The End Poem that is displayed when entering the Exit Portal after defeating the Ender Dragon was written by Julian Gough, the singer and lyricist for the Irish alternative rock band Toasted Heretic, at the invitation of creator Markus Persson. In 2022, 11 years after the game's official release, Gough revealed that he had never formally signed a contract with Microsoft or Mojang when he wrote the poem, allowing him to retain copyright over it. In the same announcement, he released the poem into the public domain, encouraging fans to make their own derivative works based on it.

If a Parrot is near a music box when the player inserts a music disc and plays music then the parrot will dance along with the music by bobbing it's head around.

While the Evoker Illager is not engaged in combat and "/gamerule mobGriefing" is set to "true", it can change the color of the wool of any blue sheep within 16 blocks to red. It signals the spell by producing orange particles and making a "wololo" sound. This is a reference to the Priest special unit in Age of Empires who after making that sound can turn enemy units into friendly units, thereby changing that unit's color. Mojang's developers first noticed the similarities between the Priest and the Evoker in the latter's spell-casting animation when it holds up its arms, and because Age of Empires and Minecraft were both owned by Microsoft, they were able to use the same "wololo" audio clip from Age of Empires for the Evoker in Minecraft.

One of the random title screen splash messages "Woo, /v/!", a reference to the dedicated video game imageboard "/v/" on website 4chan, was removed from the PC Java version of the game in update ver.1.17 released in 2021. It's unknown why it was removed, neither was it mentioned in the game's official patch notes, but it's presumably due to the controversial nature of the website which Microsoft may wish to distance themselves from.

During the game's early years, the game's creator Markus "Notch" Persson had heavily promoted the game on a number of websites including 4chan, which its success he partly attributed to the website.

The feature to feed parrots cookies to breed and tame was removed in a patch due to outcry from the Minecraft community. In real-life, chocolate cookies can kill birds if fed to them and people felt that children who played the game would try to copy this. The feature was changed prior to the release of patch 1.12.

Feeding cookies to parrots was also a subtle reference to the song "Polly" by the band Nirvana.

The achievement "On a Rail" shares its name with the eighth chapter in Half-Life, the 1998 first person shooter by Valve.

The SGU (Geological Survey of Sweden) released a mod for minecraft which adds more realistic geology in the game. For instance, gold can be panned out of river beds and the hardness of materials better reflects reality. This was created to increase public knowledge of geology.

On the title screen, random splash text is displayed below the bottom right of the title. One example is "Let's Danec!". This is a typo Notch (the game creator) made while working on "Wurm Online".

The United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat) has a mission to create or improve 300 public spaces in the developing world by 2016. This led them towards Mojang in Sweden and their game Minecraft.
The partnership that spawned from this is called "Block by Block", which uses Minecraft to help teach young people in the planning of urban public spaces. Haiti, Nepal, India, Rwanda, and Kenya are countries undergoing projects with the help of said program.

In the texture for the Armor Stand, in an unused area in the bottom right, the word "SEARGE" can be seen in a black box. This is here because Searge was the creator of the armor stand.

If the game crashes, a witty comment is placed at the very beginning of the crash report. These comments include parodies of Zero Wing's "Somebody set up us the bomb", lines from "2001: A Space Odyssey", and even Minecraft in-jokes like "You should try our sister game, Minceraft!"

If the game's language is set to Australian English, there are a number of interesting changes that occur, including all new names for each type of tree, pigs being renamed wombats, and many more. Many in-game messages are also changed, like if you try to use a bed when a hostile mob is nearby, it will say "You can't sleep. The neighbors are having a party." instead of "You can't sleep. There are monsters nearby."

Whenever the player unlocks an achievement in the PC release, the notification will read "Achievement get!" This is a reference to the Japanese release of Super Mario Sunshine, where upon collecting a "shine" the words "Shine Get!" pop up on screen.

One of the possible splash screen lines will read "Follow the train, CJ!" This is a reference to the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas mission "Wrong Side of the Tracks", in which the line is exclaimed by Big Smoke upon the mission's failure.

The Enderdragon can be damaged with snowballs.

When the .ogg file of the Disc 11 is run through a spectrogram, it is possible to see an image of what appears to be Steve's head and some numbers. Many fans have speculated why these are here but no official answer has ever been given.

There is a 1 in 2500 chance that a rabbit will spawn hostile, and attack players who come within four blocks. This rabbit is referred to as "The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog" in the player death screen. This is an Easter egg based off of the Rabbit of Caerbannog from the British comedy film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In Peaceful difficulty, the killer rabbit will not despawn and will still try to attack players, but will do no damage.

The collective noun for a group of Endermen is a "haunting" of Endermen.

There is an unused enemy in the game called Giant. This mob is a huge Zombie with considerable health and deals heavy damage. They can only be hurt by being hit in the legs. Giants were added in the last version of Survival Test, but haven't been used since. They can still be spawned through hacks, however. Additionally, they can be spawned using the command "/summon Giant" in version 1.7 of the game.

