I doubt that very many people would have installed this update and found diamonds within 22 minutes. This could be the one.

They could have been lying, but I don't really care. It was just fun to answer such a frivolous question, and I was kinda itching to dig through Minecraft's IRC logs anyway.

(It should be noted that Diamonds were called Emeralds during development)

After digging through the logs a bit, I found that the Indev v0.31 update came out around 22:02 UTC that day.

Just 22 minutes later, someone claimed to have found diamonds. This is probably the earliest documented instance.

Diamonds were first added to Minecraft on 28 January 2010, ~22:30 UTC. This was the exact moment I wanted to find in the logs.

I didn't actually know where to find the logs, but lucked out with this link that was posted on the Minecraft article on the Lost Media Wiki.

archive.org/details/Mine...

... When I watched this video about the early history of Minecraft. This one shows off several old chat logs from the game's official IRC channels.

That made me think: Could these old chat logs contain the first instance of someone finding a diamond?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzm-...