What was Minecraft Indev? History of Indev version explored

Minecraft has been around for quite some time now. It was officially released in November 2011, but the development started almost two and a half years ago in May 2009. Markus "Notch" Persson, the founder, made a simple block game where players can roam around and place and remove blocks normally. This was the start of the massive sandbox game it is today.

During that time, Minecraft went through different phases, one of which was Indev. This article explores a short overview of the Indev version's history and what it has added to the game.

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Everything to know about Indev phase of Minecraft

When was the Indev version released?

Indev version of the game was released in December 2009 (Image via Mojang)

Within a year, from May 2009 to December 2009, Notch and his team of developers worked extremely hard to add loads of features to their "cave game." On December 23, 2009, Notch released the first version of Indev Minecraft. This phase was mainly created after loads of people in the community urged the developers to let them try out the game as well.

The first Indev version that was publicly released was 0.31, which was available on the official website. Furthermore, it was only available to those who had purchased Minecraft, which cost €5 at that time. Hence, this made the Indev version 0.31 the first paid version of the game.

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Features that Indev version had

At this point, Notch and his team were trying to add mobs to the game, along with several other features like inventory, crafting, farming, etc. When it comes to entities, they tried to bring in MD3 mob models to the game, which were demonstrated by Rana, Beast Boy, Steve mob, and Black Steve. These looked quite different from what mobs in the current Minecraft versions looked like.

Here is a list of all the new features the developers added in the Indev stage:

• Indev House
• Inventory
• Crafting
• Map generation screen with configurable map themes, map types, and map shapes.
• Dynamic lighting.
• Other foods, like pork, bread, and mushroom soup (later renamed stew), replace mushrooms as consumable foods to restore health.
• A new tesselator to speed up the game.
• The ability to hold multiple stacks of an item
• Fullscreen mode
• A third-person view can be toggled with F5.
• Isometric screenshot captured with the F7 button
• Decorative paintings.
• Tools and equipment
• Farming.
• Updated mobs (better path-finding, varying difficulty options)
• Day and night cycles (including the sun and moon)
• New map format (.mclevel).
• Firing arrows requires a bow.
• Furnaces and Smelting
• Torches and Fire
• New mob sounds
• New title screen
• Rana, Beast Boy, Black Steve, and Steve mobs (did not last too long in regular Indev)
• Pressing F5 also toggles rain in some Indev versions

Features like inventory, crafting, food items, a third-person view toggle, tools, farming, firing arrows with bows, furnaces, torches, and more are now fundamental to the gameplay. This shows how important Minecraft's Indev phase was.

Soon after this, Notch progressed into the next phase of development, which was named "Infdev," where another massive feature was added to the game: infinite world generation.