Game Theory: Minecraft and The Power of The Dead

Hey nice kicks you got there wonder what i’ll get my turn here you go shopkeep one gold ingot Wait this is just a wad of string fine here’s another one what do i get random barters suck hello internet welcome to game theory the show that’s taken another dive into the deep end of minecraft’s hidden lore it’s also time for me to remind you that it’s now the end

The end of the 10-year anniversary month here on the channel that is which means that this is your absolute last chance to pick up the once in a lifetime commemorative anniversary theory-wear hoodie or t-shirt with gold printed references to the past 10 years of theories available below

This video only for the next few days it’s been almost two years since we started journeying down into this lore rabbit hole but there’s one area of the minecraft universe that i’ve yet to cover in depth my friends we are long overdue for a discussion of the netherlands

It meant the netherlands the nether space lands the lands of the nether the nether regions oh you know what i mean the nether is in my estimation one of the most misunderstood parts of the minecraft canon and it all stems from the widespread misconception that the nether is located deep beneath the

Overworld now don’t get me wrong i get why everyone thinks this the nether is located entirely underground with no sky above it dig up and you’ll only hit a bedrock ceiling and the fact that distance traveled in the nether translates to a much greater distance traveled in the

Overworld makes a lot of sense if they’re concentric circles around a single core even the fact that they named the game’s starting position as the overworld seems to imply the existence of an underworld a world associated with hades the fire-filled dangerous hexscape filled with dead souls which is exactly what the nether

Is i mean you don’t even have to go that far by dictionary definition nether actually means lower in position under or below all the evidence is pointing to this one conclusion like it is a slam dunk of a theory at least it would be if it wasn’t 100 wrong

Don’t shoot the messenger here friends minecraft’s technical director nathan adams confirmed this in a tweet saying that the nether is a quote separate dimension while the idea of the nether being below the overworld is a common belief it’s not what they’re going for well you know what mojang you could have fooled us

Anyway knowing that the nether as its own separate world connected to the overworld only through portals has some shocking and unsettling implications for the minecraft universe first off the idea of the nether as a completely isolated underground ecosystem is fascinating it is quite literally a world with no sun in

Gameplay terms this means that there’s no day night cycle but on a more basic level it leaves us with the fundamental question of how would a world like this actually be able to function like where is it getting its energy from after all here on earth pretty much all

Our energy originates on the sun think about it either it’s a plant who performs photosynthesis to draw energy from the sun or it’s an animal that gets its energy by eating those plants or it’s a carnivore that gets its energy by eating those animals which is just

Getting energy from the sun with extra steps so how do you sustain life in a world with no sun the nether proposes an answer fungus in the nether we have no plants only fungus instead of trees we have huge fungi instead of grass we have nilium even the weeping vines which may at

First appear to be plants must be a fungus based on their red color variant plants are green because of their chlorophyll which is how they use photosynthesis fungus on the other hand doesn’t get their energy from the sun which is how they’re able to get colors like red

And teal but all of this leaves us with a big question if the fungi aren’t getting their energy from the sun like normal plants would where do they get their energy from well in the real world fungi leech the nutrients that they need from the environment around them it’s

Why mushrooms are often found attached to rotting trees and logs even when mushrooms aren’t directly attaching themselves to decaying organisms they’re able to get what they need from the soil which is filled with nutrients from the creatures and plants that died and decomposed there when you look at it

Like this it would seem like the nether should be a sustainable ecosystem where various mobs like the piglens are able to survive by eating fungi and when the piglens die their bodies decompose and the nutrients are absorbed back by the fungi it’s all part of the circle of

Life but there’s one big problem with this system it just doesn’t work that way the way humans and piglens and fungi and minecraft stephen alex work is that we get nutrients in a really inefficient way it isn’t like the water cycle where there’s a fixed amount of h2o that gets cycled around

When you eat plants or hamburgers or fungi or whatever for food it’s true some of the calories in that food are gonna go to help your body grow so that when your body eventually expires and decomposes it’s going to provide food for the worms and the energy cycle continues

But think about the idea of burning calories those are the calories that you eat getting converted into other forms of energy like movement and heat even when you’re sitting completely still your body is still burning calories to do things like pump blood through your veins keep your lungs breathing air heck even

The process of digesting the food in the first place burns some number of calories and that’s all energy that plants and animals can’t use in short the nutritional cycle of the ecosystem is losing energy leaving the nether with a constantly dwindling supply of useful resources needed to sustain life

If you need a good visual example for all this a paper from 2008 looked at what’s called the feed ratio for different animals like cows pigs and chickens cows for example have a feed ratio of 25 to 1 which means that for every 25 calories

Of feed that’s given to a cow we only get one calorie back of usable meat this is actually one of the environmental arguments for vegetarianism cutting out the inefficient middleman of these animals and just eating the plants ourselves or at the very least switching to meats that have a more sustainable

