Minecraft in 20 Seconds Explained in 20 Minutes

Here is Minecraft beaten in 20 seconds. It may look like absolute chaos right now, but I assure you that by the end of this video, you will understand everything that’s going on. Let’s start from the beginning. What is the goal of Minecraft?

Despite its primary nature being a 3D sandbox game, Minecraft actually does have some sort of progression, a final boss and an ending. The goal of Minecraft is to defeat the Ender Dragon, found in the dimension aptly called The End.

To do that, one must typically get rid of end crystals sitting atop tall pillars of obsidian that regenerate the dragon’s health, then take it down slowly but surely. Of course, players are free to completely ignore this quest and sink thousands of hours

Into the game recreating Middle Earth or building a computer that runs Minecraft itself, but the goal of the speedrun is to reach that ending as fast as possible. Now, those with a keen eye may have noticed the Ender Dragon was nowhere to be seen in this run. Don’t worry, we’ll get to that.

This is a tool-assisted speedrun, made by DylanDC14, of a category called Any% Set seed. The four main categories in Minecraft are Any% Set seed, Set seed glitchless, Random seed, and Random seed glitchless. Glitchless categories disallow abusing any bug in the game, and while they are more popular

Among real-time Minecraft runners, they typically result in a slower run time. Here, the ultimate goal is to create the fastest possible speedrun, so glitches were used. Any% simply means to reach the ending by all means necessary, with any amount of the actual game completed.

This is by far the most popular approach, but there’s a myriad of other arbitrary goals players can race towards. Set seed refers to the world generation. Here, the two options are set seed and random seed. A core element of Minecraft’s identity is that the world is procedurally generated randomly.

The random world generation uses a number as a seed. A specific seed will always return the same world, but change one digit and the result is completely different. Speedruns that use random seeds cannot set this number, so runners are dropped in a completely random world in every attempt.

Luck plays a massive role in random seed speedruns. In set seed, a runner is allowed to replay the same world over and over. This means they can choose a world with favourable conditions, learn where things are and figure out the fastest route, resulting in a much more optimized run.

So, what is a tool-assisted speedrun? In short, instead of a performance like a real-time speedrun, a tool-assisted speedrun, or TAS for short, is a carefully crafted creation. It was still done by a real person – in this case, DylanDC14 – but it was made using tools

To slow down the game and to retry segments if he ever made a mistake. Typically, a TAS is created on an emulator using savestates, memory watch and frame advance, but this is not actually possible for a modern PC game like Minecraft.

Instead, mods were used to slow the game down to a fraction of its real speed so that when the video of the run is played back at normal speed, the player looks like they have superhuman speed and reflexes. To replace emulator savestates, the game was simply saved and loaded back when Dylan wanted

To retry a specific section. For most of the run, he slowed the game down by a factor of 40 to 80. If you’re still confused about what a TAS is, please watch this video. Keep in mind that this speedrun is in no way trying to compete with real-time speedrunners

– it’s a demonstration of what’s possible with perfect gameplay. Here’s the basic premise of the path Dylan took to beat the game. The ending is triggered by entering this portal, which appears when the Ender Dragon is defeated. Like I mentioned before, the Ender Dragon is actually skipped in this run.

To reach The End, the player must fill in and enter the End portal found in the stronghold, a unique dungeon found underground in the main world. The portal is completed using Eyes of Ender, a special item created by combining an Ender Pearl with Blaze Powder.

An ender pearl is an item dropped by Endermen, creepy slender enemies that attack you when you look at them, but it can also be found in chests in a few rare locations, or acquired by trading. Blaze Powder is made by breaking down Blaze rods, which drop from a Blaze, a fiery enemy

Found in Nether fortresses. To reach a Nether fortress, one must build a portal to the Nether using blocks of obsidian and light it up with a flint and steel. Obsidian is generated by the collision of water and lava, and it can only be mined using a diamond pickaxe.

Luckily, it can be found in small quantities in random chests as well. Same goes for the flint and steel: while it’s normally crafted by combining flint, a random drop from digging in gravel, and an iron ingot, created in a furnace from iron ore, it can also be found in random chests.

So, in short, Dylan needs to find a flint and steel, obsidian and Ender Pearls in random chests, create a Nether portal, find a Nether fortress, kill a Blaze, collect its rod and break it into powder, combine it with the Ender Pearl to create Eyes of Ender, repair

The End portal and defeat the Ender Dragon, all in 20 seconds. Let’s dive into it and see how he did it. The first obvious thing is that Dylan spawns directly next to a chest that contains a Golden Axe with the silk touch enchantment, obsidian and a flint and steel.

Just how lucky is that? Well, this is where the importance of the set seed comes in. Dylan was able to choose a string of numbers that would get him the world with the most favourable conditions to beat the game the fastest.

However, the set of specific conditions that he needed for the optimal result was mind-bendingly unlikely. Right next to his spawn is a ruined portal, a naturally generated damaged Nether portal that also has a chest containing four to eight items from this list.

He needed the chest to contain flint and steel, obsidian, a Golden Axe, and an item with the silk touch enchantment. In this case, the axe itself has the enchantment. To his right is a woodland mansion, a large random structure that’s typically generated

Very far from the starting location – tens of thousands of blocks away. Spawning directly next to one is astronomically rare. The two rooms here are a fake end portal room and a lava room. Those two are among the rarest in a woodland mansion, so them being right there is also incredibly unlikely.

Once Dylan goes into the Nether, he needs to end up near a Nether fortress where he can find a Blaze. Even better is a Blaze spawner. This seed has a Blaze spawner only 7 tiles away. Dylan also needs an area where a Ghast can spawn, and favourable terrain to navigate inside the Nether.

The stronghold where the End portal can be found needs to be uncharacteristically close. Finally, the spawn point in The End dimension can be underground or exposed. It needed to be exposed for the optimal run. Quick sidenote: throughout this video, watch out for numbered notes in the bottom right corner.

You can find a link to additional notes that provide context and clarifications in the video description. In order to get this incredible combination of rare occurrences, Dylan ran a script that parsed through about 2 quintillion seeds and he looked through dozens of the most promising ones manually.

This is the single best seed that he found. It’s possible that more solutions exist, but the script Dylan ran looked at over 10% of every possible seed in Minecraft, so this one is at least pretty good. From the chest, Dylan takes out the obsidian, the flint and steel and the golden axe with

Silk touch. The obsidian and flint and steel will be used to build and light up a Nether portal to travel to the Nether. Dylan gets the golden axe so he can break down the wooden walls of the Woodland mansion as quickly as possible.

Golden tools have the fastest base gathering speed in the game, even better than diamond tools, but their garbage durability makes them very rarely worth using. This is one of those cases, because Dylan doesn’t need the durability – only raw speed. He needs the silk touch enchantment to gather glass for later.

The first room he breaks into is a fake End portal room. It’s made to look like the End portal room, but instead, the structure is made of wool and there’s a trapped chest. When the chest is opened, the TNT next to it goes off, breaking infested cobblestone blocks that release silverfish enemies.

The chest always contains two Ender pearls, which is perfect because Dylan needs those. First off, he breaks a block in the wall while climbing to the chest to allow him to go into the next room over afterwards. There’s a noticeable cut here because Dylan saved and reloaded the world.

Minecraft speedruns are usually measured using the in-game time, which removes all variability from loading screens and other factors. As such, any time spent paused, loading or outside the game doesn’t count, but time spent crafting or looking inside a chest does.

Only the time where the game is actually running was kept for this TAS, so transitions like loading screens or quitting and reloading the save are completely removed. There will be more of these cuts throughout the run, but this one is perhaps the most obvious.

Dylan first breaks one TNT block, then he picks up the ender pearls from the trapped chest, which activates the other TNT. TNT takes four seconds before blowing up, which gives enough time to get out of the way. The explosion will actually be useful later.

Dylan then immediately puts the pearls back in the chest, along with his obsidian and a block of wood he picked up along the way. Why? Because with a sprinkle of magic, as soon as he reopens the chest, the items are both in the chest and still in his inventory, effectively doubling them.

How does that happen? The answer is very simple: the game saves the state of chests and your inventory independently of each other. After Dylan puts the items in the chest, the chest inventory is saved, but his inventory isn’t saved yet.

Then, by quitting and reloading the world, he can reload the inventory state from before he put in the items, and the chest state from after he put them in, resulting in the items being both on him and in the chest.

But the game is not that dumb: whenever you quit the game, either through the menu or by force quitting using Alt+F4, it will save your inventory. However, if you crash the game by force using the Task Manager’s End Task function, it

Won’t get the luxury of saving your inventory before the process is killed. Therefore, you can quit the game and reload the save, and the items will be in both places at once. This is what happened in-between the two chest openings.

