Jokeypokey – How to play through most of Minecraft from one grass block

How much can you do with just a single block of grass in vanilla minecraft if we had an otherwise empty world in survival with no extra items and no extra blocks could we scavenge together an experience similar to sky block kinda it’s complicated though for a quick comparison this is what you

Start with in skyblock there’s an island a tree and a chest of useful items from just this basic kit you can make almost anything you can in normal minecraft skyblock starting items are often seen as the fundamental elements of the game but i think we can do better almost all

Of the blocks and items on the starting island and the eight islands surrounding it can be made from just one piece of grass though the process is incredibly stupid and no human should ever try it okay then how do we progress from just a single block well we can’t interact in any meaningful

Way with the grass block so we’ll have to rely on mobs for our progression i’m categorizing the mobs available to us into three main groups passive mobs that spawn during the day hostile mobs that spawned during night time and biome exclusive mobs this morning depending on which bio move in

Of course since we only have one block of grass that can’t be moved we’ll only choose one biome for obama exclusive mobs to spawn in any mob in minecraft there are a few technical requirements the first and most important requirement is that mobs can’t spawn while there was

A player within 24 blocks of them for us this means we’ll have to jump off the block every time we want the mob to spawn this holds for both passive and hostile mobs passive mobs also have two additional requirements for passive mobs to spawn they’ll need a light level of 9 or higher

And they can only spawn on a grass block this shouldn’t be a problem for us though since yeah assuming these conditions are met any attempted passive mob spawn will have a small chance to succeed the spawning algorithm for passive mobs runs once every 400 ticks

Or 20 seconds so all we have to do is find the right timing and jump off the block every 20 seconds each time we respawn there might be a passive mob waiting for us when we get back most passive mobs will be completely useless to us though

Since we can’t do much of many of the items they drop the sheep however drops the wall block which we can use to build stuff all we have to do is murder the sheep and oh yeah sheep are kind of impossible to kill using just our fists

I’ve really tried to find an angle that didn’t knock them off the block but i just couldn’t do it so i guess we’re stuck at square one maybe it is possible to kill sheep but for now let’s assume we can’t and move on to the hostile mops hustle mobs

Probably seem just as simple to sworn in compared to passive mobs they can spawn in on any block as long as it’s dark enough and the spawn timer is also much faster than passive mobs running once per tick instead of once every 400 ticks but there is one big problem that’s

Exclusive to hostile mobs they’ll instantly despawn if there are no players within a 128 block range of them at any time this is a huge problem for us since when we walk off the void to let hostile mob spawn we’ll fall over 200 blocks before the void finally kills us

This assumes the block is at a y level of 1 which is the best case scenario for dying near the block so even if we did get a hostile mobster 1 during our fall it would have despawned by the time we come back so if we want to spawn in and keep a

Hostile mob we need a way of dying before we leave the 128 block radius the damage from the void is just too slow to kill us from full hp but what if we were already damaged by the time we got there the void does its first stick of damage

As we reach a wire level of negative 64. so if we die to that we should be able to never leave the despawn threshold but how do we get to low hp before jumping there are two ways of taking damage while on the block the first being lightning which

No that’ll take way too long and the other being starvation yay if we can starve ourselves down to two hearts before jumping we should be able to die for the first stick of void damage but since we’re on just one block starvation is going to be a little annoying to pull off

Losing hunger in minecraft is accelerated by various actions like sprinting jumping and taking damage unfortunately we can’t do many of these things so we’ll have to stick with jumping in one spot to starve ourselves i tested it out and it took a little more than 20 minutes before running out of hunger

Then if we take down to just two hearts we should be able to jump off the block and die as we hit y equals negative 64. any hostile mobs that spawned on the way down should be waiting for us as we respawn All right let’s talk about how we deal with these hostile mobs some mobs just aren’t worth dealing with now but what about the ones that drop useful stuff we obviously can’t punch them off the block since we won their loot we also need to be careful about

Them knocking us into the void since we’ll probably form more than 128 blocks and despawn them so how do we get the hostile mobs to safely drop their loot yep we use the sun since the sun doesn’t apply a knockback effect when it deals damage

