Game Theory: Minecraft, STOP Punching Trees!

[Applause] [Applause] Hello Internet welcome to game theory the show that’s been around since before minecraft was released kind of if you had time travel back to the first-ever game theory episode which is coincidentally about the time travel game Chrono Trigger you’ll notice that the upload date is April 18 2011 more

Than half a year earlier than November 18 2011 the date of Minecrafts 1.0 release now of course earlier developmental builds of classic minecraft were released as early as 2009 so you know the show isn’t that old but still we’re older than dirt or at least minecraft 8

Bit pixelated dirt anyway the reason I’m waxing nostalgic about the early days of game theory is because today we’re going back to game theory classic not in terms of the bad audio quality and awkward Photoshop slideshows of yesteryear in terms of subject matter compared to where it first began game theory has

Evolved a lot as a show becoming much more about solving the mysteries of game lore mostly because that’s what you all told me that you like the best and lately on the channel that’s what we’ve been doing with the Minecraft series unraveling the mysteries of the Enderman

Two lost discs the origins of the wither and connecting it all back to an ancient race of master builders even right now I’m working on a theory all about the images and villagers that I’m really excited about but today I wanted to do a throwback of sorts to that earlier

Period of game theory one that simply asks the question is that stupid ridiculous video game thing actually possible in real life and that my friends in the context of Minecraft is punching down a tree with your bare fists it’s literally the first thing that pretty much every player does in

Minecraft they’re brought into the world with nothing but the teal blue shirt on their backs and two meaty sticks for arms and you swing them at the nearest tree and you punch that tree until it gives you wood wood upon which will fill your empire unless of course the creeper

Blows it all sky-high but seriously can a human actually punch down a tree I mean not me obviously since my arms are about as strong as a flaccid noodle but say I don’t know a boxer not like those YouTube boxers either have the air quotes there I mean the real men and

Women who have been professionally training in the sport for years or you know if they can’t do it maybe just Steve is superhuman and if he is blessed with some level of superhuman punch strength just how strong is he make sure that you stick around today folks you’re

Not gonna want to leave until you’ve seed the end of this one the themes of the show may have evolved ladies and gentlemen but the roots bad puns those have never left as it turns out we have Internet videos that answer this question already like this video of a

Ten year old russian girl smashing a tree to pieces in Soviet Russia we don’t got two trees down we plunge them down that was pretty good best accident I’ve probably done on the show for years now obviously ethnic Assad because here isn’t really giving us what we’re asking

About the tree that we see in this video is obviously dead more importantly it’s not just dead it’s been subject to dry rot form of wood decay that occurs when certain species of fungi start breaking down and digesting the parts of the tree that give the wood its strength and stiffness

Dry rot is not something that affects still living trees like the ones that were so fond of punching down in Minecraft so if we’re really hoping to replicate what we see Steve doing in the game it’s gonna take a lot harder of a punch so how hard would it be to

Actually damage a tree using a human punch well hard is the operative word here the amount of damage a tree takes from a punch is actually gonna depend on how hard it is and not all trees are created equally for example balsa wood is much softer than a hard maple tree

And thus is gonna be much easier to punch through luckily in Minecraft we know the exact types of wood that we’re dealing with here it’s not just a world filled with generic trees but instead we know that there are six different species of trees in the Minecraft universe there’s oak spruce acacia birch

Jungle tree and dark oak and each one in real life would have its own varying level of hardness now if you’ve spent much time in the lumber section of a hardware store which believe it or not I know many of you actually have shout out to all the loyal theorists who currently

Work at a Home Depot seriously that call-up might seem random but I meet more fans and Home Depot than almost anywhere else and there a lot I actually like doing home repair projects and since our first floor flooded there’s been a lot to do alright so thank you to

All the loyal theorists at home depot have been help me out with those anyway you may have heard the terms hardwood and softwood before all woods fall into one of those two categories now at first you might think that these terms refer to the heart of various woods right obvious answer is

Obvious but actually these terms refer to the seeds that the trees grow from if the seeds of the tree have some kind of covering when they fall from the tree like say a fruit or a nut then it’s classified as a hardwood but if it’s a species of tree that just allows the

Seeds to fall naked without any covering then that’s considered a softwood and while it is generally true the trees in the hardwood category tend to be harder than trees in the softwood category this isn’t always the case for instance balsa wood here is one of the softest woods on

The planet so soft that even I can punch through it on the other hand incense cedar here which is most commonly used to make pencils is classified as a softwood but I mean you can already tell it’s a fair bit harder and I’m gonna have a bit harder time oh great so good

Such a soft wood on the other hand the yew tree is classified as a softwood but let’s just say it’s a little bit harder so hardwoods gonna be soft and soft woods can be hard it’s confusing right we obviously are gonna need a more accurate way to measure the hardness of

A wood if we want to have any hope of figuring out just how many punches it takes Steve to get to the center of that Tootsie Roll log luckily there’s a test for that existing specifically for the purpose of testing the hardness of wood the Janka hardness test created by

Gabrielle Janko which measures the amount of force needed to embed a small steel ball into a piece of wood of a specific size cut and moisture level because all of that matters when we’re talking about the subject of wood hardness balsa wood the softest wood

Rates a mere 70 pounds of force on the Janka hardness test you can just push that thing in with your own thumb but an Australian species of Ironwood tree is among the hardest of woods rating a whopping 5060 pounds of force because in Australia even the trees are hard

And yeah Ironwood trees aren’t just a fantasy term that george RR martin invented is an actual family of plants so the more you know in Soviet Australian authorities aren’t wood they’re iron so obviously we’re talking about a pretty huge range here seventy pounds of force to over five thousand

