Early Screenshots of the Aether Mod

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The Aether is one of the first mods for Minecraft to completely overhaul the experience of the game. It added an entirely new dimension with tons of new interesting content. Due to the size of this mod, it’s no wonder that it also underwent many changes throughout its development. Thanks to an old forum post announcing the mod, we can see how the Aether originally looked during its first week of development.

In case you haven’t seen the mod in 10 years, here’s what the final product looked like:

A large floating landmass covered by trees and surrounded by clouds.

World Generation

Many small floating islands with golden trees scattered throughout.

The small, rounded islands in this version of the Aether are quite different from the large, natural landmass-like islands seen in the final product. This is because the Aether used leftover code for the unfinished sky dimension to generate its islands. From Beta 1.6 to Beta 1.8, Minecraft had some unused code for a sky dimension, which eventually became the end. These screenshots are from March 2011, meaning Minecraft’s latest version was Beta 1.3 and the sky dimension did not exist yet, so the mod’s developers had to come up with their own world generation

Interestingly, the large sphere shaped islands seem to have been kept in the final version of the Aether for the Gold Dungeons. From looking at these screenshots, I feel that the old Aether would have felt very cramped. The smaller islands generate at many different layers, whereas the final large islands don’t overlap vertically.

A similar scene, but with larger, more spread out islands and dark green leaves on the trees.

A cluster of spherical islands, with the foliage resembling the final version of the Aether.

Further on in the mod’s development, the “golden oak” trees were changed to a deep shade of green, then later a lighter green very similar to the final leaves. The name “golden oak” was given to a new type of tree that was added later, and the common trees were named Skyroot.

Dungeons

A cube shaped Sentry in the blocky cobblestone halls of the dungeon.

Sentries can be seen inhabiting these dungeons, but at this point it seems that no bosses had been implemented yet. The forum post hints at a “Guardian” that would grant access to loot when killed.

Plans that were never implemented

The forum thread mentions a few features or plans that never made it into the final mod: