Dream Admits He Cheated On His Infamous Speedrun

After months of drama that ignited the Minecraft YouTuber fandom, the uber Minecraft YouTuber, Dream, has admitted that he cheated on his infamous speedrun.

In October of 2020, speedrunning moderators and lobbed allegations that Dream had cheated to complete a 19-minute speedrun of 1.16 of Minecraft: Java Edition. They accused Dream of using a mod on the game that upped the spawn rate of key items necessary to complete the game. The key piece of evidence was that for Dream to obtain ender pearls and blaze rods so quickly, he would have had to have defied 1-in-1.77 billion odds. Ultimately, the speedrunning community disallowed his speedrun on suspicion of cheating, but at the time, Dream vehemently denied the allegations, going so far as to post a video explaining how he did it. This led to back and forth between Dream stans and critics and the drama permeated the Minecraft-focused corners of social media. By the end of the year, Dream tweeted that he respected the moderators decision, though he disagreed with it.

me: I don’t care about my run being verified, the mods decision is respectable, sorry for my behavior originally, at the end of the day I understand their POV.

mods: respond respectfully, decide not to make a video to not prolong drama

youtubers: here’s why dream is a SCUMBAG

— dream (@dreamwastaken) December 31, 2020

However, over Memorial Day weekend, Dream admitted that he had unwittingly cheated, in a now-deleted Pastebin post. According to Dream, he had had mods installed in version 1.15 of Minecraft for "challenge" videos so that he wouldn't have to spend large amounts of video time hunting for key items. When the game updated to version 1.16, Dream said he believed the mods were removed, but this turned out not to be the case.

"In our challenge videos, before 1.16 we always increased the enderman spawn rates and pearl drop rates out of convenience and we’ve mentioned that openly before," wrote Dream. "It makes the videos better because we don’t spend hours looking for pearls or spend so much time farming blaze rods (a totally RNG thing, mostly pearls). When 1.16 came out, it was more complicated to increase piglin trades then it is to do enderman pearl drops. A server side plugin was made for our videos that slightly increases the rates. Around this time is when the first versions of the recording mod was being made, although it was more of a chat mod at this point."

He continued, "I had considered at the time that this potentially could have been a problem, but brushed it off because 1. Server side and client side are completely different and as far as I was aware nothing had been done client side. 2. as far as I knew it was just basically a chat mod so far and 3. I was 99% sure that I didn’t even have the recording mod on. Which was backed up by the fabric api logs saying that only the fabric api was loaded (although I found out later it only lists things that explicitly ask to be listed which I had no idea) this was mentioned in my response video."

Several months ago, Dream quietly deleted his video defending himself, though said nothing publically about it until last Sunday.

"I’m not really sure what I'm expecting out of all of this, but I just felt like I had a huge weight on my shoulder and I want to get it off," wrote Dream. "I think the whole situation was extremely shitty overall for everyone involved and I wish that I could go back and do things differently because it was some of the worst weeks of my life and still impacts me every day. I’m sorry to anyone that I let down or disappointed. I always strive to be the best person that I can be and that whole debacle wasn’t the best that I can be or anywhere near it. I hope this brings some closure to anyone who needed it, and I really want to move forward with positive vibes like I’ve been trying my best to promote as much as I can."