It’s a perfect way for us to kill mobs safely and get their drops it does only work on zombies and skeletons but that should be enough to get us going all we have to do is starve ourselves down to two hearts jump off the block at the end of night

Respawn on the block survive until the sun comes up and then does enough damage to take them down to one hb and then punch them once to secure the rear drops we punch the enemy once because if they die without us ever dealing damage to them we’ll miss out on their drops

Both the skeleton and the zombie have some super useful rear drops from the skeleton comes the bow and arrow which we can use to kill other mobs and get their drops some passive mobs can be killed in just a single powered up shot meaning we can finally get wool we just

Need to remember to drop the items onto the block before we jump off then there’s the zombie that drops another two useful items those being the iron ingot and the iron shovel if we somehow manage to get two iron ingots we can craft some shears that let us harvest one to three wool

From a sheep but only once per sheep if we let a sheep regrow their wool by eating the grass block we’ll no longer be able to spawn in passive bombs which really sucks the other useful item shots by zombies is the shovel which is great for one purpose guess again

There we go taking up snow with a shovel and not your first we’ll drop a snowball craft four snowballs together and you can make a snow block snow is much easier to mass-produce them all but it does require us to be in a snowy biome and we’ll talk more about which biome

We’re in when we get to buying exclusive mobs so now we have access to wool and maybe snow it doesn’t matter which block we use what really matters is that we now have access to an infinitely renewable source of blocks with these new blocks we can expand out

The platform and make our lives a whole lot easier we can do stuff like create dedicated hostile mob spawning areas or bridge out to these new biomes just by having these new blocks our potential to play the game goes exponentially but as far as our progression gears

All that really matters is that we can kill any mob passive or hostile and get their full set of drops and there are some cool things we can get to drop for mobs like iron and glowstone but none of that is really transformative we’ll need to think of something else to

Get us to the next level of progression introducing the biome exclusive mobs somewhere in here is our ticket to the next level of progression but of course our glass block can only live in one of these biomes so which one try and figure it out for

Yourself but just keep in mind that the answer is completely stupid okay if you guess the tiger you’re correct but if you guessed the snowy tundra you’re even more correct both of these biomes are home to the only mob that matters in our sad one block existence

The fox foxes don’t drop anything useful on their own but they do have a very small chance of spawning with an emerald in their mouth we can trade these emeralds with a wandering trader to get a whole range of cool items that’ll be essential for our progression

The problem is it can take a while to get emeralds to drop foxes have a 20 chance of halting an item in their mouth when they spawn of these items the emerald occupies a five percent chance for appearing this means there’s a one percent chance

That a fox will spawn with an emerald in its mouth also foxes are just one of the many passive mobs that can spawn in the tundra or tiger biomes in both cases foxes account for 2 15 of all the passive mob spawns that means there’s a 1 in 750 chance

That a spawns and passive mob will be a fox with an emerald to put that into perspective let’s assume that it takes 10 minutes to spawn a passive mob using the methods described earlier as foxes account for 2 15 of passive mobs it would take 75 minutes to spawn a fox

To get a fox with an item in its mouth a 20 chance it would take 375 minutes then for the 1 chance of an emerald that’s 7 500 minutes or 125 hours okay that’s a long time to be playing minecraft for just a single embled

But i mean kurt jmek has been walking to the far lands in an update before sprinting was even introduced so maybe it’s not that ridiculous but that 125 hours assumes we can spawn a passive mob once every 10 minutes if you’ve ever tried to spawn in passive

Mobs you’ll know that it can take way longer than that so how long should we expect it to take when spawning in a passive mob on a single block of grass i ran a little simulation to test just this using the carpet mod i was able to simulate 4 million ticks

Of a minecraft world or around 55 and a half hours during the simulation every mob that spawned was automatically killed and the info was logged into the chat to maximize the spawn rate of passive mobs i surrounded the grass block with 16 blocks of snow in each horizontal direction and for 90

Of my time making this video i didn’t think that non-grass blocks surrounding the grass would make a difference but here i am reworking this entire section because the difference it makes is absolutely huge over the 4 million tax a total of 154 passive mobs swarmed in excluding the chickens which can spawn

