Game Theory: What is a Minecraft Emerald WORTH?

Hrrmmm Hrm HAHAHAHAHAHA! Sonic: Eggman, you’re finished! Okay, chaos emeralds blast awayyyyyy~ Disappointed Sonic: Hmm. What! that’s it? HEY [villager noises again] Sonic: Shoot, not my day [Game theory intro] Mat Pat: Hello internet, welcome to GAME THEORY! The only show on the internet that pays its staff in Minecraft emeralds.

Uh, surprise to all of Team theorist this month! [Angry team complaints asking to pay real money] Mat Pat: Look guys it’s February, adrates are super low Ugh, if it makes it any better I’ll throw in some doughnuts [Team Theorists]Man, he’s got a point- YAAY, it’s currency! – I can eat!

Mat Pat: Anyway, with it’s 10th anniversary last year, Minecraft not only saw a massive renaissance here in Youtube Ahem…Kicking the Fortnite to the curb But it also rolled out some of their biggest content updates in years Giving us everything from target blocks to bees OH NO, NOT THE BEES! NOT THE BEES!

[Dies from the bees] Mat Pat : But, of ’em all probably the most interesting was the revamped villager trading system. Before last year’s ‘Village and Pillage’ update, villagers would give randomly generated deals that could range anywhere from: >>Trump The worst trade, maybe ever signed anywhere.

Mat Pat: All the way up to Uh this one dude from futurama: “Shut up and take my money” Mat Pat: Now, after the 2019 update, that randomness is suddenly gone. Instead, all of the trades start at a base price, and then fluctuate based on a variety of factors: the

Villager’s experience, your player status, and your personal demand for the deal. But it’s that baseline price that has me the most interested… You see, for the first time, it gives us a standard value for the emerald. An emerald,

In Minecraft’s world, is the equivalent of 1 stone axe, or 16 bricks, or 22 carrots or 32 sticks, or simply 1 rabbit stew. And so, that’s what I wanted to look into today. What What is the value of a Minecraft emerald, in real- world dollars? Can it actually be quantified?

Does the dollar amount even make any semblance of sense? Should Team Theorist over here be bummed about getting paid in emeralds this year? >> Team Theorist: Yes! >> MatPat: Just you wait guys, because by the end of this episode I think you’re all

Going to be singing a very different tune. At least, I hope you’ll be singing a different tune, ’cause I don’t got a lot else to pay you with… So, because I walk up to Kay’s Jewelers, drop down my bundle of 32 sticks and get Stephanie

A nice emerald necklace for our anniversary, I should probably know how much I’m gonna be spending on her, right? Who knows! Those sticks could be very valuable. *ka-ching* So, like I said, under the new trading system everything has a base starting price, with

1 emerald being tradable for lots of different types of items. It’s worth everything from 6 bread loaves to 32 rotten fleshes, 24 sheets of paper, to 1 empty map. Which, let’s face it, is literally just 1 sheet of paper, so the cartographer over there is getting himself

One heck of a deal. Price gouging for the win! So, the first way to look at this problem is simply by pricing out some of these items and seeing if they all land in relatively the same price range. As I look at the items,

I’m just gonna pick out the ones that are pretty darn standard. Things that aren’t really dependent on weight or quality, like pounds of chicken or things like that. So, a loaf of bread. Probably the most blasé, standard item out there. Keep your gluten-free seeded

Fancy Whole Foods $800 rye bread loaves out of here; this is a pure Home Pride butter top wheat channel. That’s gonna run you roughly $3 at your local Target, Vons, or Food Lion my friends, so 6 is gonna rack us up about $18 for that 1 traded emerald.

Carrots are about 30c a piece, so 22 is… $6.60. A sheet of paper is, like, 2c, so… 24 is getting us up to 48c… for that 1 emerald. Jeez, we keep going backwards, this is not good! And already you can start to see the problem with this methodology; 1 emerald is

Worth anything from 20 bucks to 50 cents! And that’s without me even getting into some of the bigger ticket items like axes and shovels. The range of value for that 1 emerald is just all over the place, depending on what you’re trading it for. There seems to be nothing consistent about its value.

So, let’s approach the problem another way. Consider this, when you trade 22 carrots for an emerald, the farmer isn’t just paying you for the carrots. The carrots are usually right there, literally right next to that villager. I mean, we’ve all felt like evil capitalists

Before clearing out a villager’s garden, only to sell it back to him, but that’s exactly what he wants – or, at least, that’s what I tell myself he wants to make the guilt go away. No, the villager isn’t just paying an emerald for the carrots, he’s paying

You an emerald for the carrots plus the labour costs it took to pull them out of the ground. How much labour are we talking about? [breaking carrot noises] >> MatPat: Oh boy, that is not really a lot of labour. Or, is it? Sure, as the player

We can clear out a field of carrots in seconds using our superpowers, but villagers clearly don’t have the same abilities we do. They can’t instantly build things. They can’t defend themselves against monsters, and they farm way, WAY slower than we do.

So, to get a sense of true value that 22 carrots would have to a villager, I mixed things up a bit. I set up a village with 5 villagers and watched them farm their plots of carrots

For a full day. It was boring. Maybe boring isn’t the right word to describe this – it was frustrating in the same way that watching someone else struggle through a video game that you’re really good at is frustrating. You just gotta sit there while they just that

ONE plot of carrots just unpicked for no apparent reason! I mean, villager! Just grab it! Just grab the top of the carrot and pull! Just, pull a little bit. Seriously, why! Why are you just leaving that one block unharvested?!?! Oh my gosh, it’s like, messing with my OCD.