Some of the Ghast's sounds were recorded from composer and sound designer C418's pet cat.

Baby zombies can occasionally be found riding chickens.

If a Spider is spawned in the Nether, there is a very rare chance that it will spawn with a Wither Skeleton riding it. This behavior normally goes unused, because Spiders don't spawn in the Nether.

The age of a tree is determined by the number of rings on its stump. With that logic in mind, every tree in Minecraft is two years old.

It's possible to place a bed in The End. However, as the developers didn't want the player to sleep in The End, beds will explode when placed. It's possible to actually defeat the Enderdragon with precise placing of beds. Upon exploding, they will injure the Enderdragon with very high damage if it is close by.

During the development of Beta 1.7, Mojang was considering adding spike blocks that would function like a piston, except with spikes instead of a flat piston head. They instead decided to add sticky pistons that could pull blocks, and make spike blocks into a static block that could simply be pushed and pulled with the sticky pistons instead. Sticky pistons were implemented, but they couldn't decide how they wanted spike blocks to look or function.

The End Stone texture is simply an inverted cobblestone texture.

There are quite a few base potions in the game's code that were left with no method to craft them in 1.9 beta pre-release 3. These potions include: Clear, Diffuse, Artless, Thin, Bungling, Suave, Smooth, Debonair, Charming, Refined, Cordial, Sparkling, Potent, Rank, Acrid, Gross, and Stinky.

While they can still be obtained using commands, they have no effect, and take the appearance of a water bottle.

The Steve skin comes from an unfinished spiritual successor to Left 4K Dead, another game by Notch.

As of Minecraft 1.7.3, naming a Sheep "jeb_" with a nametag will cause its wool to start changing colors.

One of the splash texts in Minecraft is "Consummate V's!" This is a reference to the Homestar Runner "Strong Bad Emails" episode, "Dragon", in which Strong Bad explains how to draw Trogdor. This includes drawing "consummate 'V's" for teeth.

There's a chance that the splash text on the title screen will read "12345 is a bad password". This could be a possible reference to a scene in the 1987 film Spaceballs.

The achievement "Adventuring Time" is a reference to the Cartoon Network show "Adventure Time".

If you delete the file 'splash.txt' without deleting the META-INF folder, the splash text on the title screen will say 'missingno'. This is a reference to the infamous Glitch Pokémon, MissingNo.

The texture of the Zombie Pigman has "thx xaphobia" written on it as a credit by Notch to the skin's original creator, XaPhobia.

In the TU12 world of the Xbox 360 version of the game, it's possible to find a pyramid. Inside is a tower of 4 gold blocks placed on an obsidian block. This is a reference to Rooster Teeth's series "Let's Play", where each week 7 guys play different challenges in Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition to win a golden tower they call the "Tower of Pimps".

There are four unused paintings in the pocket edition. Information on who drew these paintings, and their purpose, is unknown.

If you name a Mob creature "Dinnerbone" or "Grumm" (using a name tag) the creature will flip upside-down. This is an Easter egg put into the game by the developers, Nathan "Dinnerbone" Adams and Erik "Grum" Broes.

Some of the paintings in the game are maps from the game Counter-Strike.

Five humanoid mobs which were available in the Indev version were later removed. However, they can be found in the files of earlier versions of the game. The mobs were Beast Boy which resembles the DC comics character of the same name, Black Steve, humans which resemble the default player's character (later renamed 'Monsters'), Rana who is a little girl with a frog hat, and a different human also named Steve.

Notch tweeted a mysterious picture that, when brightened, revealed a player to be "flying" on a cloud. This was a scrapped idea for flying in creative mode, which was implemented in version 1.8.

Notch intended to include a "Sky Dimension", which would be the polar opposite of the Nether. It was to be included in the Beta 1.8 Adventure Update. Players would have been able to enter a world made up of floating formations once they slept in a bed. However, Notch delayed this new area until he could make the Nether more interesting. Eventually, the Sky Dimension was converted into the End, though the Sky Dimension was unintentionally able to be accessed in Beta 1.6 and 1.7.

Gears were a type of block that were available in Indev 0.31 which could be used in a similar way to redstone. They could only be placed on the side of blocks, and were never available in the release versions. In earlier builds players could hack the game to make them accessible, but the files were removed in later updates.

The Leather chain armor is a sprite from Indev (an older test version of Minecraft's Survival mode) 0.31's items.png armor. It never made it to the release versions.

In the InDev version of the game, Notch may have planned to have furniture in the game, as found in the terrain.png inside the Minecraft Indev files. The idea was later abandoned.

Bedrock was originally known as "adminium" because it was only allowed to be broken and placed by admins.

