Game Theory: Minecraft, The Secret Desert Origin of Creepers

Here we see the eye of horus the ancient egyptians used it as a symbol of protection and good health and here we have ourselves the ankh representing life write that down and this one well we just haven’t figured this one out yet uh dr matpat what’s that hissing sound probably just

The sound my torch makes when it’s hello internet welcome to game theory the show that continues to chisel away at the hidden lore of minecraft and in that little archaeological dig we’ve covered the secrets hidden a lot of minecraft’s environments from the game’s underwater biomes to the woodland

Mansions and caves to what lies beyond the portals to the nether in the end but one that i’ve largely left ignored up till now has been the desert biome which i can now say having researched this theory was a huge mistake on my part while the desert might be lacking in life

It is teeming with lore filled with subtle game design decisions that give us details about the long forgotten ancient world of this game and connecting in with a lot of the theories that we’ve had since the earliest days of the channel in short the desert is where everything

In the lost history of minecraft’s world began which is why it is a shame that i am only starting to cover it now so i hope you’re thirsty theorists thirsty for a nice tall cool glass of knowledge that is because today is all about cats creepers and desert temples oh my

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Back to our theory now to begin with a quick refresher my little minecraft lore series which i’ve been building on for the better part of two years began with the premise that the world of minecraft was once home to an ancient civilization of builders who left behind the structures that we see today

Over time and many episodes of game theory we’ve been able to show that this ancient race was obsessed with preserving life leading to experiments with soul sand that resulted in the creation of the wither alongside other mobs that might also be made from souls and while i think i’ve made a pretty

Solid case for all that so far today we’re gonna examine a piece of evidence in the game that is by far the strongest argument for this being the true history of the minecraft universe one absolutely intended by the game developers and not just me you know doing that thing that i always

Do where i insert lore where lore was never meant to go so what exactly am i talking about well if we examine the blocks of the temples that spawn randomly into the desert biome we see a symbol that looks like a real world hieroglyph which in ancient egypt was the symbol of life

The ankh and this should immediately strike you as odd the world of minecraft is entirely fictional and largely a blank slate where we can layer in whatever adventures we want to have in this world and yet for some reason this is our one instance of a real world

Symbol being used in the minecraft universe i mean when the game’s developers were designing these structures they didn’t have to use any symbol it’s not like jungle temples or underwater temples have any sort of real world symbology in them so that’s already an odd little outlier about these temples but beyond that

If they really felt the need to use hieroglyphics there are dozens of iconic ones that they could have chosen like the eye of horus which if you ask me is much more iconic get it iconic i hate myself so much but instead they decided to go with the ankh a symbol of life

Interesting what’s more the ankh didn’t just symbolize life it was a symbol of the idea of the continuity of life the ancient egyptians were famous for mummifying their dead and then building elaborate beautiful and massive tombs for them all of this was based on the idea that what we now think of as

Death wasn’t the end of life but rather just one step on their journey into the afterlife hence the need to preserve the physical body even after all signs of life leave it that is roughly what the ankh stood for eternal life life after death which

If you ask me ties in pretty neatly with the theory that i’ve been crafting about these minecraft builders an ancient civilization obsessed with life and finding a way to conquer death check building a bunch of ancient structures that have endured to the present day leaving archaeologists like

Us trying to piece together how these ancient civilizations operated check again and this is just scratching the surface the more that we dig into the desert biome the more we start to get a clearer picture of what kinds of projects those ancient builders were working on oh yeah we’re talking about those guys

One of gaming’s most iconic enemies the creeper one of the first things that every player learns about the desert pyramids is well you gotta be careful because the people who built them left behind some traps traps in the form of tnt in fact desert pyramids are one of the

Very few places in the game that you can actually find tnt you can find tnt near the ocean by looting buried treasure and shipwrecks but the only places that you’re going to be finding tnt in the world itself are in the desert pyramids or in certain

Woodland mansion rooms put a pin in that woodland mansion stuff we’re gonna come back to that in a few minutes now the desert temple tnt is notable because tnt has a very specific connection to the creeper obviously tnt and the creeper are both very explodey they both make a similar hissing sound

You may also notice that crafting tnt requires gunpowder and one of the few reliable sources of gunpowder is killing creepers what you might not know about the creeper is that they are literally made of tnt no joke in the official minecraft book the ma bestiary you get to see a

Cross section of a creeper that has a tnt block shoved right into the center of its body now in case you didn’t realize this mother nature doesn’t tend to put neat little labels on your internal organs otherwise all those dissections in high school science class would be way easier

No this outright tells us that the creeper was an artificial creation by some sort of people that would label a block of explosives as tnt like for example the same civilization that built the desert pyramids and rigged them with tnt traps and yeah i get that the tnt label is

Kind of a joke but also it’s kind of not a joke because in that same mabistiari entry which is written from the perspective of an in-world adventurer they point out that quote the ancient desert temples clearly portray the creeper’s image now it might seem weird at first to suggest

That the creepers were made by a civilization located in a desert or even made in a desert at all after all creepers are green and the desert biome is significantly less green than other places in the game world but remember this mob was made by an ancient civilization and the desert they lived

In might not be completely identical to the desert that we see today in fact just like with the ankh this is another place where i think turning to real world egypt can actually give us some insight while most people’s mental picture of egypt just includes things like the pyramids and sand

Lots and lots of sand egypt is also home to the nile river which is surrounded by lush plant life now way back in 2014 i actually did a minecraft episode all about the creeper not a lore episode but a science episode trying to pick apart what the creeper could possibly be

Back then i theorized that the creeper’s green color was peat moss decayed vegetation often found near bodies of water like bogs rivers and marshes and wouldn’t you know it but pete is in fact found near rivers like the nile river in real world egypt so yeah turns out that real world

Egypt is home to the sort of stuff that creepers could potentially be made out of but of course we don’t care about real world deserts we care about minecraft deserts could a lush green bomb monster come out of there we unfortunately don’t see the same kind of

Lush floral wildlife in the game that we see in real world egypt after all but could minecraft’s deserts have once flowed with a river similar to the nile is there even a way that we could possibly tell this fact in a video game yes and yes in fact we can know it in

The game in much the same way that real world researchers have to solve the same problem in real life using geologic formation answering the question of what ancient worlds looked like is something that real world researchers have to tackle all the time since mars has been in the news lately

Let’s use that as our example many scientists currently believe that mars was once home to liquid water but why would they think that considering the planet is currently drier than dunkey’s sense of humor well because of geologic formations the surface of mars has canyons the same kind of canyons

That would be carved by a flowing river and have been carved by a flowing river here on earth by the same token we can look at the desert hills and minecraft and conclude the high likelihood that they also would have been made by ancient waterways slowly carving away at

The land bit by bit year after year how do i know that i’m not completely overthinking this remember these aren’t just sand dunes if you start digging down you hit sandstone a rock that is formed mostly in rivers lakes the ocean floor and beaches all places that either currently have

Or once had water so yeah given what we know about real world egypt the geologic formations of the biome the fact that creepers are depicted in the temples the connections to tnt and heck just the fact that creepers spawn in deserts we get a good sense that creepers the

Ancient builders and the desert biomes may just all be connected but if you look at the loot that appears in desert pyramids another interesting picture starts to emerge for one thing you can loot ancient chests and find bones and rotten flesh not all that different from real world archaeologists uncovering ancient

Egyptian pyramids and finding preserved human remains oh god when we loot boxes in minecraft and get rotten flesh it’s actually the flesh of ancient humans we’re desecrating 8-bit corpses oh that puts in an entirely new perspective but what’s really interesting about this outside of the fact that now we’ve realized that we’re