Feed ratio like chickens which have a feed ratio of four and a half to one still fairly inefficient but not nearly as wasteful as beef the long and short of it though is that in no circumstance are you putting one calorie in and getting one calorie out the system is constantly leaking

Energy it’s the basic principle of entropy so how do you beat it well on earth we have the benefit of not being a closed system we import most of our energy from outer space now that might seem like a weird thing to say but it’s entirely true we’re constantly getting blasted with

New energy from the sun at a rate of 173 million gigajoules per second to put that number into perspective that’s around 12 times new york city’s annual power consumption hitting the earth every second and that means that while the nutritional cycle is constantly losing energy it’s also

Gaining a ton of energy as plants capture that from the sun and mind you it takes a lot of energy from the sun to sustain this the only way the circle of life thing actually works is for literally 99.9 of life on land to be plant plants can

Harness energy from the sun the rest of us are basically just freeloading off their hard work so with all that context let’s talk minecraft the overworld works the same way as earth lots of plants and the sun constantly pumping in new energy but the nether doesn’t seem to work that

Way it’s a closed ecosystem there isn’t energy coming from an outside source so how can the nether survive well when you think about it the nether actually is chalk full of an abundant energy source a much darker more disturbing and sinister source of energy souls like seriously there is nothing subtle about

The horror of souls trapped in the sand beneath your feet in the nether but the idea that these trapped souls might serve as a source of energy for the biome is actually well supported within established minecraft lore in the newly released minecraft dungeons the souls that you obtain from killing

Mobs can be used as a power source for various artifacts and several months ago when i did a video analyzing the reveal of the warden mob with dream we pointed out that the warden appears to be powered by caged souls that are trapped in its chest heck you’ve probably even harnessed the

Energy yourself if you’ve ever run a soul sand farm it’s the best way to grow nether wart for making potions in short the body of a dead mob spawn might not have much energy in terms of raw calories but apparently the power of the soul does but that still leaves us with the

Important question of how even if souls are the thing providing a renewable source of energy to the nether where did they come from in the first place after all they’re the souls of something or maybe more accurately someone well a big clue might exist in the nether portals themselves to build another

Portal you need obsidian and one of the easiest ways to make obsidian is by blending lava with good old h2o except there’s a problem while lava is certainly abundant in the nether water isn’t in fact you can’t even pour water in the nether which gives us really strong

Evidence pointing to the fact that the overworld portal was the first to be created and it was the nether that was being invaded in fact the more you look into it the more it makes sense consider if you will the existence of the warped forests well the word warped probably makes you think

Of things like twisted or wrong the word warp actually has a very specific meaning in the world of botany and agriculture specifically warping refers to the process of taking river water that’s rich in sediment letting it flood over agricultural land and then draining it all away thereby transforming an area that was

Once dry and barren into now nutrient-rich soil and while that might seem like a strange thing for me to bring up in a minecraft video it might help explain why the warped forest feels like such an outlier when compared with the rest of the nether maybe the word warped here

Isn’t so much a reference to the oddness of the forest but rather to the way it was created think about it dry soil transformed into rich land i mean that is the definition of these small little pockets found in the nether and what’s more the warped forest is relatively safe for us

Because the only mobs you find there are striders and endermen think about that for a minute striders are apparently so domesticated that they’ll let you ride on them they are naturally friendly to minecraft steve’s race and endermen who as we’ve hypothesized in previous theories are actually our ancestors the

Descendants of ancient builders who abandoned the overworld long ago the warped forest both in its name and in the very nature of what it is might suggest that it’s not a natural formation but something spawned by outsiders builders who came from the overworld saw the nether as a hostile

Environment and sought to terraform it transform it into something more like the over world that they came from there’s a dark side to all of this too regardless of how life in the nether may have gotten started it’s currently a system that’s reliant on the energy of souls to sustain it

In order to beat entropy it has to pull energy from some renewable source and unlike the overworld it doesn’t have a sun conveniently located overhead flooding the world with energy every day in other words the nether has two possible fates one is to fade away as all its useful energy gradually gets

Converted to heat and it’s no longer able to sustain life the other possibility is that it draws its energy from somewhere else the constant influx of fresh souls from arrogant overworld adventurers after all the nether seems practically designed to harvest the souls of overworld adventurers it seems that the

Only way to prevent your soul from being ripped from your body is to remain in a constant state of vigilance allow yourself to grow tired and nod off in the nether and well you know what happens the bed blows up the moment your eyes shut and your mind starts to drift into dreamland

That’s the end of your worldly existence just another fresh soul to feed a dimension that’s hungry for energy now that gives a whole new meaning to the phrase soul food and speaking of soul food nothing quite feeds your soul quite like music yeah alright maybe it wasn’t the most seamless transition i’ve

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