Remember, the run is timed using in-game time, which effectively renders this process instantaneous. This process is done five times, so Dylan ends up with 32 of each item. In the middle of it, though, he throws an Ender pearl into the other room through the hole in the wall he made earlier.

Throwing an Ender pearl allows the player to teleport. When the Ender pearl lands, the player is instantly teleported to its location and they take two and a half hearts of damage. But it takes some time for the Ender pearl to travel: in this case, one third of a second.

This gives enough time to finish the chest duplication, then make a crafting table for later. When the Ender pearl finally lands, Dylan doesn’t actually take damage. This is because whenever a player relogs into the game, they benefit from a 3-second invincibility period.

This is intended to give players enough time to find their bearings, but in this TAS, three seconds might as well be three minutes. As a result, pretty much all sources of damage won’t hurt Dylan in this run.

Note that there’s a purely visual bug when playing the run at such low speeds where the Ender pearl is still visible after landing. Dylan landed in the lava room of the Woodland Mansion. The rarest of all the possible rooms contains a block of diamond surrounded by lava encased

In a glass and obsidian pillar in the center of the room. The obsidian here is helpful because it allows Dylan to build a Nether portal using fewer blocks than usual. However, when building the portal, he is limited in how fast he can build it.

Regardless of the visual framerate, Minecraft has a fixed tick rate of 20 game updates per second. This means Dylan can’t do more than a single meaningful action, like placing a block or using an item, every 1/20th of a second. As soon as the portal is lit up, Dylan now needs to wait.

To be taken into the Nether, the player needs to stand in the portal for four seconds. If they step out for any length of time, this timer resets. In the meantime, he harvests a block of glass, which he’ll need to defeat the Ender dragon in a creative way later in this run.

Blocks of glass can only be obtained in three different ways: using sand in a furnace, which takes sand, a furnace and ten seconds; trading emeralds for it with a villager, and harvesting it from this very room using a tool with the silk touch enchantment. Otherwise, it would simply break.

Any other form of naturally generated glass in this specific version of Minecraft is a glass pane, not a glass block. This is the reason why spawning near this specific room and finding a tool with silk touch were two crucial requirements for this run.

As soon as that’s done, Dylan gets to work on building a second Nether portal, this one against the wall of the fake End portal room. He uses an Ender pearl throw to get across from one portal to the other. The game actually doesn’t care that you’re standing in any specific Nether portal.

Because the teleportation is instantaneous, Dylan never spends any time outside the portals, so he can travel from one to the other and keep the 4-second timer active. Now that he’s against the wall, he can wait a bit. Did you forget about the TNT from earlier? Well, it just blew up the wall!

The chest and the TNT blocks were sitting on a ring of green wool, which gets flung in the explosion. This is why Dylan created a second portal here: so that he could stand in the path of those wool blocks and catch them. He places the crafting table and gets to work.

First, he makes planks out of his wood blocks so he can craft the rest of the items. Then, he makes two chests and more crafting tables. Finally, he makes four beds with the twelve blocks of wool he just collected, and he reorganizes his inventory while the rest of the 4-second timer plays out.

Dylan finally lands in the Nether. First order of business is throwing an Ender pearl for future teleportation. Second order of business is placing a bed to take a well-deserved nap. But as soon as he tries to slide under the covers, the bed explodes! This is actually not a bug: it’s a feature.

If you don’t believe me, if you die from a bed explosion, you get the message “Player was killed by intentional game design”. Normally, in Minecraft, sleeping in a bed skips the rest of the night until it’s day time again, and it sets your spawn point next to the bed.

But you can only sleep in a bed in the main world. Instead of making it so you couldn’t even place a bed in the Nether or in The End, the developers decided to add an Easter egg.

Attempting to sleep in a bed in these dimensions will make the bed explode and set fire to nearby blocks, in an explosion even stronger than TNT. Dylan actually places and explodes three of his four beds in very quick succession. Again, these explosions don’t damage him because of the invincibility period, but they

Move him faster than walking would have. They also affect the Ender pearl, flinging it away further and faster than a normal throw. When this pearl lands, it will transport Dylan close to where the stronghold is in the main world.

Now, after a quick reload, Dylan throws a second Ender pearl while the first one is in motion. Normally, there’s a one-second cooldown after throwing a pearl, but this cooldown is reset upon reloading the world. This allows him to throw multiple pearls in quick succession, something that he will abuse

For the entirety of the run. This second pearl will land in about a second and a half. He places a chest, throws a pearl just a couple blocks forward to better position himself, and another pearl down below towards the Blaze spawner.

While this one travels, he uses the chest to duplicate his remaining bed, his second chest, the glass block and some obsidian. He doubles up the glass and beds to four of each, then his pearl lands next to a Blaze. Dylan places a bed right next to a Blaze and blows it up.

He makes sure to punch the Blaze first to mark it as being damaged by him. Bed explosions don’t count as damage by a player, and a Blaze killed by environmental hazards never drops anything. It drops a blaze rod, which he picks up and immediately doubles using a chest.

He also duplicates his glass and beds again. He now has all the ingredients to craft Eyes of Ender and open the portal to The End. At this point, the second Ender pearl he threw, which I said would land about a second and

A half later, finally lands and he is teleported next to a Ghast, a large random enemy in the Nether. Note that although the world can be generated using a set seed, randomly spawning enemies like Blazes and Ghasts depend on in-game Random Number Generation or RNG.

This Ghast holds the last ingredient to the secret method to kill the dragon quickly: a Ghast tear. Dylan blows it up with a bed, then he quickly repositions with an Ender pearl, places down a crafting table and a chest, and gets to work.

He doubles his Blaze rods twice to get to 8, turns them into 16 Blaze powders, combines 13 of them with Ender pearls to make Eyes of Ender, and he uses one of those eyes, seven glass blocks and the Ghast tear he just obtained to create an End crystal.

End crystals are the objects that heal the Ender Dragon in The End, but they also serve another purpose. When crafted and placed in a particular arrangement, they can be used to spawn or respawn the Ender Dragon. This is the key to the strategy to defeat the dragon quickly.

After creating all of these items, Dylan does a bit of inventory management, then warps again. This is when the first Ender pearl he threw when he entered the Nether finally lands. In order, the first pearl travelled the furthest and the longest, then the second landed near

The ghast, and the short throw to the Blaze spawner below him landed first. Dylan now builds another Nether portal. In 4 seconds, he will return home, but this time, to a new location. Portals between the main world and the Nether are linked to each other at the same relative position.

However, the Nether is 8 times smaller than the main world. Therefore, portals that link the two dimensions are 8 times further apart in the main world than they are in the Nether. In other words, traveling in the Nether corresponds to traveling 8 times faster in the main world.

This Ender pearl throw in the Nether netted Dylan a displacement of 1200 tiles in the real world, bringing him all the way to the stronghold, where the End portal can be found. After an excruciatingly long wait, Dylan is finally back in the main world.

His portal conveniently sits right in the entrance of the End portal room of the stronghold. A quick Ender pearl throw gets him up the stairs, then he quickly places all twelve Eyes of Ender in the portal, repositioning with a pearl when needed.

As soon as the last Eye is in its socket, the portal activates, instantly sending him to The End. Immediately upon arriving, Dylan’s position isn’t quite optimal, so he has to use two Ender pearl throws to reposition. But between these throws, he places down the End crystal.

When entering The End for the first time, it takes one second for the Ender dragon to spawn. However, placing this crystal throws a wrench in the process. The dragon and the exit portal appear at the same time. When an End crystal is placed before they spawn, it finds that there’s no exit portal,

So it spawns a new one and opens it by default. Then, when the dragon tries to spawn, it’s prevented from doing so because the exit portal is already open. The end result is that the Ender dragon is banished into the void and simply never appears.

Since the exit portal is already open, all Dylan needs to do now is to get there. He throws an Ender pearl towards the center of the arena, and again, resorts to the bed explosion technique to boost the speed and distance of his throw, this time using four beds.

This tosses him off the map and into the infinite void where he can contemplate his existence. Just before he falls to his death, the Ender pearl lands close to the portal. One final quick pearl throw lands him directly into the portal, and the game is beaten in 19.9 seconds of in-game time.

That’s it! That’s the fastest possible way to beat Minecraft that we currently have. It requires a one-in-a-quintillion seed, perfect RNG, superhuman mouse precision and speed, and crashing the game a couple dozen times, but it is technically possible.

I want to thank DylanDC14 for making this TAS, for allowing me to break it down, and for helping ensure this video’s accuracy. And now, I will keep my promise. You can watch the run again, but this time, if you focus really hard, you can actually keep track of what’s going on.

Thank you for watching!