Months later, Dream admits suspect Minecraft speedruns used illegal mods

Enlarge / The bartering Piglin that were at the heart of Dream’s Minecraft cheating drama.

For months now, popular Minecraft streamer Dream has insisted there was nothing fishy about six “Any% Random Seed” speedruns he streamed last October, despite evidence to the contrary presented by the moderators of clearinghouse Speedrun.com. Over the weekend, though, Dream said in a message posted to Pastebin that he had “actually been using a disallowed modification during ~6 of my live streams on Twitch,” while maintaining that he “didn’t have any intention of cheating.”

The admission seems to finally put to rest months of drama and dueling accusations between Dream and the mods, settling an argument that relied on complex mathematics to prove that Dream’s runs were vanishingly unlikely to be the result of random chance alone.

The math

To understand the accusations at play here, first you have to understand just how much of a role luck plays in a top-level Any% speedrun of Minecraft and how ridiculously lucky Dream was in the streamed runs in question.