Game Theory: The SCARY Crimes of the Minecraft Illagers

What are the illah Jers doing in that dank secluded mansion of theirs with its redstone jails elaborate altars and hidden rooms housing strange obsidian structures it really seems like they’re plotting something that is a quote from Marsh Davies former creative Communications Manager for Mojang and his introduction to the evoker mob back

When it was introduced in 2017 it’s a line that is outright challenging us it’s telling us there’s something hidden within the walls of the illah Jers woodland mansion compound there’s a mystery to be solved out there in those dark forests one that according to my research has gone unanswered that entire

Time now three years later think I’ve done it I think I know what the illage is are doing out there and more importantly I think I know what they’re planning let’s just say after today’s video you will never look at Minecraft the same way again hello Internet welcome to game theory

The most bin jabal show on YouTube for all those times when you find yourself inexplicably stuck inside with nothing else to do speaking of bin jabal content over the last year we’ve been mining for nuggets of lore to craft together a massive overarching theory on the story of

Minecraft a link to all those theories right there in the upper right hand corner of the screen I recommend starting with our analysis of the Enderman as well as this one covering the origins of the Drowned civilization here’s the thing though up until this point you as the viewer and

Quite honestly me to have been uncertain what if anything has actually been planned by the Mojang team working on Minecraft I mean don’t get me wrong I think we have done some incredible work piecing together a lore for this game from the Enderman being the lost builders to the Drowned being a

Civilization rotting away from a massive flood if the proof has been there in the gameplay and yet the question has remained how much of this lore was intended versus how much of it was just me Theory crafting by putting together random details to make a coherent story

Today though is different I started this episode with that quote from Marsh Davies for a reason it shows that the developers intended some hidden lore to exist around the woodland mansions the illah Jers do indeed have something up those oversized sleeves of theirs this time it’s not just us over analyzing

Things like we normally do it’s us piecing together clues to solve a secret that has remained hidden in this game for years and maybe it’s been for a good reason because if I’m right the secret the illah Jers are hiding takes this family-friendly game and makes it a much

Much darker world we’re talking t14 at least I think the illah Jers are kidnapping villagers and turning them into animals through some bizarre magic and that’s not all I think they’re going one step further they’re taking those experiments to try and recreate us now if you’ve never been to a woodland

Mansion before I don’t exactly blame you the chance of one generating is extremely low as they only generate in the rare dark forest biome and even then only if it fulfills a certain list of criteria and you’re lucky to boot that’s why even with the maps that you could

Buy from the cartographer villagers you still might find yourself trekking for hours to find the nearest mansion so it’s pretty safe to say that these are some of the rarest structures in the game entering the mansion things seem pretty normal at first then Hall is pretty much always the same it

Has a nice red carpet some stairs and as you go through you’re likely to see lots of normal-looking rooms ones that appear to be dining halls libraries little farms of mushrooms and trees but then you get to some of the stranger structures jail cells a room with a

Large altar in the middle a room with a large fake map in the middle a room with a large fake end portal in the middle rooms dedicated to large woollen statues of cats and chickens in the middle always in the middle it is weird and let

Me be clear when I say fake and portals and fake Maps I mean it these aren’t made from your typical assortment of end portal frames and lava blocks or paper and compasses these are made with wool the fake end portal rooms are filled with orange wool in the middle in a ring

Of green wool above it giving the appearance of a stronghold end portal the map is made out of carpet so are the numerous beds found throughout the mansion more wool more carpet again it is weird I say it on a lot of these episodes but I think in this one it’s

Hard to deny developers don’t just put fake replicas of an end portal into the villains hideout for the funsies there is a reason these structures are here but to understand why we first need to understand who the illah Jers are for those of you who don’t know illa jar is

The classification for a group of hostile mobs in Minecraft united by the fact that they all share similar features to normal villagers the illah Jers consists of magic using of ochres axe wielding Vindicator x’ and crossbows slinging pillagers there’s also illusion errs who don’t spawn naturally in the game and the

Ravagers which are just the big ol ugly beasts that the illage ride during the raids whoo look at that face face only a mother or I suppose another villager now it’s important to note that the illa Jura pearance is an arbitrary sure they look exactly like villagers in need of a

