Herobrine is an urban legend and creepypasta from the video game Minecraft, originating from an anonymous post on the imageboard website 4chan in 2010.

The post claimed that shortly after starting a new world in Minecraft, the author saw what they believed to be a cow in the distance, which they approached in order to kill it.

When trying to contact other players about the event, the author found their posts removed, eventually receiving a message from a user named "Herobrine" that simply said "stop."

"[1] Around the same time, another anonymous post on 4chan wrote about another entity the author claimed to encounter in a cave after listening to the in-game music disc "13," which also had white eyes that lurked in the fog.

The page featured a gif of Steve, the default skin of Minecraft, with his pixelated eyes replaced with realistic, moving ones, as well as text at the bottom that wrote about how the reader was "living in a fantasy world inside their mind" and needed to "wake up."

[1][2] Throughout stories and mods that feature Herobrine, he is depicted as having numerous traits, such as constructing abnormal structures, digging random tunnels throughout the world, and removing the leaves from trees.

"[4] Lauren Morton of PC Gamer wrote that, despite Herobrine never having truly existed, the character "lives on in the minds of plenty of Minecraft players" who were interested in him when younger.

"[5]: 00:21–46  Minecraft director Agnes Larsson added that a creature in the game called the Warden takes inspiration from the community's horror "myths".

[1] In 2021, continued interest in the story resulted in the world seed of the original Herobrine sighting being discovered by a group of players known as the Minecraft@Home project.

[1][9] Similarly, in 2020, a Minecraft player known as Enderboss25 gained contact with Copeland in an effort to recover the footage of the original livestream that caused Herobrine's popularity.

[3] In July 2024, the original livestream was uploaded to YouTube by user brutallillfjomp, who had saved the stream in 2010 and was not aware that it was lost until watching a video on it the previous day.