Game Theory: Minecraft Has A Zombie Virus INFECTING the Overworld!

Ugh i am so done with literally every game being a zombie survival game i get it the walking dead was a popular franchise um 2010 called they want their genre back give me something new you know totally hey you want to go gather some resources sure

If they ask you how you are you just have to say that you’re fine you’re not really fine but you just can’t get into it because hello internet welcome to game theory where we’re all blockheads before we begin today’s episode a quick reminder that this tuesday december 1st is the big

Show that i have been hyping up for the last month we are doing our big million dollar challenge to benefit saint jude children’s research hospital and their mission of ending childhood cancer it is a stream that has been a year in the making a stream that will feature favorite creators of yours like

Mr beast mark has brownly jaiden animations pokemane and minecraft speedrunner dream tune in for a massive all-day show featuring video games really embarrassing challenges a lot of fun surprises along the way just something that you are not going to want to miss it is a new show

Every hour on the hour it is very elaborate but man is it gonna be fun okay so today we’re gonna be talking about some of the changes that were added with the nether update earlier this year and then using that information to go back and examine

One of the oldest parts of minecraft the zombie zombies are such an omnipresent part of pop culture nowadays that it’s easy to overlook them which is kind of ironic considering what made them explode onto the scene in the first place was how horrific they were and now they’re mundane again such as

The circle of life or the circle of undead it’s a circle of undead and of course the zombie jockeys are just always terrifying those things will mess you up anyway in all of my exploration of minecraft lore up to this point i’ve tended to skip over them for exactly that reason

They’re just kinda there meh generic hostile mob in a world full of fire-breathing dragons three-headed withers exploding moss monsters and teleporting slender man there’s just so many other cooler things to talk about zombies are just very easy to overlook but you know what that was dumb of me short-sighted

Because they are the bedrock upon which minecraft is built in a very literal sense these guys have been a part of the game since the beginning in update 0.2.0 so if anything has an importance to the lore it’s probably them and you know what they do with some of the updates made to

The nether i believe we now have some very interesting leads as to what zombies are and how they plan to the overall narrative of the game today we’re talking about how the zombies and other zombified mobs might just be the most important clues for discovering what may have pushed an ancient race of

Builders to flee the overworld and live in the end one of the things that sent me down this rabbit hole was reading minecraft the island an official minecraft novel yes in absence of new fnaf books i’ve now moved on to minecraft novels yeah yeah i’ll get to you guys too maybe

Anyway the book was a surprisingly compelling read have expected this to be some lazy video game tie-in novel but it’s so much more than that for one thing it’s written by max brooks who you might know as the author of world war z one of the best zombie apocalypse stories in recent memory

It certainly was enough to get my attention and once i started reading it became clear to me that he was chosen to emphasize the horror of minecraft’s world take this excerpt i stopped and backed away its clothes were ragged and filthy its flesh was a mottled green its eyes

If you could call them eyes were nothing but lifeless black points in a flat unmoving face memories flooded my mind images of creatures i’d known from stories but had never seen in person and here it was approaching me with outstretched arms numb with fear i sprinted for the hill i

Wasn’t thinking wasn’t planning terror drove my every step this is a minecraft book like what oh and uh by the way the audiobook is narrated by jack black so you know imagine that terrifying passage but instead of being read by professional youtuber matpat it’s uh being read by professional youtuber

Jablinski games five nights at freddy’s that’s where i wanna be professional fnaf youtuber jablinskygames so let’s begin with what we know about minecraft zombies for one thing they only seem to spawn in the overworld there are some reports of them spawning in the nether but those are extremely few and

Can never really be replicated it’s thought to be either a bug or a remnant from some mods but if they are indeed limited to the overworld along with their variants like the husk and the drowned that prompts the most obvious question of why why do they only exist in the

Overworld one explanation i’ve seen tossed around online would be that the zombies are just zombified villagers and as such you’ll only find them in places where you find other villagers aka the overworld but the fact that zombie villager exists as a separate mob type with its own look kinda throws that theory under

The bus why do zombie villagers look like villagers and normal zombies look just like us these zombies seem to be the zombified remains of builders like steve and yet like the zombie villagers these og zombies or vanilla zombies tasty zombies are only found in the overworld if zombies are truly the

Remains of dead players or a race of ancient builders from the past or whatever why wouldn’t you find zombies anywhere that steve like builders are able to go like the nether and the end it’s suspicious well i think the answer to this question lies in the behavior of another mob the zombified piglen

We actually talked about the zombie piglen previously on the channel back before the 1.16 nether update and since then there have been some noteworthy new changes with this particular mob back when i did my first video on them there was really no explanation for what could have created humanoid zombie pigs

The only thing that we had to go on was that they spawned when lightning struck near a pig and since then as the mojang team has further developed the piglen mob it appears as though minecraft wants that feature removed quote from lead creative designer jeb on twitter at jeb will pigs

Struck by lightning become zombified piglen or regular piglen jeb’s reply we will likely remove that feature because it’ll work differently this tells me that even though as i write this lightning near a pig still spawns a zombified piglen it’s more a thing that’s been grandfathered in

As an easter egg to og players but no longer represents the new lore that they have in mind for this particular mob type so what spawn mechanic does reflect how piglins not pigs canonically become zombified piglens visiting the overworld i’m serious if you take a piglet out to

The overworld or the end after 15 seconds they turn into a zombified piglen just as a result of standing in the overworld and breathing and i mean that literally it seems like the only plausible explanation for what could be happening here that the piglens upon traveling to the overworld begin

