Here's how the Minecraft subreddit banded together to help a father find his distraught daughter's lost animal sanctuary

In an especially adorable use of everyone’s time, the still-bustling Minecraft subreddit has saved the day – yesterday, specifically – by helping a father locate his daughter’s missing monument in the ever-popular survival game. In a world where people locate your house from a reflection bouncing off your cornea, it’s endearing to see a similar tactic used to stop tears rolling down a little girl’s face. Oh, the kids on the playground are going to hear about this.

In what’s now sure to be one of the best decisions the man could have made, one lost father took to the Minecraft subreddit with a plea: to find his daughter’s Minecraft creation. In the post, he recites how his little girl “spent the last weeks” building a zoo. Not a dungeon or some impossibly large tower for absolutely no reason, but a “giant zoo with her favorite animals.” Soon after, she made a decision I’m sure we can all relate to. She braved The Nether – hopefully to bring back a cute little Ghast, but I’m reaching. When she returned, well… she wasn’t at her beloved zoo anymore.

The poor princess “spent hours flying around” in a futile attempt to find it, leaving her dad with no choice but to rely on the goodwill of strangers. The pair followed a few community suggestions: they followed the in-game compass, wasted themselves in survival mode in hopes that they’d respawn among her fuzzy friends, and even jumped through hoops to load the save in minutes. I don’t know what that is, but the point is that nothing worked.

Eventually, the good people of Reddit took matters into their own hands, offering their own time to locate the missing sanctuary. User Hamzeol_Murf made the request for the father to hand over the save game data. From there, an assumed army of Minecraft heroes loaded it on their own machines and took off on the hunt. Despite the practically infinite size of generated Minecraft seeds, it took our heroes less than an hour to locate the lost animals, dropping the coordinates into the thread for the father-daughter duo to follow.

In the end, our savvy explorer explained how they found the lost kingdom of creatures, and it’s a method you might want to commit to memory if you’re a dad already fearing for the loss of your own kid’s hard work. To find it, Loganfincain “converted it from a bedrock world to a Java world and looked at it with a program named MCA Selector.”

It’s heartwarming to read through the whole thread. 700 upvotes led to 70 comments offering entirely different strategies to help a dad bring a smile to his daughter’s face. In the end, no amount of console commands could fill in for a player with Minecraft mods and a bit of spare time.