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.