I have asked 2 questions about Minecraft seed images so far, 1 of them have a score of 5, and another having a score of 1. Of course, both of them did not get answered with the correct answer, and the only answer that they had were more of opinions. I then decided to vote to close one of the question stating that it was an opinion based question. Even after a few days of voting to close it, it was still not closed, with only 2 other people voting. I feel like questions asking for Minecraft images' seeds are first answered with user's opinions, before answered with an actual seed since brute-forcing the seed takes time. My question is, can "What is the seed for this Minecraft image" be asked, or do they fall in the opinion based category and should not be asked? Thank you.
3 Answers
I think a problem with this question is that it is impossible to answer.
There isn't a tool to identify the seed of a world by inputting the appearance of the screenshot, and people who play Minecraft can't scroll through available seeds. Even if they could browse seeds, there are 2^64 of possible seeds and it'd be statistically impossible for any person to randomly stumble upon the seed used in the question.
The Use of the MinecraftAtHome program allows users to randomly generate seeds and compare it to feature depicted in terrain. This tool relies on chance as you can't influence the terrain spawned by a seed. As an example it took 93 days worth of computational power to get lucky and find the seed used in the Minecraft title screen. This is an unfeasible and unfair time commitment for people who'd want to answer the question. Additionally, it may be completely impossible to identify the location if the terrain has been terraformed by players.
Since that's the case, the only way to identify the seed would be to perform a reverse image search and see if the original image source has the seed posted anywhere. But then it no longer becomes a gaming question, it becomes a server identification question. It still may be impossible if the original source doesn't provide the seed anywhere.
If I were posed this question I'd close it as "Needs Details or Clarity" because it can only be answered by people to happen to know the seed, and happen to recognize the location depicted. It can't be researched and answered by users on the site, therefore making it ill-suited for Arqade.
The only exception I would make for this is identifying the seed for the world shown on the game's splash screen. Allegedly, the seed is located somewhere in the game's code and intrepid players could possibly reverse engineer the scripts to find the seed used.
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Technically you can get the seed from any image if the randomised block texture rotations are enabled. But I don't think a program for that exists yet. Commented Dec 22, 2020 at 1:18
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you can find a seed for any image of unaltered terrain with enough resolution from minecraft, with time. a youtuber named salc1 covered the seed finding process on his channel– TopcodeCommented Dec 22, 2020 at 21:15
No, unless there is enough interest and specialty (e.g. the image appears on the splash screen), such questions have no utility to future readers, and therefore goes against Stack Exchange's ultimate target of building a library of knowledge, making them unsuitable for Arqade.
That "it's strictly possible despite computationally expensive" holds no ground because being answerable is required for a question to be on-topic, but not sufficient.
Given enough unmodified terrain, it is not an opinion-based question but rather a very computationally expensive one. So I think it is on-topic.
