Dream admits to Minecraft speedrun cheating controversy: “I felt an extreme sense of guilt”
In a now-deleted tweet, Minecraft streamer and speedrunner Clay “Dream” admits in a Pastebin post to claims of cheating in his Minecraft 1.16 speedrun last December.
After taking the internet by storm and being heralded as YouTube’s top breakout content creator of 2020, allegations of cheating in his Minecraft 1.16 speedruns began last December after a 29-page official report from the speedrun.com Minecraft moderating team was published.
The paper breaks down Dream’s statistically impossible luck in collecting Ender Pearls and Blaze Rods, both of which are randomly generated mob drops that are necessary items to complete the speedrun.
In his post, Dream admits to using disallowed gameplay mods that manipulate the rates of which mobs drop these items in-game.
“After considering this, I ended up finding out that I HAD actually been using a disallowed modification during ~6 of my live streams on Twitch,” Dream writes. “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.”
Dream also prefaces that while he did not deliberately set out to cheat, he was unaware that the mods were active while attempting his runs due to a miscommunication between him and a hired developer who programmed the mods meant for Dream’s other video content.
“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.”
Dream’s Pastebin post (which was posted as a guest and therefore cannot be deleted by the author) has since been deleted alongside the tweet.
Through the use of the Wayback Machine, readers can view the original Pastebin here where Dream concludes his statement by asking his fans not to send hate to the Minecraft speedrunning team or the developer who programmed the mods. He states that he wishes to avoid causing further drama and plans on clarifying the situation more in the future.
“I’m sure I’ll talk about it more just for clarity sake, but I want to avoid causing more drama,” the Youtuber said. “Please don’t send any hate to the mod team or anyone involved in the situation, I don’t want any more drama at all, you’re no supporter of mine if you do.”
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