How did part of my house in minecraft disappear?

I was playing Minecraft 1.6.2 survival mode (normal difficulty), and I built a house. Then I went far away to explore a cave. When I got back, part of my house had simply disappeared.

As you can see, a part of my house just vanished. There used to be walls and a roof, but not anymore.

The stranger thing is, the wooden floor just turned into a perfect square of dirt.

There also used to be a pond nearby, but part of the pond also turned into dirt. (as indicated by the redstone circuit.)

Fences are gone. My iron golem and a cat are nowhere to be found. The whole area encircled by the redstone simply turn into dirt.

I thought of a creeper explosion. Yes, I might have left the gate open, and yes a creeper might be able to sneak into the house, (if it managed to get pass my two cats). It seems unlikely that an explosion would occur. There is no hole on the ground, and the roof is gone too. I don't think the blast radius is that large. The house was fine when I left. Doesn't a creeper has to be near me to trigger an explosion?

I am really puzzled. Can somebody explain what happened? I would be very grateful.

Solution 1:

It most certainly was no creeper, creepers don't place dirt back.

It looks like chunk got reset. The minecraft world is infinite, but is internally stored in 16x16 "chunks" of land. The chunks you explored are saved to a file (so the more land you explore, the bigger your save file becomes), if this file gets lost, the game will regenerate the area and basically "reset" the land back to what it was before any player made modifications and without any items/entities(your cat and golem are entities). Another way a chunk could get reset is if a bug caused the game to think "this chunk doesn't exist yet", and then the game will regenerate the area.

The area that got reset in your case is a 16x16 block area (or a multiple of that, can't see if there are any other strange borders further out to the top of your picture).

If you had any mining shaft running through that area, they'll be refilled with stone too. The good part is that ores are replaced too! So if you remember finding diamonds right under that piece of land, they'll be replaced too!

Solution 2:

In your world go to the point of the map that has reset (easier in create) and press F3. This will tell you your x, y and z point. If your not in create mode and have cheats enabled write /gamemode 1. If your not in create mode and have cheats disabled pause the game click open to lan, turn on allow cheats, click start lan world and then write /gamemode 1.

It doesn't matter what it says after the decimal point.

Once you get your x, y and z coordinates go to this website https://dinnerbone.com/minecraft/tools/coordinates/ and type your coordinates in the Block Information Section. Y does not matter because you are measuring in chunks. In the Region Information Section it tells you the filename.

When you found out the file name press the windows key and R

This brings up run

Type %appdata% as seen in the picture and press ok. this brings up the appdata folder. Go to appdata/roaming/.minecraft/saves/NAME OF YOUR WORLD/region and find the file that https://dinnerbone.com/minecraft/tools/coordinates/ told you the name of.

Rename the file as shown. mine was r.-1.-1.mca but some of my stuff was not gone and I had to copy this stuff to another chunk temporarily using the /clone command. I made two more backups. Those parts of the map were recreated. The backups were because I copied over 40,000 blocks and I was not going through the effort of deleting it all. So i just renamed two files and those parts of the map were recreated.

I had to copy my stuff, fix the corrupted chunk, copy my stuff back to its original place and then create the other two backups.

This set me back about an hour and a half but even though I had to start some of my house again I was happy I fixed the map and did not have to start all over again.

Doing this you cannot get all of your stuff e.g. If you had a castle and half of it got deleted you can fix the corrupted chunk but you cannot get the other half of the castle back.