Okay so this has been bothering me for well over a decade now so maybe I’ll finally get an answer!

I had a crappy old laptop back in 2011 so every so often it would become very slow and laggy. To fix this, I would free up some disc space. This included deleting old Minecraft saves. One day, the laptop was being particularly annoying, so I deleted A LOT of files, one of them being my first ever Minecraft save. Stupid move, I know, but I was twelve at the time so I had the right to be dumb as hell. It wasn’t even particularly good or anything - just a tiny cave base, a crappy waterpark and an even crappier house in the desert. Still, it was my OG Minecraft save, so there’s that.

After some time I started regretting my decision and missing the OG save, so I created a new world with the exact same name. I spawned in the middle of nowhere (as was usually the case in Beta 1.7.x) and spent a good few hours in it. After a while I became bored with my initial cave base, so I set off to build a majestic brick house. I was finishing up with the roof when I looked into the distance and I saw that crappy desert house that I built on my old save. I go there, it’s just as I left it. I continue along, and I find my first cave base.

Is this something that’s known to happen in the old versions? Or did I stumble upon a once-in-a-lifetime bug?