Game Theory: Minecraft. The Secrets of the Undead Ender Dragon

And done oh man it took a lot of time but my Minecraft dream house is finally finished come on let me take you on a tour here is my Giant Game Theory stained glass window here is my Shrine to Music Man and here oh no no no no no no no Oh what could I have possibly done to protect myself against something like that like this sponsor for today’s episode in just 15 minutes I was able to get a quote on my home insurance in fact I managed to say 15 so I still have some diamonds to spare thanks Tom by the way

What are you doing here oh just popping in to ask whether you’ve ever built a car in Minecraft yeah it’s a lime green like the game theory logo why oh well um no no not not my car get off get out of here you weird bull thing well on the

Bright side Geico makes bundling your home and car insurance easy in fact you save more when you bundle man just when you thought this day couldn’t get any worse hey Matt you might want to look out sorry what what you say Tom Foreign Hey does Geico do life insurance too looking at you I think you’re gonna need something a little different yeah I’m I’m gonna go call Geico yeah you do that but hit Bed Rock Bottom years ago today we continue to Cobble together the Deep lore of Minecraft either by unearthing

What’s been hiding there under the surface the whole time or you know doing what we do best creating it out of thin air so the developers can say oh yeah that’s what we planned all along now I’m gonna level with you initially I plan for this episode to be about some of the

New stuff introduced as part of the latest caves and cliffs update part two but uh now that it’s out I don’t know there’s there’s just not a lot here for me to sink my teeth into don’t get me wrong the new biomes and Landscape changes are really cool but Noah gets my

Theory engine running lore high octane lore that’s injected straight into my thinky brain and alas it looks like a lot of that’s being saved for the Wild update including things like ancient underground cities which totally called by the way so rather than look into the future I decided to instead take a look

At the unanswered mysteries from Minecraft’s past Mysteries that have been around for a while but never truly solved and of them there was one that really grabbed my attention the Phantoms in case you’re not familiar these creatures are incredibly special within the history of Minecraft they’re only in

The game because they won the first ever public vote for a new mob back at Minecon Earth in 2017 beating out the Barnacle no contest there and the great hunger cool name but lame design anyway because this was such a big deal in the Minecraft Community they had to make the

Phantom stand out from the normal mobs and boy they did not disappoint these horrifying monsters only show up if you don’t sleep in fact the longer you don’t sleep the more show up no other mob in the game has this kind of spawning Behavior it’s totally unique to the

Phantom which is awesome but also why why would we have voted for this these things make the game so much harder especially in the early game if you can’t find any darn sheep to make a bed but this spawn Behavior got me thinking what actually are these things we do

Have some flying creatures in the Overworld bats and birds mainly but they’re tiny in comparison to this thing and take a look at their design they’re like the stuff of nightmares a bony decaying body accompanied by ear piercing screeches in fact the whole nightmare thing might

Not be all that far off as I started my research into the Phantoms I found that there was a general consensus amongst the Minecraft community that the Phantoms aren’t real that might sound like the crazy rantings of a sleep-deprived theorist but honestly that’s the point as I’ve already

Mentioned Phantoms only appear when the player hasn’t slept for a few days three days to be precise which is strange considering most other mobs are tied to light levels so what if the reason they can’t spawn like normal mobs is because they are actually hallucinations that is

The predominant Theory online so today I aim to answer the question once and for all are Phantoms just the product of a sleep-deprived mind or are they something else something grander well friends I’m here today to tell you that I’ve cracked it I know what the Phantoms

Are and you’re never gonna guess how they fit in first let’s talk about every YouTuber’s favorite hobby sleep deprivation as humans we need sleep it allows our brains time to recharge and our bodies time to recover from working all day so when we stay up and deprive ourselves of that much needed recharge

We start to experience some pretty nasty side effects not sleeping for 24 hours can make you irritable decrease hand-eye coordination and can lead to memory deficits two days without sleep can start to negatively impact your immune system but it’s three days 72 hours without sleep or the crazy stuff starts

To happen it’s here that you actually start to hallucinate to see things that aren’t really there so this idea that Phantoms only appear after three days without sleep actually reflects the real life science of sleep deprivation not only that but after three days of no sleep your body can start to harm itself

Causing inflammation and muscles and Joints which is Gonna Hurt matching the pain that you’re feeling when the Phantom attacks finally lack of sleep can lead to death if you’re awake for long enough your brain can stop functioning properly which can lead to organ failure and in rare cases death

