Legend of the Chambered

Legend of the Chambered (LoC) is a raycaster styled game created by Notch where the player must explore winding stone chambers, fight monsters, and reach the end of the dungeon. There are at least five different versions of LoC, including some where the player is unable to fight monsters, and some where they are. Notch later lost interest on this game and gave up on it (as he said on his now deleted project page). Along with other Chambered games, it was based on games like Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder. It was released at an unknown date before May 27, 2008.

Legend of the Chambered is significant to Minecraft history because Notch reused many of this game’s item textures as textures for items in Minecraft, those being the textures for leather armor, iron swords, apples, and quivers.

Despite quitting the original game, Notch made other games under the title Legend of the Chambered and a prelude, Prelude of the Chambered (PoC). PoC was created for the Ludum Dare 21 game jam in August 2011. Along with his other LoC titled games, Prelude of the Chambered is significant as some of the ideas in them helped shape what Minecraft became.

Legend of the Chambered (Version 1/Version 2)

 * ,, , and keys to move
 * to sprint (drains energy, hunger, and thurst)
 * to pick up and equip items
 * to "use" an item (red apple on a character to feed them and sword to attack)

Legend of the Chambered (3D Version/Android Version)
Both the Ludum Dare LoC and the LoC with characters from Eye of the Beholder have the same controls.
 * ,, , and keys to move
 * to look left
 * to look right
 * to interact

Prelude of the Chambered

 * ,, , or the , , , and  keys to move
 * to number keys to cycle through the inventory
 * to to interact

Legend of the Chambered (Version 1)
Legend of the Chambered begins in winding stone chambers that need to be explored. The players soon finds a small side-room in the hall with a pile of equipment on the floor, enough for the entire team. A little further on, there are two slots in the wall with some text in the middle of them saying "Niches". There are other niches scattered throughout the dungeon, but none of them have anything in them. The player will find an intersection, going left the player will find another, going left again there is a square loop in which there is a niche in one of the walls. Going the other way there is a roofless room with an automatic wood door to it, and some text on the wall next to it saying "(dancing)". Inside are two apple trees and two monsters.

Going right from the first intersection is a room with a pentagonal stone slab in the middle, and a stair well behind it (the player can't go up these stairs because of an invisible barrier). There is also another automatic door inside the room which leads to the woods (another roofless room with a maze of trees) as is suggested by some text saying "woods" on a wall somewhere inside it. The players can find their way into another tree-filled room that contains two words, "Win" and "Yay", on opposite walls, and a niche in the middle wall.

Prelude of the Chambered
Prelude of the Chambered starts in The Prison and the player must smash through cracked walls to find a ladder. Going down the ladder leads to The Dungeon and after exploring a little, the player finds a power glove which lets the player push boulders and fight monsters. After fighting some bats and solving a boulder puzzle, doors open into a room filled with bats and The Golden Bat Boss.

After that, the player must go back to The Prison and push two boulders into some holes. This lets them cross to another ladder which leads up to The Island, which has yet another ladder that takes the player down to The Frost Cave. Here they must fight eyes, and find the skates. Players can also find a green healing potion here too. The skates allow them to move on the ice without sliding, allowing them to get to The Golden Eye Boss.

Players can then go to The Island to obtain Cutters. Going back to the Frost Cave, players can use the cutters on some bars to obtain a pistol. Going back to the prison, they can find more ammo and healing potions in the cells. On The Island, there is a fence of bars that the player must cut in order to get to The Crypt. In The Crypt, there are flippers and Ogres that spit acid. The flippers help the player in the water so they can get to The Golden Ogre Boss.

Going back to The Island, the player must trap a ghost in a white box to enter The Temple. The player must lead ghosts and trap them in some more white boxes in order to cut the bars and push buttons to open the door. Pushing a boulder through the hallway and into a hole lets the player pass into a room with another white box in it. Going into the door behind the white box is a room with a maze made out of ghosts.

After finding The Golden Ghost Boss, the player must lead it back through the maze to the white box at the begging in order to get the last key. After that, the player can go back up to The Island and open up the door. The text "YOU WIN", the number of trinkets found (trophies), and the time show up on screen.

Legend of the Chambered (Version 1/Version 2)
Items are objects that can be picked up and put into a character's inventory, though they are unstackable. Each character's inventory consists of 18 item slots and 12 equipment slots (4 slots for armor, 2 for weapons, 2 for rings, 2 for food and shields, a quiver slot and an amulet slot), totaling up to 30 inventory slots. The textures for armor such as Leather chain/Studded, Chainmail, and Iron armor can be found in the Indev 0.31 items.png file. Considering that said file uses a lot of textures from LoC, it may be that the armor sets were included in some version(s) of the game.

Prelude of the Chambered
The inventory consists of a hotbar with 8 slots, in which collected items are shown. Unlike in the main game, certain items are stackable such as Health Potions and Pistol Bullets.

Characters
The game code in LoC referrers to a character individually as Hero, and collectively as Party. Both PoC and the LoC android version referrers to the player character simply as Player which has no sprite or given name.
 * Diana - A female mage with red hair, green eyes, and a purple top. She has 46 HP, 26 Power, 8 Attack, and 7 Defense.
 * Green - A male ranger with black hair, blue eyes, a light green top similar to Alex, and a green jacket or sweatshirt. He has 86 HP, 55 Power, 13 Attack, and 14 Defense.
 * Shera - A young female warrior with brown eyes, brown hair, a gray sleeveless top, and a sword. She has 107 HP, 46 Power, 17 Attack, and 15 Defense.
 * Teron - An old bald priest with brown eyes, a purple robe, and a light purple top. He has 31 HP, 34 Power, 5 Attack, and 9 Defense.

