Shout Out / Minecraft

• The splash text on the title screen has more than a few:^note Around mid-March, 2020, the splash text was changed to give sanitation tips relating to the COVID-19 Pandemic; this has since been reverted.
  • "Follow The Train CJ"
  • "Reticulating splines!"
  • "MAP11 has two names!/Phobos Anomaly!/idspispopd!"
  • "DRR! DRR! DRR!"
  • "Not on Steam!"
  • "Switches and ores!"
  • "That's no moon!/Han shot first!"
  • "Peter Griffin!"
  • "Made Of Truthiness!"
  • "Haley loves Elan!"
  • "Less addictive than TV Tropes!"
  • "Cow Tools!"
  • "Stay awhile and listen!"
  • "Also try Super Meat Boy / Terraria / Project Zomboid / VVVVVV / etc."
  • "Consummate V's!"
  • "Kinda like Lemmings!"
  • "My life for Aiur!"
  • " BTAF used to be good!"
  • "Lives in a pineapple under the sea!"
  • "Technologic!"
  • "You're going too fast!/Should not be played while driving"
  • "The creeper is a spy!"
  • Woo, facepunch!
  • "4815162342 lines of code!"^note 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 are The Numbers that appear all over the television series Lost.
  • "Age of Wonders is better!"^note This splash attracted the attention of said game's dev team. During the ensuing discussion, it was arranged for Notch to fund a third installment in the series
  • "All is full of love!"
  • "Joel is neat!" ^note deadmau5's real name is Joel Zimmerman
  • "Gargamel plays it!"
  • "Woo, somethingawful!"
  • "Warning! A huge battleship "STEVE" is approaching fast!"
  • "<playername> IS YOU"
  • "& Knuckles!"
  • "Huge tracts of land!"
  • "An illusion! What are you hiding?/Something's not quite right..."
  • "Now you are thinking with pistons!"
• From Bedrock achievements:
  • "The Lie", awarded for making a cake.
  • "Iron Man"
  • "Hot Topic", after a clothing chain.
  • "Rainbow Collection".
  • "Inception".
  • "Beam Me Up".
  • "Let It Go!"
  • "So I Got That Going For Me".
  • "Do A Barrel Roll!"
  • "One Pickle, Two Pickle, Sea Pickle, Four", named after the kids' song "One Potato".
  • "Moskstraumen" is named after a Norwegian whirlpool.
  • "Plethora of Cats" is the name of a painting by Dr. Seuss, which may or may not be a deliberate reference.
• From Java advancements:
  • "Suit Up".
  • "Ice Bucket Challenge", the name of a challenge used to promote ALS awareness.
  • "The City at the End of the Game".
  • "Subspace Bubble", "The Next Generation".
  • "Withering Heights".
  • "Spooky Scary Skeleton".
  • "Hot Stuff".
  • "Country Lode, Take Me Home".
  • "War Pigs".
  • "Very Very Frightening".
  • "Not Today, Thank You".
  • "Is It a Bird?", "Is It a Balloon?", "Is It a Plane?"
  • "Ol' Betsy".
  • "You Got a Friend in Me".
  • "Bukkit Bukkit", named after a popular server-hosting tool.
  • "Two By Two".
• From both advancements and achievements:
  • "Adventuring Time".
  • "Wax On", "Wax Off" (advancements) and "Wax On, Wax Off" (achievement).
  • "Bee Our Guest".
  • "Monster Hunter", plus the Java-only "Monsters Hunted".
  • "Return To Sender".
  • "Sound of Music".
  • 'Sneak 100'.
  • "Star Trader" is a reference to a 1974 space trading game with the same name.
  • "With Our Powers Combined!"
• The paintings in the game are pixellated recreations of works by the artist Kristoffer Zetterstrand, who also did the Minecraft versions. Some examples:
  • Three of the paintings are screenshots of Counter-Strike maps. Two of them are of Aztec and captured from outside the map's boundaries, while the third is a normal shot of a bomb site on Dust 2.
