The April/May 2023 MCSR Cheating Scandal Saga
(or, as much of it that I can explain as of May 3rd, considering we keep getting new info)
So, it all starts back in April of 2019 — 27 April 2019 exactly, when NikocraftHD posted his 3:59 Set Seed Glitchless Peaceful (SSGP) pre-1.9 WR. At 11 million views, it’s one of the most well known speedruns ever, and unquestionably the most well known run of its type. And four years later, on 30 April 2023, Eliotex dropped a video: NikocraftHD spliced his speedruns and nobody noticed.
Two of NikocraftHD’s runs were cheated: the 3:59, and a later 2:49 (26 March 2022). Both had evidence of a cheating method called ‘splicing’, or cutting videos of two attempts together. In this case, he additionally used a recreated world file and a NBT Editor to manually copy the previous world “level.dat” values for getting good End Towers.
The 2:49′s evidence is, in retrospect, relatively obvious: Nikocraft had placed blocks during his run that should have been visible from spawn, but when he loaded back into spawn after going through the end portal, those blocks weren’t there anymore.
The 3:59 was harder to prove — until Crafterdark noticed something odd about Nikocraft’s hunger bar. If you’ve ever played Minecraft in peaceful, you’ll know that your hunger bar will never deplete. However, there’s two aspects of the hunger bar: the food level, and the saturation level. In peaceful, your saturation level does decrease, and when it reaches 0, your hunger bar starts to ‘bounce’ or ‘jitter’ every 3-ish seconds. Saturation level persists even between dimensions, meaning even when you load into a new dimension, if you have zero saturation, your hunger bar will continue to make that constant movement.
When Nikocraft enters the end at 2:54, his hunger bar doesn’t start moving again until 3:30. That’s over 30 seconds without the periodical 3-second jitters. In the 2:49, after he enters the end at 1:50, his hunger bar doesn’t start moving again until 2:14 — roughly 23 seconds without movement. That second run, with a 23 second section without movement — the chance of that happening legitimately is 3.9E-34. That’s 0.00000000000000000000000000000000039.
Sources for this section: Eliotex’s video | Cheating Doc | NikocraftHD’s runs (3:59) (2:49)
Cool. So NikocraftHD cheated, twice, but you may be wondering: all of this was uncovered on April 30th. Why is this the April-May cheating scandal?
That would be because ten hours later, at 8am on May 1st for me, a runner who was incredibly popular and well liked at the time, Lide — who is a huge part of MCSR history — admitted to cheating his world records.
Lide got so many people into running. He was the first to use tower strats in a world record, he worked with so many of the legendary runners of that era. I need to emphasise: that this runner cheated, and sees it as a joke, has been heartbreaking for the community. I think Cscuile explained it best:
Sources for this section: Falco’s tweet | Cscuile’s tweet
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the end of it: around the same time, Loth realised something interesting about a 4:41 pre-1.9 SSGP run by bruono1st — who would have had world record if not for NikocraftHD’s cheated 3:59. bruonost’s run also showed evidence of a splice — the hunger bar once again stopped moving after he entered the end. Unfortunately, upon being called out bruono1st privated his run, and we can no longer watch it, but here are the tweets about it: eliotex tweet | poisonousskely tweet
As of May 3rd, this is all that’s come out in total, but I hope this was an understandable and informative explanation of what’s going on for those curious!
