According to former Mojang business and production director Daniel Kaplan, he came up with the original name for the mobile version of Minecraft, "Minecraft: Pocket Edition", a nod to the Game Boy Pocket, because he was a Nintendo fan.

According to Minecraft's creator Notch, the game's protagonist, Steve, and all other beings in the game are genderless. Animals were designed to be hermaphrodites (for instance, cows/bulls having both horns and udders) to reinforce this. Notch expressed regret in 2012 for refering the protagonist as "Steve" with masculine pronouns, prefering the "up-and-coming" they/them pronoun. He also joked that no gender existing in Minecraft meant that every animal and character in Minecraft is homosexual "because there's only one gender to choose from. Take THAT, homophobes!" It is unclear if Notch still stands by this, as he has since become an outspoken opponent of gay and transgender identities.

The End Stone texture is simply an inverted cobblestone texture.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Baby zombies can occasionally be found riding chickens.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The Enderdragon can be damaged with snowballs.

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.