When Beta 1.4 was released (April 1st, 2011), there was a small chance of every chunk spawning a block that is now called "Locked Chest" which, when right-clicked, displayed a menu saying "Steve Co. Supply Crate". This is a nod to Team Fortress 2's Mann Co. Supply Crates. Clicking the "Go to Store" button opened a browser window to the newly created Minecraft Store, which sold 12 items:
• Steve Co. Supply Crate Key ($3)
• Steve Co. Supply Crate Key 5-Pack ($18)
• Miner's Helmet ($21)
• Name Change ($99)
• Creeper Saddle ($42)
• Secret Griefer Identity ($155)
• Enlargement Pill ($2)
• Response From Support ($494)
• Three "Coming Soon" items (Priced at $75, $7, and $1499)
• "Regular Padlock" for $8.

Items could be "purchased" by clicking on them. Once the cart reaches $10,000 worth of items, a pop-up appears advising you to click cancel if you're prone to seizures. If you click OK, the screen starts flashing various colors.

Clicking the Checkout button caused a Velociraptor sound effect with an error in the "checkout" process. On April 2nd, a banner was added which floated the words "♥ April Fools! ♥" across the screen, accompanied by a midi instrumental of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up".

The "Locked Chest" item was meant to be removed on the midnight of April 1st, but since the creator, Markus Persson, was sick, the item was removed on April 5th instead, the day Beta 1.4_01 was released.

According to Notch, The Enderman name is a reference to the creepypasta monster, "The Slenderman".

Endermen sounds are actually a person saying "Hi" and "What's up" played backwards and distorted.

A block known as Crying Obsidian was originally planned as a way for the player to set a new respawn point, but was abandoned and removed from the game after the release of beds.

The Iron Golems holding out roses to baby villagers is a reference to the ancient robots in the animated film Laputa: Castle in the Sky, as is the fact that the Golems are covered in vines.

Notch would always drop a red apple when killed in earlier versions of Minecraft.

In Minecraft Pocket Edition, there's an unused camera. If hacked into the player's inventory, it can be used to take pictures.

Villagers were inspired by the shop keepers in Dungeon Master 2.

Lightning does not have an image file associated with it. It is coded directly into the game engine.

The Snow Golems don't actually have pumpkin heads. They simply wear them as a helmet and their actual faces can be seen by standing in very close proximity to them so that you see through the pumpkin. Shears can be used to remove the pumpkin and cause one to drop it revealing its face, although the pumpkin cannot be put back on the Snow Golem.

There's a very rare chance that the "C" and "E" in the Minecraft logo will switch and instead show "Minceraft".

Emeralds were originally supposed to be rubies, but they were changed to emeralds due to Dinnerbone (Nathan Adams) being color-blind, making him not able to easily tell the difference between redstone ore and ruby ore.

The game was partly inspired by an earlier game by Notch called RubyDung. It was more of a Base-Building type game, like Dwarf Fortress. The old Cobblestone texture came from this game.

One achievement in Minecraft is called "The Lie", which includes making a cake. This is a nod to Portal's famous meme, "The Cake Is A Lie". Also, the achievement for entering the nether in the PC version is called "We Need To Go Deeper", which is a reference of the multi-layered dream based plot of "Inception".

When Soul Sand is directly placed over an ice block, its slow effect is greatly increased, affecting both mobs and players.

"Herobrine Removed" has been added to a number changelogs. Herobrine is a character from a Minecraft "creepypasta" who looks exactly like the player, but has white eyes. It is said that Herobrine is Notch's dead brother, although Notch said himself that he does not have a dead brother. Herobrine never appeared in the game, and it's likely that this line being added to the changelogs is just a joke with the community.

Steve once had a beard, but it was removed in the beta update.

The in-game NPC Villagers, often referred to as Testificates, were originally planned to be Pigmen, much like the Nether mobs. (Except not undead.) They would have the standard player model like Zombies and Zombie Pigmen, but with a Pig's skin. The second Skin Pack for the Xbox 360 version contains a Pigman skin as a slight nod to this.

Originally, zombies used to drop feathers when killed. This was the result of Notch, the developer of Minecraft at the time, not knowing what zombies should drop.

The creepers were based on a failed model of a pig. The length and the height of the pig model were accidentally inverted, resulting in a tall mid section with small legs.

When enchanting an item, the strange symbols used to describe the kind of enchantment is actually a direct usage of the Standard Galactic Alphabet from the Commander Keen series for DOS.

The texts respectively read "Well Played Internets You Are Good", "These Names Will Be Random And Confusing" and "Each Spell Costs Experience Levels" describing the function of the enchantment table.

Diamonds were originally called Emeralds. Because of the light blue color they had, Notch decided to change the name to diamonds. In the code of Minecraft, Diamonds were still referred to as emeralds until 1.3, which introduced the current item known as Emeralds.

According to Minecraft's creator Notch, the game's protagonist, Steve, and all other beings in the game are genderless.

Minecraft was originally called "Cave Game".