Pounds of force it’s really important for us to figure out which woods we’re specifically working with so all we have to do is take all six of those minecraft tree types and mentioned earlier look him up on the Janka hardness test performed on the woods at the same time

And we know the hardness simple and clean right well not exactly yes minecraft calls each of its six different tree types species but that’s not actually accurate oak for instance is not actually a species it’s an entire genus that includes many different tree varieties including white oak red oak

Tasmanian oak and English oak same thing for spruce trees same thing for birch trees and acacia so for each one of those categories we’re actually gonna use the design of each tree in Minecraft using especially the bark and branch designs that we see and then choose the most accurate real-world equivalent for

Each of those categories dark oak our fifth minecraft tree variety isn’t a real thing either but it seems pretty darn close to the black oak in real life so we’re just gonna use that one and finally jungle tree yeah that’s obviously not a real thing so I’m just

Gonna choose a tree that’s commonly found in jungles that looks roughly like our games jungle trees doing all that we get ourselves the following list oak is really live oak spruce as technically white spruce birch is really gonna be a great Asia is largely focaccia jungle

Tree as amazon rosewood and dark oak is really black Oh feel free to add those to your Minecraft Wiki trivia sections guys all units that you see present in the chart are measured in pounds of force with our jungle tree being the hardest at 2,700 pounds of force and our

White spruce being the softest at the very low 480 since it’s hard to envision what those numbers mean let me give you some context here a study of boxers found that they can punch with an average strength of 776 pounds of force with the strongest boxers think close to 1300 pounds of force

Meaning that four of our six different tree types are indeed weaker than the average punch of a really strong boxer in other words it’s looking totally possible for a human to be able to punch down too birds of these trees no obviously not all punches are created equally right

You’re gonna want to aim these punches carefully if you’re punching directly into the tree you’re just gonna end up condensing the fibers of the tree into each other and thus create a denser harder tree so not only do we have to think about the strength of steve’s

Punches here but we also have to think about the boxing technique that you’re gonna use Steve just limply waving his arm at the trunk of a tree not gonna cut it literally but a hook of a punch could easily knock off a good chunk of wood allowing you to chunk by chunk cut

Through the wood with your very own dam so knowing that it’s now possible for a highly trained boxer to punch down a tree the next question is how many punches would it take to recreate what we see Steve doing in the game it’s well established that one block in Minecraft

Is one cubic meter so let’s take our acacia tree as an example the Janka hardness rating that we found earlier represents how much force is needed to eliminate 750 1.5 cubic millimeters of wood from the tree for example a large leaf acacia tree has a Janka hardness of

1100 pounds force which means that a 1100 pound plunge is gonna take off that 750 1.5 cubic millimeters of wood that we just talked about so to gradually chip away at an entire one meter by one meter by one meter cube 751 cubic millimeters at a time it would take you

A whopping drumroll please 1 million three hundred and thirty thousand seven hundred punches that is gonna be one long and painful and quite frankly boring game of minecraft over 1 million punches to get rid of one block of tree that is crazy but it’s also a bit misleading that number is only if

You want to pulverize that entire one cubic meter block of wood to pull don’t know why you’d want to do that maybe you want just a pile of really ineffectual wood chips say do you have a repressed rage that you really want to take out on a piece of lumber

You’re not gonna question it I’m not gonna get anywhere near your fists but if instead you just want to chop the tree down like a normal not rage-fueled person then you’re just gonna need to chip away at a small layer of wood one little strip through the center there

Doing that calculation you actually get yourself a much more reasonable number of punches sixty six thousand five hundred and thirty five and remember each of those punches has got to be at full strength I mean Steve is a fast puncher but even at his rate of four

Full power punches a second that is still four hours 37 minutes and 14 seconds and non-stop whaling on the tree to do the hard work of just slicing through a single thin block of wood so let’s look at it from the other angle Steve is able to down logs from trees in

Just three seconds which is about 16 swipes from his meaty paws which means that each of those punches must be packing some serious power if we keep all of our assumptions intact and observe sixteen punches is enough to completely pulverize one complete cubic meter of wood that means that when Steve

Is punching a spruce the softest of all of Minecraft trees he is punching with a staggering forty million pounds of force that’s not even the half of it Steve was able to karate chop down every minecraft tree with the same number of hits per block including the mighty oak which

Would require a whopping 274 million pounds of force per punch to take down the tree with the efficiency that we see in the game from Steve to put that into perspective that’s over two hundred eleven thousand times stronger than the world’s most powerful boxers that’s ninety eight times the thrust of a space

Shuttle solid rocket booster at liftoff these punches are not only powerful enough to pulverize a mere they’re enough to lift a rocket into space nearly 100 times over and Steve is putting out that kind of force with every single one of his punches no wonder he’s able to carry dozens of

Giant gold blocks around in his pockets dude is stronger than Superman actually come to think of it that’s a good question is Steve stronger than Superman or Steve’s pants pockets stronger than Superman is he carrying all that in his pants anyway all of this should make one thing

Abundantly clear if you want to chop down a tree use an axe seriously well you could wail on the tree with titanically strong punches for a solid thirty minutes you could instead pick up an axe and direct all your effort to a single point of contact sure Steve might

Have the power of Titan’s in his fists and if you want to work smarter and not harder you can wield that same level of power just by picking the right tool for the job but hey that’s just a theory Oh game theory thanks for subscribing and ringing the bell because next week

Is our next minecraft lore theory and you’re not gonna want to miss that so ring that Bell make sure that you’re notified so that way you don’t miss it and you are one of the first people to know that the deep dark secret of the Minecraft villagers is well more on that

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