Just like what happens when we get swarmed by Phantoms after many nights and no sleep also just worth mentioning that the word Phantom literally means a figment of the imagination so you know some really strong evidence to support the whole their hallucination Theory I can absolutely see why this explanation

Has existed for so long in the Minecraft community and yet because of course you knew I’d have something else to say there’s one teeny teeny tiny problem with the hallucination Theory Phantoms drop items physical items called Phantom membranes which are described as leathery skins obtained from killing

Phantoms you can pick up this item that cats can pick up this item sounds pretty real to me plus you can use this item to fix your electron if this item was imaginary you’d believe you’d fixed your elytra and then you’d go out for another flight only to fall to your very real

Death but that’s not what happens here the eletra do actually get fixed if you’ve tamed a wolf they’ll attack the Phantoms just like they do other mobs in the game like zombies or skeletons if Phantoms were just hallucinations your dog wouldn’t be able to take them out

And lastly you can capture these things you can name tag them and you can keep them in a makeshift cage it’s a bit of a challenge but if you do manage to pin one down and then go to sleep the Phantom is still gonna be there when you

Wake up they haven’t despawned so again they just simply aren’t hallucinations so for this mini Morty I’m gonna have to call the hallucination fan Theory busted yay I just debunked a common internet belief gonna be real popular after that one but well I’ve just shot pulls into a

Theory I’ve yet to propose one of my own so what in my mind is a phantom well let’s first look at the Phantom’s other qualities namely the fact that it’s considered to be an undead mob the undead mob category is mainly filled with very obviously Undead enemies basically all the variations of zombies

And skeletons zombie villagers zombie horses zombie piglens skeleton horses things like that there’s also stuff like drowned and husks all of them are representations of living things that Exist Elsewhere in the world villagers piglens horses hoglands players ancient Builders like we’ve talked about in previous theories but the Phantom is

Different once again it’s Unique as the only Undead mob to not have a living counterpart or does it loyal theorists I propose to you that the Phantoms are actually the undead versions of Ender Dragons see I mentioned something earlier that I wasn’t able to shake the Phantom membrane this unique item is

Incredibly important because it’s the only one in the game that can be used to fix your elitra before the introduction of the Phantom in 1.13 you could repair your elytra using regular old leather but as soon as Phantoms were introduced Phantom membranes became your only viable option which tells us that

There’s a very specific connection between these two items repairing items in Minecraft works on a like-for-like basis if you want to repair your diamond armor you have to use diamonds same for your tools so the fact that Phantom membranes can repair elytra would imply that they are in fact one and the same

Now in one of our previous episodes we actually discussed the creation of the elytra and determined that they were created from the wings of Ender Dragons that’s why they can only be found in the end ships and why unlike practically everything else in the game we’re unable

To craft them after defeating Gene the Ender Dragon the final living Dragon there simply isn’t enough material in the world to create a new set of electron so if eletra comes from dragons and Phantom membrane repair Elektra then Phantoms must be dragons but Phantoms look nothing like Ender Dragons I hear

You saying yeah if you compare the two side by sides there isn’t a whole lot connecting the two however if you look at the initial design process that went into making the Phantoms you start to find a few more connections here’s the original design that was shared during

The mob vote of 2017. the design originally included a flapping mouth which was removed because the designers felt it made it look too much like a muppet which yeah I can definitely see that the only other mob to have itself a flapping mouth the Ender Dragon now that

Might have been a bit of a stretch but what’s not a stretch is that for the longest time the Phantom was meant to have a black color scheme originally it was just black but if you take a look at the official toy collection for update aquatic when the Phantoms were first

Introduced what do you notice about the Phantom it had a black design with gray detailing just like the coloring of the Ender Dragon and just like that we suddenly begin to see a lot more similarities especially with the top edge of the Wings and the tail details

Sure since then the coloring has changed and the toy collection has been brought in line with the coloring in the game but this shows us that up until quite late in the development the design was made to reflect the Ender Dragon even elements of the Phantom’s game design

Are reflective of the Ender Dragon specifically the way it tax it flies around in circles and then swoops down to attack much like one of the techniques employed by the Ender Dragon during your fight sure this might sound like a weak connection but I’m not the one making it this element of the

Phantom’s mechanics is specifically called out in the Minecraft dungeons Wiki quote the attack and flying behavior of phantoms and dungeons is similar to various species of hawks in reality instead of the original game which use the Ender Dragon’s behavior all of this points to these two creatures being linked but I get it