  • The first 2-tall-by-1-wide painting is Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.
  • A slightly less-recurring topic is King Graham, as one painting shows him by himself on a black background while another shows him viewing himself in Space Quest.
  • One of the larger paintings features a duel between two fighters from the game International Karate+, and a second features one of the characters holding the finger of a giant hand.
  • Another of the larger paintings features instead the 100m level from Donkey Kong.
  • One of the paintings portrays Mean Midget sitting in what appears to be a large paper boat.
• Persson compares the Endermen to Samara.
• The gibberish text in the enchantment table is the Standard Galactic Alphabet. Among the possible enchantment words are "Xyzzy", "Klaatu Barata Niktu", and "The Elder Scrolls".
• The Iron Golem resembles the robots from Laputa: Castle in the Sky, and if you watch closely, they occasionally offer a rose to villager children.
• In the language option Australian English, there aren't any villagers. Only Bruce.
• An update to the Xbox 360 Edition hides away the Tower of Pimps.
• A Halloween texture pack released for the Xbox 360 Edition turns the Endermen into Slendermen. As if the Enderman wasn't a big enough shout out to Slenderman on its own!
• Rabbits originally had a 1/1000 chance of spawning as a hostile version called "The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog". Unfortunately, its name was changed to "The Killer Bunny" and was changed to no longer spawn naturally (although it's still on the game files and can be spawned with commands).
• In the LOLCAT language:
  • Sponge is called Spongebob.
  • The Regeneration effect is called Time Lordz Buffeh.
• The End is one big one to Xen from Half-Life. To wit, the game sees you travel through a portal to another dimension (using components stolen from the inhabitants of said dimension), where you fight the Final Boss in the form of a giant flying monster with psychic abilities who launches highly damaging purple spherical projectiles at you, and who draws power from various crystals in its chamber to heal. It can't be beaten until they're destroyed. The creature goes up in a huge explosion with lasers shooting out of its body when it is killed, its death teleports the player character to another area where a mysterious otherworldly being rants at them, and it is implied that the monster had enslaved the inhabitants of the dimension you find it in.^note The Achievement for beating the Ender Dragon is called "Free The End." Also, the dimension has primitive, Organic Technology based cities built into it, but seemingly exists as a bunch of rocky floating islands in a void that can only form any kind of society because the inhabitants have the ability to teleport.
  • The splash text also contains a dig at Half-Life 3's status as de facto Vapor Ware.
• Both of the original illager enemies have one: the evoker will turn any blue sheep nearby into a red one while going "wololo" and the vindicator will attack everything on sight when renamed "Johnny".
• Steve's design is based on that of Tommy Vercetti.
• One of the goat horns, the "Call" variant, has a sound similar to the THX "Deep Note".
  • Another goat horn is named "Dream", and the sound it makes sounds similar to the "Oh, Dream!~" Share Phrase that often comes up during Minecraft Manhunt.
• The "Library" easter egg dimension in the 2020 April Fools "Infinity Update" is a shout out to The Library of Babel; both feature infinitely expansive libraries that contain an infinite number of books, full of every single possible combination of characters that fit within the books' length — and most of which is complete gibberish.
• Also from the Infinity Update is the "Ant" dimension, which is set up as a grid for a cellular automaton called "Langton's ant", complete with "ant" block which behaves like the hypothetical ant in that automaton.
• The rare blue texture for the Axolotl is a reference to Mudkip from Pokémon.
• Foxes' favorite food is "sweet berries". This is quite likely an allusion to "The Fox and the Grapes", one of Aesop's Fables.
• One of the dimensions in the 20w14∞ snapshot for April Fools' Day 2020 consists only of the words "We apologise for the inconvenience.", written in fire.
• The newer Game Over screen "You died!" is a direct homage to the similar screens of earlier (pre-Remake) Resident Evil games.

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