454 splash texts, 453 unique — and the one duplicate is "Déjà vu!"
Minecraft ships 454 splashes. Exactly one appears twice, and it is the joke you would pick. 407 end in an exclamation mark and the shortest is four characters.
The yellow text on the title screen is a plain list in the game files, and it is worth reading as data. Counted from Mojang's shipped splash list for 26.2 — the same file the archive on this page renders.
454 entries, 453 unique
There is exactly one duplicate in the entire list, and it is:
Déjà vu!
It appears twice. That is not an oversight — of the 454 strings Mojang could have accidentally repeated, the one that is repeated is the one that means "the feeling of having seen this before". It is the best joke in the file and it is invisible unless you count.
One entry lies about itself
This message will never appear on the splash screen, isn't that weird?
It is in the file, so it can and does appear. The archive on this page will happily show it to you.
The shape of the writing
- 407 of 454 end in an exclamation mark — about 90%.
- 12 are questions.
- 27 end in no punctuation at all.
So the house style is overwhelmingly the cheerful shout. The handful that break it stand out precisely because the rest do not.
Length runs 4 to 97 characters
Average length is 19.6 characters. The extremes:
- Shortest, at 4:
Wow!and...! - Longest, at 97: *"This text is hard to read if you play the game at the default
resolution, but at 1080p it's fine!"* — which is again a splash about splashes, and the one most likely to be cut off on the screen it is describing.
50 entries are under 10 characters and only 17 run past 40, so the list is heavily weighted to short punchy lines. That is a rendering constraint as much as a style: the splash scales to fit, and a long one shrinks until it is hard to read.
Almost none of them mention the game
- 6 mention "Minecraft" at all.
- 2 name a person at Mojang.
For a list this size that is a deliberate restraint. The splash is not advertising the game to someone who has already launched it, which is why it reads as a joke rather than a tagline.
If you are replacing them
splashes.txt in a resource pack overrides the whole list, and the two constraints above are the ones to copy rather than the jokes: keep them short — under 40 characters unless you want it shrunk — and remember the game picks uniformly at random, so a list of ten means each one shows up 45 times more often than a vanilla splash does.