Breathing in something that just magically turns them from a perfectly well-functioning living creature into a flesh-starved zombie it’s bizarre something about being in the overworld turns piglens into zombies as i see it the only explanation for this is some sort of airborne zombie virus now that might seem crazy at first after

All we and the villagers are all able to run around in the overworld all day breathing in the same air without turning into zombies so what gives well that question is best answered by turning to some very real and some very tragic history as you might have learned in your history class

When european colonists came to america and started interacting with the native population it didn’t go well for the indigenous americans in fact it’s estimated that over 90 percent of indigenous americans were killed in the decades that followed it’s just horrific but why i bring this up today

Is how they died because while the europeans that settled in america certainly did kill plenty of indigenous americans in warfare most were killed by diseases such as smallpox measles and influenza diseases that were common in europe but completely new to the indigenous population of the new world

In many cases they weren’t even getting these diseases from people who were displaying symptoms of the sickness the european explorers were asymptomatic carriers of the diseases a concept that in 2020 a lot of us have become all too familiar with these were all diseases that europeans had been dealing with for generations

And with each passing generation the people who managed to survive dying from some terrible epidemic passed on their antibodies and immunities to their descendants with each generation europeans gained stronger and stronger immune systems which meant that formerly devastating diseases were no longer quite so deadly so when the europeans

Brought these diseases to the new world exposing a population whose ancestors had no opportunity to build up those same immunities the results were devastating but there’s a part of the story that might strike some people as a gaping hole why weren’t the europeans having the same problem

They too were in a new land encountering new people why weren’t the colonists dying of the american diseases well the answer is cities europeans lived in densely packed cities which were breeding grounds for infection another thing that we’ve seen pretty darn clearly in 2020. i don’t know if

You’ve heard about this one looks like a lot of people are still missing the memo but big gatherings of people all packed together in a tight space are one of the easiest ways to spread a virus go figure social distancing starts to get a whole lot harder when you’re

All packed together like sardines and all of that gets compounded far worse when you don’t have modern conveniences like plumbing and clean water if you want an indication of how big a problem water contamination was during this time it took until 1535 to finally prohibit people from dumping their excrement into the river

Thames of london yeah they had to pass a law outlawing you from dumping your poop into the water that ran through its most populous city reports from the time say that the water ran black really makes you want to reconsider that river view property huh all of these factors combined to make

European cities a breeding ground for all kinds of horrible diseases north america meanwhile with its lack of densely populated cities stood in stark contrast and hence the indigenous people of north america had no plagues all of that is a fascinating and frankly tragic look at history but what

Relevance does it have in minecraft well understanding the history of diseases and plagues in the real world it becomes a lot easier for us to understand how this might happen in the fictional world of minecraft let’s just assume for a minute that there is a zombie plague floating around in the air of

Minecraft’s overworld and end we don’t know how it would have started or why maybe it was the result of experiments trying to resurrect the dead like we’ve talked about in a previous theory maybe it was somehow tied to the appearance of the wither who knows but

Let’s just say that it happened well in those early days it wouldn’t be pretty those who managed to avoid being turned into zombies would still have to deal with the menace of being attacked by the undead it could very well be that the zombie plague was responsible for wiping out the overworld’s population

The reason that the overworld is filled with so many abandoned structures like the desert pyramids the jungle pyramids who knows some of the early members of this ancient civilization may have fled to the end to try and escape the plague like i’ve been guessing for the better part of

Last year but over successive generations of natural selection the people in the overworld developed stronger immune systems that were resistant to the airborne plague the villagers of today are the beneficiaries of those many generations of inherited immunity they only turn when they’re bitten which makes sense one of the most important

Defense mechanisms that we have against infection is our skin and a bite bypasses that to inject the zombie virus directly into the bloodstream delivering a viral load high enough to transform some villagers and for as overthinking and overreaching as that statement might seem design details of the game

Seem to support the theory some villagers will be zombified when attacked by zombies while some others appear to be fully immune 50 of villagers will simply lose health when attacked by zombies and eventually die without ever being turned which tells us that some are immune or more resistant to the zombie curse

Weird right it’s an awfully suspicious detail why though wouldn’t a zombie virus exist in the nether when it’s both in the end and the overworld my guess temperature warmer climates tend to be better at fending off pathogens and likewise when it’s colder viruses are more likely to be spread

That’s why you’re more likely to get a cold in the winter the flu in the winter and why everyone was talking about the second spike of covid happening during the fall and winter months one of the reasons your body heats up and develops a fever when you’re sick is

That certain infections have a harder time surviving at higher temperatures and what can be hotter than h-e-double hockey sticks itself the temperature down in the nether is high enough to effectively sterilize everything nothing says hot quite like pools of lava this in turn would keep the nether clear

Of any zombie viruses producing a civilization of piglens whose immune systems never encountered the plague until of course they’re brought into the overworld so there you have it friends the invisible zombie virus of the minecraft overworld for as ridiculous as it sounds the science of it actually fits a surprising

Amount of in-game details and behaviors maybe it’s time steve and alex spend less resources building swords and axes and more time building face masks after all it’s up to us to protect the immuno-compromised hoglands but hey that’s just a theory a game theory thanks for watching and one final

Reminder here that game theory merch is available right now right in time for the holidays including my signature red vegan leather jacket built from the ground up by me and also an incredibly soft game theory blanket along with a puzzle that you can do while you’re snuggled in it supplies are

Running out right now very fast so please make sure you grab those before they’re gone we even have some black friday deals going so you know take advantage of those and i’ll see you all this tuesday december 1st for the massive st jude livestream and then after that on

Saturday for you know our usual episode of game theory