Dream's Minecraft Speedrun Cheating Scandal Explained

Popular content creator Dream made headlines last year as drama surrounded his "Minecraft" speedrun. The drama came in once it was denied by the SpeedRun.com verification team. Almost 30 pages of a report were released that provided enough evidence for the team to argue that Dream's speedrun wasn't possible without some kind of cheat. Dream was immediately upset and lashed out at the verification team. On May 30, 2021, Dream posted a large Twitter thread that addressed the situation in more depth. It was deleted, but an archive on Pastebin has it recorded. 

Essentially, Dream unintentionally cheated. At the time everything went down in 2020, he wasn't aware that he cheated because of some issues with the "Minecraft" update and the video mods that he had in place for streaming. The thread of over 50 tweets had a lot of information explaining the struggles Dream had with the situation. There was more to it than most people knew at the time.

One of the biggest bombs that Dream dropped in his version of the events was the bias the team SpeedRun.com supposedly had against him, via Pastebin. He started by saying that he knew several of the mods weren't fond of him, and it made him feel "targeted" by the group.

These feelings stayed around as he wrote that "multiple speedrun moderators [were] messaging [him] scary things about how it was a [disaster] and no one could agree on things ... [and] that they were clearly biased against me." Dream pointed out that they could have been lying and trying to get on the "good side" of the situation.

This is where he notoriously hired a professor to help confirm the mod numbers. The professor eventually found out that the numbers the moderators had come up with were off, and that Dream may have been able to beat the odds and get the speedrun that he did. This made the moderators look even more biased. But unfortunately for Dream, there was more than just an internal bias problem — he actually cheated.

As shown on the Pastebin archive, there actually was a cheat used in Dream's game. It was completely accidental on his part, but it affected more than one of his Twitch streams. Apparently, Dream had hired a developer to create a mod that helped him stream. The mod was simple, and Dream mentioned that fans could see its effects when it came to custom backgrounds and a few other small details on his stream.

However, early versions of this mod tampered with a few of the game's stats, which were seen in the speedrun in question. Dream found out after the drama blew up by discussing it with his developer, who had kept the same improvements to the game that Dream's "challenge servers" had. 

So all in all, Dream did cheat on the speedrun. However, he didn't mean to, and he's since apologized and doesn't hold a grudge against the moderators anymore.