Just all poking dead bodies is the next most common item that we’ll find in these chests string now string might seem like the odd one out here maybe it’s just a coincidence that it appears with the exact same frequency as sand and gunpowder but i think there’s something

Else going on here consider this in the minecraft world string is connected to cats after all tamed cats have a chance of giving string to the player and cats drop string when they die the premise is that cats love playing with string but why would the ancient builder civilization that made the desert

Pyramids have any sort of connection with cats well once again we can turn to real world egypt the ancient egyptians considered cats to be sacred a number of egyptian deities had cat heads ancient religious texts from the time detailed the protective function of cats as they were considered responsible

For killing venomous snakes and were considered in the first dynasty of egypt to play an important role in keeping the pharaoh safe even on his journey into the afterlife skeletal remains show that many pharaohs were buried with cats to keep them safe the fact that egyptians held cats as

Sacred was something that enemies would sometimes take advantage of in battle in the 6th century bc during the battle of pelusium persian soldiers used cats as shields expecting that egyptians would be hesitant to attack if they thought they would risk herding cats even wilder than the fact that they

Tried this as a combat maneuver is the fact that it actually worked so how does this relate to the minecraft world well wouldn’t you know it but there’s a particular minecraft mob that’s repelled by the appearance of cats the creeper it’s a weird detail right why this creature of all mobs would

Avoid something as random as cats well it suggests either one that it’s scared of cats or two that it is the creation of a civilization that somehow found cats important creepers avoid cats because they don’t want to hurt them just like the ancient egyptians avoided cats in wartime for fear of hurting the

Sacred creatures i mean seriously it seems highly possible that the ancient builders made creepers with their own cat worshiping sensibilities in mind but those ancient desert builders aren’t the only ones in the minecraft world worship cats if you’ve ever found a woodland mansion you might have stumbled across a room with a giant

Cat statue it is unexpected to say the least why would they do that well you might say that the cat statue is a tribute to the minecraft lead designer’s pet cat newton and you’d be right but there are lots of places that you could put this easter egg

Why place it here in the woodland mansion specifically well remember earlier this episode when i mentioned that tnt only appears in two places in the minecraft world one was the desert pyramid obviously but the other is the woodland mansion where you also find chests that are booby-trapped with tnt

Huh something tells me that the illagers might be copying someone’s homework and not just with cats and tnt either but with the whole concept of life itself i’ve spent multiple episodes trying to prove to you how the illagers are experimenting with the power of eternal life most notably through their usage of the

Totems of the undying but these egyptian connections just take it all one step further cats tnt anks a quest for eternal life from ancient egypt to minecraft desert temples to woodland mansions it all connects and now we start to see how these pieces may start to fall together could it be

That creepers were some of the earliest creations of the ancient builders living in their desert temples perhaps it was their experiments with life and creating life that led to the creation of a walking sentient pillar of tnt and as a society that valued cats just like their

Counterparts in real world egypt and as evidenced by the strings stored throughout their loot boxes they endowed their creations with a similar respect for felines and from there could it be that illagers are long-lost descendants of that culture with their cat statues and their tnt booby traps or are they

Just imitating this ancient culture cargo culting it without really knowing the logic or reason behind it who knows the answer to that question may be coming i hear that this summer we’re going to be able to do our own archaeological excavations in minecraft i mean

I can dig it as in archaeology pun get it again i hate myself i am so sorry anyway until that moment that my friends is the uncanny connection between creepers cats and desert temples the strange coincidences just keep building don’t they you can bet i’ll be here to cover it all

But until the next one remember it’s all just a theory a game theory thanks for watching you know one thing they don’t warn you about being a youtuber is the sheer amount of time you spend staring at screens for this theory alone i had minecraft on one monitor and

Ancient aliens on the other with my vision split down the middle like the megusta meme that’s right 2010 meme reference for the win i am so old anyway long story short my eyes are tired and to combat that searing feeling in my retinas i’ve been taking a lot more walks to unplug but

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