Characters taken from Eye of the Beholder

 * Taghor - A male dwarf with a white beard, a dwarf helmet, and a brown top.
 * Keirgar - A male wizard with a white beard and a blue robe.
 * Alyssa - A female thief with a green hood and scarf, and black hair.
 * Largo - A male wizard with purple aesthetic.
 * Mat - A male wizard with red aesthetic.
 * Chriss - A male dwarf with blond hair and beard, and a white sleeveless top.

Creatures
The original LoC only has monsters in it, while second version of the game has skeletons instead. PoC has all of the other creatures (except for the slimes.)


 * Monsters - They resemble goblins with green skin, messy dark green hair, red eyes, tusks, rust top, tan pants, and dark blue shoes. Their movement resembles dancing and they wander around aimlessly even when the player is near. If one bumps into the player, it raises its arms and deals 1-5 damage. When killed, they explode into giblets of blood and drop coins.
 * Skeletons - Skeletons have similar behavior to monsters but have a different appearance, instead resembling skeletons.
 * Bats - Creatures found in The Prison, Dungeon, and Crypt. They fly around aimlessly until they bump into you, dealing damage.
 * Eyes - Fully blue and fly around aimlessly on The Island and Frost Cave. Some may notice that eyes of ender from Minecraft are also somewhat fully blue, with the exception of the green iris.
 * Ogres - Green humanoid creatures that are found in The Crypt. They have a ranged attack of spitting acid at the player.
 * Ghosts - Ghosts are neutral creatures that attack only if provoked and are found in The Temple. Ghosts are the only monster that follows the player. The player has to defeat them by luring them to white boxes.
 * Slimes - During a Ludum Dare, Notch had planned on making another LoC game which he later released as a mobile game. One of the screenshots of this game showed purple blob-like creatures known as "slimes" in the game code. They had 3 HP and would wander around aimlessly unless a player was near, in which they would attack. Their appearance is very different from that of Minecraft slimes.

Bosses
There is a stronger, golden variant of every creature in PoC, each of which drops a key. The ogre spits two streams of acid at the player. The ghost spits acid and also has a speed boost, and must be lured through a maze of ghosts in order for it to be trapped.

Trivia

 * The abbreviation of Legend of the Chambered as "LoC" comes from Notch himself:
 * The textures for some items in Minecraft were the same at first to the Legend of the Chambered textures, but with time some modifications were made, and some items were completely removed.
 * The button textures of Bedrock Edition appear to be recolored versions of Legend of the Chambered's buttons.
 * Other notable unfinished games Notch made that he took sprites from for Minecraft were RubyDung (grass and cobblestone) and ''Zombie Town (the Human/Steve texture and possibly the zombie texture.)
 * Notch made many games with the same name or with similar names. All of them seem to be at night.
 * A second version of the main Legend of the Chambered game was created with different textures and a different level layout.
 * Another LoC game featured 3D rendering and characters from the game Eye of the Beholder.
 * Notch also made a flash version of LoC.
 * Notch also made another game called TinyCham, a similar dungeon crawler with a 40x30 pixel resolution, which was followed by a sequel, Eye of the Onlooker II - The Legend of Tinymoon.
 * Notch made two similar 3D dungeon crawlers, Dungeon4k and Hunters4k, for the java 4k programming contest.
 * The first game Notch created under the title of "Legend of the Chambered" was released all the way back in 2001.
 * In some posts Notch made during a Ludum Dare competition, he had some screenshots of a game that was labeled LoC (Legend of the Chambered). This one however used mainly billboarded sprites. The controls were, , , and keys to move and  and  to look around. Soothing music would play in the background; one could go up stairs, pick up items, and throw them; and purple slimes would wander around and attack the player.
 * Notch made another version of the game for a ludum dare in December 2010, though he didn't finish it. At the end of the month, he began working on it again, released a playtest, and eventually released a version for android devices.
 * In this version of Legend of the Chambered, a sound titled "oof" can be found in the code which may be the same sound that the Player used to make.
 * Notch had planned on adding stats to Minecraft similar to the ones he had in these games.
 * There used to be a list of games on mojang.com that listed Legend of the Chambered as well as others.
 * There are green creatures in both Prelude of the Chambered and Legend of the Chambered. The ones in PoC are called Ogres, while in LoC they are called Monsters. There are also green creatures in another one of Notch's games, MetaGun, called Gremlins.
 * In early development of Minecraft, Notch stated that he would like to add monsters roaming the land. He gave examples of lava zombies or troll infestations. Later, the zombie was implemented and a humanoid mob called a monster was added and then removed.
 * The Power Glove in Prelude of the Chambered also appears in another one of Notch's game's, Minicraft.
 * In a game similar to these that Notch made, Dungeon4k, as part of his 4k series (See also: Minecraft 4k), there are specked red stones called power stones in the game that the player uses to charge power fields, which are somewhat similar to the redstone from Minecraft.
 * The game Doomgeon took inspiration from Prelude of the Chambered.
 * On Notch's old youtube channel, Nizzotch, there was a video of him making Prelude of the Chambered. The video has been deleted, but there are archives of it.