One of Minecraft's more popular streamers and YouTubers, Dream, has had a 16th place speedrun from October of 2020 removed from the official Minecraft speedrunning leader boards. As the result of a two-month-long investigation, the Minecraft speedrunning team has published the finds of the investigation into Dream's runs.

Speedrunning Minecraft is a hobby that many people have picked up as a way of making the game more interesting. One of the more popular categories (of which there are many) is the "Any Percentage Random Seed Glitchless" which tasks players with killing the Enderdragon and reaching the credits screen as quickly as possible. The "random seed" means that the player has no idea where anything is, or if the world will ultimately produce the conditions necessary for a record-setting run.

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As of the 1.16 update—and the advent of Piglin trading—world record times have become shorter and shorter, depending on your luck with those trades. Therein lies the reason that Dream's runs were investigated in the first place. In a since-deleted tweet, another player, MinecrAvenger, posted the results of Dream's trades with the Piglins, pointing out that 262 trades, 42 of them produced an Ender Pearl—an event that is highly unlikely, even if you are very lucky.

The speedrunning moderators then set out to discover how likely it would be for anyone to ever be as lucky as Dream was over the course of 11 different streams. The 29-page report largely consists of the mathematical reasoning that was used to determine the investigation's conclusion, as well as exploring some of the game mechanics that are relevant to the analysis. While the report should be read in full by anyone who is interested, the efforts to ensure that the conclusions were based purely on math, and not personality conflicts, are clear.

A lot of what the conclusion relies on is the game's various random number generators, which ultimately determines the result of trades with the Piglins, as well as the drop rate of Blaze Rods. As it turns out, the analysis shows it's not mathematically possible to use a naturally occurring exploit to increase the likelihood that you get Enderpearls or Blaze Rods.

The analysis even accounts for broken number generators and an event known as "cosmic ray interference" (an event which would temporarily cause a computer to miscalculate) and determines that the math and design of the game simply don't allow for both Ender Pearl and Blaze Rod drops to be affected naturally the way that is seen in Dream's videos.

Several corrections to the math were made in an effort to ensure that as many variables were accounted for as possible before release. Ultimately, the investigation's conclusion was that the probability of any player experiencing the luck that Dream had in 11 different videos was 1 in 7.5 trillion—thus, Dream's game was modified to manipulate Ender Pearl and Blaze Rod drop rates.

Dream initially refuted the claims on Twitter and vowed to issue a response, saying that several of the site’s moderators claim that the investigation was biased.

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