PC Gamer Demo

The PC Gamer demo is a demo version of Java Edition Beta 1.3, that was bundled with the June 2011 issue of PC Gamer magazine (American edition, issue 214). It provides 100 minutes (equal to five days in-game) of gameplay, after which it tells the player to buy the game in order to continue playing on the current map.

The demo gives access to all the features found in the full version of the game, except that the player can access one world called the demo world. The demo world, which uses the seed "glacier" (or 108181935 when hashed), has been altered slightly to help guide newcomers to Minecraft. The demo spawns the player at x = 166, y = 65, and z = -57.

The player's save game is saved in the standard game directory and is fully compatible with the full version, making it playable after purchase. The demo and information can be downloaded here.

The demo contains an exclusive cow skin branded with the PC Gamer logo.

Bugs

 * If the player is at or above y=89 at time of demo expiration, they can continue to interact with the world.
 * If the player's game window is at its smallest size at time of playing, upon enlargement of said window, all blocks become transparent until the mouse is moved or until the player interacts with their keyboard. This reveals all underground caves, thus revealing where ores and other valued blocks can be found without the need to dig.
 * If the player opens two windows of the demo, one of them playing the world, but paused, and the other one, on the home menu, reset the demo world and then click back to game on the other window, an error message occurs, and if the player plays the demo, the time is reset, but not the world, and their inventory items are lost, but not the items in the block entities.

Trivia

 * Purchased versions of Minecraft have code from the demo, which was not used until Java Edition 1.3.
 * The demo adds the following to the world: 54 red wool, 90 snow blocks, 122 black wool, 3 chests, a sign, 22 gunpowder, a nearly broken iron pickaxe, a nearly broken iron axe, a nearly broken flint and steel, 4 coal, 5 bread, 4 string, 12 torches, 2 sticks, and 3 compasses.
 * If the player digs directly underneath the sign telling them how to open the chest, they can find a chest that contains 22 gunpowder.
 * The amount of gunpowder in this chest is supposed to be randomly determined (anywhere from 1 - 88), but the random number generator that determines how much gunpowder is given is seeded with the same number (19) for each new world, thus meaning that it generates the same amount of gunpowder in the same positions each time. It is unknown whether this is a developer oversight, or intentional behaviour.


 * If the player goes to sleep in a bed and skips the night, it removes that time from their clock, decreasing their play time.
 * While the player cannot interact with most blocks, items, or mobs after the demo expires, they can still interact with existing boats, and can milk cows if they have a bucket.
 * If a player goes left when they reach the PC Gamer sign, they find a skeleton dungeon. The dungeon is located in a rectangular pit with cobblestone walls and fallen sand filling it. One chest is visible, blocking a stream of water and the other chest and the skeleton spawner are buried in the sand.
 * While mining, if the player opens and closes their inventory without releasing the key, the pickaxe does not move until they stop mining.
 * The "PC Gamer" logo can be mined. It is composed of snow blocks, red wool and black wool.
 * The game files can be modified in such a way, so that the player can receive unlimited play time.
 * The demo disables the F3 Debug screen, the F8 cinematic camera, and Shift + F2 to take an extremely high resolution screenshot (a feature of retail Minecraft between Beta 1.2_2 and Beta 1.5). These are all fairly obscure and experimental features, which were likely disabled to avoid confusing new players.
 * The player's score (which is always 0 in the retail Beta 1.3) is not shown upon death.
 * Due to the developers forgetting to remove debug code, if the Demo is able to print to a log or is launched from a command line, the message "Spawnpos: (a number which is the X location that you spawn at), (a number which is the Z location that you spawn at)" is output to the log every time the player is spawned. An example of this message is "Spawnpos: 166, -57" when spawning into the demo world for the first time.
 * The second hint message has the old Minecraft Wiki link, at http://www.minecraftwiki.net.