Suntan but that is a very intentional decision it isn’t like Mojang just ran out of ideas for how creatures in this universe could look no the one bit of lore that we know about these guys is that they’re exiled they were booted out of the villagers villages they’re outcasts according to

The Minecraft mob bestiary quote via Volkers are outcasts from the friendly villages that we know and love twisted by their practice of evil and and again with The Vindicator description here we go like the Evo kurz The Vindicator ‘s were expelled from villages for its unspeakable activities

And it too wanders the halls of eerie woodland mansions we do not know what they’re trying to achieve out there in the woods but we must be on our guard end quote so again we’re teased with little bits of lore here these are villagers who are committing unspeakable

Acts and were booted out of the towns for it only to take residents in the dark woods but we have no idea what all that is referencing so we come back to the initial question what were they doing in the woodland mansions we have prisons and altars built by the illage

But what was it all for well what if I told you that the first and yes there are several but the first atrocity is that the illah Jers are kidnapping normal peaceful villagers and turning them into animals don’t believe me take a closer look at the Ravagers I

Mentioned earlier the beasts that the illage ride into battle look familiar they should most obviously there’s that signature nose that completely matches a normal villager okay fine that would just be an aesthetic choice but then what about eyebrow Ravagers have a unibrow just like every other villager that exists in Minecraft

What makes that similarity stand out all the more is that both The Vindicator and the evoke er who we know are former villagers themselves that were exiled have themselves to separate angry eyebrows clearly differentiating them from every other villager in the game and yet the ravager shares the unibrow

That the villagers still possess and what about those green eyes again every villager has green eyes just like the eyes of the Ravagers so the features of the Ravagers face are an exact copy of the features on a villagers face but to say that they are a villager seems to be

An extreme jump right it does until you listen to this that’s one of the Ravagers roars it’s this big fearsome beast that has a little honk honk-honk at the end of its roar a hog that sounds kinda like the sounds that a villager makes when it’s speaking in fact a lot

Of the Ravager sound effects seem to have an undertone of honking to it again listen to those grunts roars the honking is very clearly worked into the sounds that the Beast is making Suggesting that along with the visuals this was once an actual villager but to me the biggest piece of evidence doesn’t come from the game itself but rather from a tweet sent by Jem chief creative officer for Minecraft what if the odd little details about Ravagers was that when they were first introduced they

Were programmed to be scared of rabbits it was a cute little Easter Egg to have a giant hulking fearsome beast suddenly run away from such a cute little animal the one was first discovered Jeb who again it bears repeating is one of the main guys controlling everything

Minecraft Jeb tweeted back this I asked Josh to remove this feature again although funny being scared of rabbits doesn’t fit with the beasts lore and cool doesn’t fit with the lore ravager lore is non-existent literally in the meet the ravager blog post there is nothing about how these characters fit

Into the story the various beasty Ares and wikis nothing about the lore of these mobs sure there are stories about how they were originally conceptualized what they’re based off of but nothing about the lore as they fit into the story of Minecraft and yet apparently the Lord exists enough for the rabbit

Scaring it off to somehow throw off that entire plotline and I think I know why I think it’s because they’re made of villagers and villagers aren’t scared of rabbits to the beasts that they are turned into by the illage as should n’t them either in short I think that the

Prison cells and those sacrificial looking altar things in the woodland mansions are used for win of ochres and Vindicator ‘s capture villagers to use in their how did the mob bestiary put it unspeakable activities i mean between the magic and the axe those two mobs should have pretty much everything they

Need to convert a villager into a giant hulking beast well everything but the power over life and death that would probably be helpful if you’re trying to create some sort of weird animal villager hybrid monstrosity oh wait the illah Jers actually have that ability too you see Volkers hold

Power over life and death considering that they’re the only source of totems of undying in the game these totems are special items that allow the wielder to escape from death and that my friends is the true plan of illage sir they might be making beasts out of illa Jers but I believe that’s

Only one component of their larger overarching plan I think that the unspeakable activities that got them kicked out of the villages in the first place are actually them running experiments trying to harness the powers of life and death they are literally playing God I mean they have totems of undying they are the

Only ones to have totems of the undying and we see that these things work I mean they certainly managed to keep us alive plus we know that magic is a real thing in Minecraft obviously in the game we’re able to enchant weapons and armor using lapis lazuli so minecraft is making the