There will be skepticism around this after all the Phantoms are still missing some key features of Ender Dragons arms legs long necks and you know they’re tiny by comparison my best guess is that they’re probably meant to represent like dragon babies but the truth is I don’t

Have any more physical evidence to give you that would explain those things but I think I can offer some hypotheses some game hypotheses as to why everything works the way it does first the membranes you would think that if we collected enough Phantom membranes we’d actually be able to make a new eletra

But we just can’t well I’m assuming that’s because the Phantom skin is decay and damaged it’s Undead so it’s weaker it’s good enough to patch a wing but it wouldn’t be strong enough to actually make a full set like the ancient Builders did from fully formed dragons

How vendi explained the whole three days thing but we actually get the answer from Jeb himself quote this manta ray like monster is a flying creature that spawns at high altitudes it’s attracted to insomnia and will find players who haven’t slept for many days it’s attracted to insomnia it’s not created

By insomnia which implies that it does already exist in the world so what then is going on here well not sleeping for long stretches of time can increase your heart rate and body temperature plenty of creatures in the animal kingdom rely on those things to sense prey barn owls

Can hear a mouse’s heartbeat from over 50 feet away but specifically I want to call out pit vipers and voids two snake varieties that use a natural form of infrared thermal vision to hunt they have these cavities located on each side of their head called pit organs which

Allow them to detect the heat difference between their prey and the environment down to the level of Millie Kelvin so if you weren’t sleeping in your temperature began to rise as a result suddenly the nocturnal Phantom is able to distinguish you from everything else and can swoop

In For the Kill as far as how Phantoms fit into the overall Narrative of this world that we’ve slowly been crafting Theory by Theory I think it all comes back to the illagers for those of you who don’t know the illagers are a group of exiled villagers that live in the

Woodland Mansions now after looking at the behavior of these mobs I proposed a couple theories back in 2020 that suggested these guys were doing experiments to bring the dead back to life in one of those theories I described the illagers as a cargo cult a society that was once visited by a

Strange highly Advanced group of people in this case the ancient Builders and when those ancient Builders disappeared they didn’t understand why nor did they understand the technology and tools that they left Behind These visiting strangers become like gods to the indigenous people and so the Cults will often recreate items and structures they

Saw used by the visiting groups but with less sophisticated technology this is why illagers have beds maps and end portals inside of their Woodland mansions that are made of wool they understand the visuals of these items but not the purpose of them or how to actually craft them and it’s the end

Portal which is actually the focus for us today see back in that other Theory I said that in order for the illagers to create a fake version of an End Portal they would have had to have seen an end portal and they knew it was significant because this is where the ancient race

Of Builders appeared from if this is true and the ancient Builders were using some form of an End Portal then chances are the illagers would have heard stories of the Ender Dragons these monsters that the ancient Builders were actively hunting to the point of Extinction they’d also be aware of the

Eletra that the builders crafted out of the dragon wings so when the ancient Builders suddenly disappeared the illagers began to recreate things that they’d seen and heard about in order to try and get them to come back they tried to create Woolen portals to go looking

For him but to no avail so they had to turn to more Extreme Measures they’d already been experimenting on villagers and have been trying to recreate the ancient Builders themselves only to produce zombies so why not try to recreate the one thing that they knew the ancient Builders had been actively

Hunting the Ender Dragon hoping that doing so would bring the ancient Builders back to protect them but there was a problem they had never seen an ender dragon all they had were stories that they’d been told maybe some scraps of dragon and Electra that the ancient Builders had left behind but that didn’t

Stop them they sought to make something out of that scaly leathery material and with the eletra being small in size they could very well have believed that maybe the Ender Dragon wasn’t really that big they created something that to them looked like the creatures of Legend but

They needed one more thing something to bring it all to life so using the evoker’s powers over the spirit realm the ones they used to summon the Vex they managed to pull the vengeful spirits of the Fallen Ender dragons and put them into these new bodies this is

Why Phantom membranes can’t make elitra the skins of the Phantoms are an imperfect copy of the original now rotting with Decay thanks to the inorganic nature of their birth Phantom is another word for ghost after all the spirit of the Dragons now a shadow of their former selves roaming the night

Sky hunting down the descendants of the ancient race that wiped out their species screaming at us with the same dying scream that we hear when we kill the last ever Ender Dragon but hey that’s just a theory a game theory thanks for watching and thank you again to Geico for sponsoring today’s

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