Minecraft Speedrunner Admits To Accidentally Cheating In Record Runs

One of the largest Minecraft content creators on YouTube, Dream, has admitted to accidentally cheating in a record-setting speedrun. The extremely popular Minecraft speedrunner stated that he accidentally used a mod that boosted the spawn rates of items key to the run, and that he didn't realize it was active during the runs until a few months ago.

Dream has 23 million subscribers on the video platform, and his channel helped ignite a surge of interest in Minecraft speedrunning. (Minecraft is currently the most popular game on Speedrun.com, with over 1,000 active players. For comparison, the second-most popular game, Super Mario 64, has 358.) However, when several of Dream's speedruns started to make the all-time leaderboard, several of the game's moderators began to suspect that the YouTuber's luck was a little too good.

For context, Minecraft speedrunning is extremely RNG-dependent. Much of a run's viability is determined by how fast key items like ender pearls and blaze rods spawn, which means that setting a record run necessitates a lot of grinding. In a 29-page report, the Minecraft moderators analyzed Dream's stream and concluded that the odds of getting the drops that he did was 1 in 177 billion. These extraordinarily small odds led the moderation team to conclude that Dream had used mods that boosted these rates--in short, he cheated.

"There is no way to accidentally manipulate these values during an RSG speedrun, nor is there any conventional way to do it intentionally using only conventional methods," the report reads in part. "The only sensible conclusion that can be drawn after this analysis is that Dream's game was modified in order to manipulate the pearl barter and rod drop rates."

While Dream initially disputed the results of the report back in December of 2020--even going as far as to hire his own statistician--the YouTuber released a statement via Pastebin in late May stating that he did accidentally cheat. According to Dream, he and another YouTuber had used server-side mods to boost the spawn rates of key items while making challenge videos, and those plugins were active during those streams. Dream stated that he did not realize the mods that he had running at the time of those streams affected the drop rate of these items until recently due to confusion about their functionality.

For more information on Dream's runs, PC Gamer has a more thorough explainer below, and you can also check out fellow YouTuber Karl Jobst's exhaustive video on the topic.