Case that lapis lazuli has some sort of mystical power now this isn’t a totally novel idea humans dating back all the way to ancient Sumeria have also believed that Lapp has had some sort of mystical quality the Sumerians believed that lapis held the souls of gods no that seems pretty darn relevant

Considering where lapis lazuli is hidden in the woodland mansions well it’s not obvious there is a block of lapis hidden in the center of the giant wool imager heads that decorate the entire building implying there to be this close connection between illah Jers and this magical stone I mean in the statues it’s

Literally right where their brain should be now I cannot stress enough how bad of an idea would be to actually inject lapis lazuli into your head there’s nearly a hundred percent chance of medical complication and a zero percent chance of you getting magical powers and in the Minecraft universe it seems like

The odds are a bit more in your favor considering the Evoque kurz magical powers could all of these statues be implying that a Volkers have lapis literally implanted into their skulls thereby giving them their magical ability is probably not if that were the case you’d expect them to have some

Chance of dropping a shard of lapis or something the lapis stone being in the middle of the statues head does imply that maybe experiments with lapis and magic were another thing that got these villagers kicked out and turned into the exiled illah Jers which brings us back

To their experiments on life and death because here’s the thing I don’t think it stops with just the Ravagers I believe that there’s something far more sinister and threatening going on in the woodland mansions that ties together all of these clues while also explaining what happened to get the illah Jers

Thrown out of in some rooms in Woodland mansions there are piles and piles of blue and cyan wool okay okay it sounds pretty mundane but consider the specific coloring of this wall blue and cyan they’re the same colors as default steve’s clothing his cyan shirt is blue pants i mean there is

Really no other reason to have stacks of blue and cyan wools together in a room it is such a specific item in such a specific set of two colors i mean sure elsewhere in the woodland mansion imagers use blue wool sometimes as carpet to make fake beds or maps they

Also use yellow and red wool for those same purposes and we see none of that in any of the rooms in the woodland mansion and yet we see rooms dedicated to just blue and cyan walls they are specifically Steve colored wool piles Steve and zombie colored wool piles

Remember this is the cult with at least some control over life and death and in the Minecraft world we see snowmen built with two snow blocks we see iron golems made by creating a tea out of iron and then plopping a pumpkin head on top of

That now we have ourselves a cult of illage Arion statues in their homes and sometimes even in bed lapis lazuli into him so it’s not so much of a stretch to think that they could maybe stack some blue and cyan wall together plop a pumpkin on top and hope to create a new

Steve they see that’s where things probably went terribly wrong in a volker using a totem of the undying must have tried to make this lump of wool come to life only to create something twisted something twisted and something hungry the first zombie as the first zombies came out and started biting villagers

It’s probably no surprise that the weird cultists who created it got booted from society and ended up settling huge distances away in dark and mysterious woodland mansions where they could continue their experiments in private and now those same cultists live in harmony with their creations the illah Jers now share their mansions with

Creepers and skeletons and of course their own zombified creations be they built from wool and skeletons be they built from wool and dead bodies so now we know why the illah Jers exists what makes them fundamentally different from their villager cousins and why the two populations separated to begin with

They’re big evil plot that’s been alluded to by the development team since their inclusion in the game is to create their own life create their own version of Steve using a combination of wool and magic but in the process it created zombies they’re like the L brothers of minecraft who knew that it

Would take more than a few bits of wool to make a human and now everyone in the Minecraft world has to pay a price and that my friends is the secret of the woodland mansion but hey that’s just a theory Oh game theory thanks for watching and

Hey while you’re here looking for things to binge since no you’re probably not at work or school watch the other six episodes that we’ve done on the Minecraft lore link is right there on screen as we speak I’m telling you each of these theories is awesome there are

Some of my favorite theories that we’ve ever concocted on this channel minecraft is shockingly rich in its lore and there’s a lot of stuff here that we could really gnaw on to try and piece together the story so check them out let me know what you think and make sure you

Subscribe buttons on screen for that as well because you know that there’s gonna be more where this came from we’re getting close to putting together that overarching theory I don’t know about you but I can start to see some big themes come together across these theories and I think they are all

Telling one story