In alongside hostile mobs if we then scale this number back to include the chickens again we get 197 passive mobs so around one passive mob per 17 minutes for comparison when i tested the grass block with nothing surrounding it it took around 23 hours to spawn in a single mob

So in theory the rate the passive mob spawn in should range somewhere between 23 hours and 17 minutes per pass of mob depending on how many blocks are surrounding the glass so if we take the 17 minute per passive mob number and put it back into our time calculations

We should expect to see an emerald once every 212 hours still kind of ridiculous but we haven’t left the rounds of possibility just yet anyway assuming we did take the time to get these anvils how would we use them i briefly mentioned the wandering trader so let’s quickly cover them

Monitoring traders have a chance to spawn in once per around 20 minutes through a system unlike any other mob in the game for what it matters five wandering traders spawned in during our four million take simulation so that should give you some idea there are so many useful trades offered

By the wandering trader so let’s just focus on the two items that’ll help us the most saplings and podzol finally we have a way of getting wood and making a huge breakthrough but let’s not rush into buying and planting the sapling right away because if we were to grow a tree on our

One grass block it would convert it into dirt which is not good since we still need to spawn in passive mobs there are two possible methods of solving this problem though the simple option is to just buy pods or before getting the saplings having the extra podzol also means it’s

Safe to let sheep regrow and we can properly farm their wool in theory having these extra blocks of podzol should also increase the passive mob spawn rate but in my testing i found no signs of an actual difference i tested different placements of the podzol such as

Adjacence of the grass separated by a chunk and separated by a larger distance i really thought that having the extra puzzle would increase the swarm rate and maybe i just couldn’t figure out how to do it in my testing but anyway that was option one buying the puzzle first

The second option is to buy the sapling first but also have two pigs stored somewhere in your base beforehand doing this means you’ll lose the glass block forever but there is a method of getting pods all later on i don’t want to spoil how the pigs work into this process just yet

But it should make sense soon enough so yeah how long will it take to save up the involves for each of these methods for the puzzle first route which requires 8 emeralds it should take around 1 696 hours or 71 days as for the sapling first route which requires five emeralds

It should take around 1060 hours of course these are the ideal times based on a best-case scenario simulation where the grass block is surrounded by a lot of other blocks it also assumes that we play the game perfectly without ever making a mistake and there’s so much we can do to screw

It up there could be a creeper incident or a clueless sheep could hit the grass block just after sporting or maybe some emblems get knocked off the map since we don’t have any storage i think you get the idea no person should ever try to do any of the stuff

We’ve been through so far sure that makes everything in this video so far useless but i think proving that it’s possible is cool enough and there’s still so much more we can do because yeah we finally have wood having wood really opens the door to wait hold on hold on okay having wood

Really opens the door to so many important features of minecraft things like having tools storing items and chests and being able to sleep at night access to the full crafting table also means an explosion of new items available to us there’s too many recipes to cover but some cool highlights include redstone lamps

Minecarts with tracks and hoppers then there’s the cauldron that collects water during the rain this gives us access to growing crops for food and fishing a few cool things can be got through fishing but the most important one might be the enchanted books meaning we can finally make fully enchanted tools and armor

Our potential has really opened up and we still have so much further to progress some of our future progression could come from the wandering trader again so many useful trades are still available but our current method for finding emeralds is kinda slow so let’s instead jump to

Probably the coolest thing we can get from our one block full on villager trading since we can’t just go out and find a village we’ll have to make one ourselves by cueing zombie villagers a normal minecraft would cure a zombie villager by throwing a splash motion of weakness at it

And then right-clicking it with the golden apple but there are some problems for us crafting a brewing station is normally pretty simple but we don’t have cobblestone and worse yet we can’t go into the neither to find blaze rods we also can’t trade to get a brewing

Stand so how do we make a splash potion of weakness well we don’t instead we’ll be checking a witch into a plane the weakness effect for us witches can throw four different splash motions at the player one of them being the weakness potion all we have to do is stance near our

Zombie village and have the splash potion hit the villager too but what about the golden apple none of the mobs that we’ve seen so far drop gold and we can’t change it either luckily one of the strangest mechanics in the game is to our rescue oh yeah takes to get struck by lightning

