release, these features were discovered by the Minecraft playerbase far more organically, and  DaMarine realised that he had the opportunity to recreate a similar experience for the Slabserver community.

The proposal was well-received by the admin team, and the remaining development work progressed quickly throughout February 2016. In order to introduce the additional puzzle features, command blocks required for the puzzle were hidden in a room within the bedrock layers of the Survival world, with the bedrock floor also removed to reduce the chance of Survival players accessing this area with chorus fruit or ender pearls.

Several hours prior to the Ender Dragon fight,  DaMarine enlisted the help of  Felix_J to assist with finishing the construction of the final location of the puzzle, before any other players could discover it. The puzzle was completed in time for the Ender Dragon fight, and began on March 12, 2016.

Gameplay

The puzzle began with the defeat of the Ender Dragon, which dropped the Disc 11 item upon its death. Holding the disc for several seconds would also trigger a cave ambience sound to hint at its unusual behaviour. Through several additional hints, both inside and out of the game, players were eventually to a cave along a river near the Season 2 spawn area, where a hidden mineshaft could be found.

At the bottom of the mineshaft, a jukebox could be found, and inserting a copy of Disc 11 would trigger a custom sequence as the track played. Any torches in the corridor were extinguished, and at the end of the disc, an Enderman would appear. Killing the Enderman dropped a playerhead of a "Lost Traveller", which players later discovered had to be taken to a build at Season 2’s spawn labelled as the “Shrine of the Lost Traveller”. Placing the Lost Traveller’s playerhead upon the shrine rewarded players with Etho's playerhead, and completed the puzzle.

Reception

Reactions to the Season 2 puzzle were favourable, even if largely due to the novelty of players being able to obtain Etho’s playerhead. The staff team were pleased and relieved by such reactions, given that they were had been hesitant to introduce such a bespoke feature to the community, particularly as Season 2 had otherwise adhered closely to vanilla Survival gameplay.

On March 21, 2016,  DaMarine published a postmortem on /r/slabserver, detailing the development process and addressing common questions since its release. In response to a question about future puzzles,  DaMarine responded with:

“There's nothing planned, but never say never. We don't want to ever get to the stage where people start thinking any glitch or behaviour may be related to a puzzle. Even if we do, it would have to be something we have put serious effort into pulling off, and again be seamless with the vanilla game while also not affecting the core gameplay at all. I really hope all of you feel we've stuck to that while still giving something extra back to you all, our fantastic community.”

Sequels

Owing to the positive reception of the Disc 11 puzzle, and despite the prior expectations that no future puzzles would be made, several years later a second puzzle, “The Tunnel”, was created by  DaMarine and  MCfineplayer for Season 3.

On the 23rd of August 2024,  DaMarine announced that a third and final puzzle had been secretly in development for Season 4 since March 2020. The third puzzle will conclude the unofficial trilogy of community puzzles, and is expected to release in 2025. As of December 2024, the name of the third puzzle remains a mystery.

Trivia

• During development, the puzzle was internally known as “Project Aquarius”, referencing Aquarius as the 11th zodiac sign.
• Disc 11 also featured in the Season 3 community puzzle, "The Tunnel", and was used in a similar way in order to solve the puzzle.
• In mid-2018, Java Edition 1.13 overhauled the command syntax, causing the commands used for the puzzle to no longer work.  MCfineplayer helped the staff team update the puzzle to the new command syntax, and addressed several long-standing bugs with the puzzle.
  • Due to his contributions and continued involvement with the staff team,  MCfineplayer was later invited to join the team.