To zombified penguins that drop gold on death so all we have to do is coat every exposed surface of our base and pigs and we’re good to go we can even use carrots to breed the pigs since carrots drop sometimes from zombies and can be farmed using bone meal

Once we’ve had a few nice lightning storms and got all the gold we need it’s time to craft some golden apples and cure some zombie villages once that finishes we can give these villagers a job and start trading with them the job each village gets is determined by this station there are

13 different stations in normal minecraft but for us only seven of them can be made using the limited resources at our disposal having a look through all of the trades available now there are some damn cool ones the toolsmith might be the most important since they sell enchanted diamond tools

We can even enchant them further by using the books sold by the liberian there’s also a bunch of cool smaller trades like campfires cake glass and lanterns now that we have a good source of emeralds we can even go back to the wandering trader and have a look at some of their items

Like sand cactus and buckets of fish it’s also worth pointing out that a lot of the items in the skyblock starting kit are sold by the wandering trader like sugarcane the melon seeds and the sea pickle sure some of the villagers are missing but we can still work to get most of the

Items they sell through other means like even the diamond armor if you go through enough zombies it’s possible to get it to drop it might take a while but that’s kind of the thing we’re going with here now you’ve probably noticed which blocks we aren’t

Able to get i said there were a few missing things during the comparison with skyblock and yeah they’re pretty big emissions the first omission from skyblock being the mycelium which i mean far more importantly will never get any lava or obsidian this means no cobblestone generator so no furnaces dispensers pistons or anything

Else that requires cobblestone we’ll also never be able to build his portal and travel to the nether maybe someday mojang will let a lava bucket trade to one of the villagers please but regardless it’s still possible to make so much happen from just a single block of glass

So as a final showing i’ve put together a little demo of some of the things we can do using our limited block palette hopefully this should show that we can still do a lot despite missing cobblestone and a few other things so i built a typical base of someone who might have

Spent the time and completed this challenge coming in on the left we have an aquarium all the stuff here is sold by the wondering trader and it’s pretty easy to get then on the right we have the light switch since we don’t have cobblestone and can’t make levers we’ll have to emulate its

Functionality using a button for those of you who are interested this is a t flip flop this thing gets a little complex when you can’t use repeaters comparators hoppers pistons of any of that but this is how this zone used to work before all those things were introduced

For example this thing over here is what repeaters used to look like before mojang added them as an actual block and then coming down the hallway we have the iron golem farm this is a simple design based on one by voltrox it spawns golems outside the bounds

Sometimes but it’s just a proof of concept and it produces a lot of iron then at the ends of the hallway we have an item to showcase this is the best gear we can make using our limited resources and to be honest it’s not that far off

Skype walk or normal minecraft for that matter and then there’s the outside section which covers all the miscellaneous stuff that we couldn’t show off before there’s quite a bit of cool stuff out here like name tags saddles horse armor pumpkins melons and bees i even made an artificial beach

This might seem like a random inclusion but it’s actually really important assuming this fake vegeta was in a real beach biome it’s possible that turtles could swarm and drop their eggs and these turtle legs are actually part of the skybox starting kit the final item we haven’t covered

So yeah we seriously can get almost everything we can in normal skyblock with just one block of gas it might take a few dozen days but it’s possible so that about concludes what we can do with just one block of grass but there is one more thing i want to

Talk about about nine years back i kind of made a survival map called the one block survival you spawned in on a single block just like what we’ve been through except this time it was bedrock instead of grass meaning there was nowhere to spawn passive mobs and nowhere to progress whatsoever

Yep this map really exists and despite how much it makes me cringe it’s slop on minecraft forums the map’s even gone through a few updates the first one being where i explained the joke on a sign and why did i do that the second update was

To make a real map out of it but it wasn’t the first i don’t know how i’m gonna relate this old dumb map i made to this video but it’s been pretty cool to see this joke of a map from nine years ago turned into

Still a joke of a video but i guess at least this time the joke was slightly more fun to get explained anyway thank you for watching the video it’s been absolutely hell to make this thing and i really hope someone out there gets something from it

And maybe someday my gym will let us trade for lava cheers