It is literally the opposite of a “Try Not to Get Dissatisfied” challenge. [Shivers in dissatisfaction ] >> MatPat: Alright. Over the course of the 5 minute 45 second working day of the villager, the 5 villagers managed to clear out 54 plots of carrots which, if harvested without a fortune tool, yielded

124 carrots. That means, on average, each villager was collecting just over 4 carrots a minute. But remember that we’re talking about in-game time. Minecraft day is only 20 minutes long, which means we need to count each 1 minute as 1.2 hours of our time. So,

In other words, the villagers are picking 4 carrots every 72 minutes, or 1 carrot every 18 minutes. THAT IS…, not efficient, my friends. So, to collect 22 carrots, it’s taking a single villager 6 and a half hours – a bit more than one of their full working days. Rounding

Things out here, that means a novice farmer is making roughly 1 EMERALD per day in wages. Mat Pat: Since picking carrots isn’t particularly skilled labour, and since the carrot trade is happening at the novice level for farmers in Minecraft world, I’m gonna imagine that

These villagers would be expecting the lower end of the pay scale for their equivalent real-life position. So, looking up salaries for farm workers in crop fields on the website PayScale.com, we see that the average hourly rate for an unskilled worker is about $10.50.

Since the Minecraft farmer is working 6 hours per day and getting a single emerald out of it, it means that 1 emerald is gonna worth 63 bucks. That… is shockingly low. Definitely a bit better than the 50 FRICKEN’ cents that we calculated earlier but still..-!

This is an emerald that we’re talking about here. These things are called precious gemstones for a reason. Clearly something is not lining up here. The values of these stones is nowhere close to what we would expect ’em to be. Which means that it’s time to do our calculations

A third way. This time, by working in reverse. We know that emeralds are valuable, right? That’s why it costs an arm, a leg, and your firstborn child to buy a decent piece of jewelry for your loved one’s anniversary gift. [Knocks in happiness]

>> Stephanie: Oh hey! Oh, sorry to interrupt recording, I- I just wanted to say thank you. Thanks for the new necklace! I love it. >> MatPat: Well I’m glad you liked it. It was either that or a bundle of sticks. >> Stephanie: Oh, by the way, have you seen Ollie?

[MatPat is thinking about ever decision in his entire life…and whistling] >> MatPat: So, what if, we start with real life prices and work backwards into the game? Back when I calculated the value of Minecraft’s diamond armour, we walked through the four

C’s of gemstone pricing – carat, cut, clarity, and colour, where more expensive gemstones are those that are bigger, aren’t cloudy or scratched, have themselves a vibrant color (or colour), and have a nice cut or design. The same holds true for emeralds just as much

As it does for diamonds. These things are huge, and have themselves a great vibrant green colour, but they definitely aren’t transparent, meaning that they’re cloudy, and they haven’t been cut in any sort of way – they’re fresh out of the ground.

So, technically, we’re gonna go conservative, and price them on the lower end of the emerald pricing scale. Size seems like it should be our biggest challenge, since who knows how large these things are. However, all we need to do are some simple calculations

To know for sure. We know that 9, raw emeralds can craft together to create one large emerald block. And the dimensions of that emerald block are gonna be 1 cubic meter. Since emerald has a density of 2.78 grams per cubic centimetre, our emerald block there is gonna weigh in

At 2,780 kg, or 6,128 lbs. For ONE block of gemstone. Remember what I said last week about how Link would maybe not beat, but could certainly hold his own against Minecraft Steve in a strength competition? …Yeah, forget I said that one. Now, divide that weight of an emerald

Block by 9, since it took 9 emeralds to make it, to get the weight of 1 single emerald, and we get ourselves 680 lbs (309 kg) for one, BASIC emerald in Minecraft. That is one HECK of a necklace! Since gemstones are measured in carats, and

One kilogram equals 5,000 carats, a single Minecraft emerald is clocking in at the scale-breaking weight of 1.545 million carats. According to Singhal Gems International, a low quality emerald larger than 5 carats is gonna cost at absolute minimum $300 per carat, and as

High as $7,500 per carat. Which means that our one single emerald valued at 24 sheets of paper, 1 rabbit stew, or just 32 slices of rotten flesh, would have a real world value on the LOW-END of $463,500,000 – or, if it just so happens to be a highly desirable

Emerald, $11,587,500,000 at absolute most. So, wait, we have ourselves an emerald worth 50c, $60, or 11 BILLION dollars, depending on how we calculate it. The. Same. Emerald. All using perfectly valid ways of calculating the value of this thing. So, which one is it? Am I just

Wrong in the way that I’m calculating this? Well, no. You see, it all goes back to something I said earlier in this episode. >> Past MatPat: We know that emeralds are valuable, right? That’s why it costs an

Arm, a leg, and your firstborn child to buy a decent piece of jewelry for your loved one’s anniversary gift. >> Present MatPat: The thing is, we DON’T know that emeralds are valuable. In fact, we have a pretty solid understanding that in Minecraft, they’re not. Outside of being used as a

Trading item, emeralds have very limited use in the gameplay world. You can’t build tools or weapons out of them, you can’t build Armour out of them, you can’t eat them. Their one and only other use is to select powers from a beacon – the player has to

Select one of the available powers and then insert an emerald into the item slot, and even here the emerald can just be replaced with iron and gold ingots, or just a diamond. In the world of Minecraft, it has zero unique, functional properties.

The issue that we’re facing with this episode is that we’re basing the value of an emerald off of how we price things. And we live in a very different society than Minecraft’s world. We can mass produce paper, we can harvest carrots by the thousands, we have machines

That bake bread around the clock. But in Minecraft, everything is done by hand; it takes a lot of time to make a single bread loaf. And a single rabbit stew? Just think about what you’re asking! It requires a carrot, a mushroom, a baked potato, and cooked rabbit. As we discussed,

The carrot alone is taking 18 minutes to pick, and that’s without even factoring in the time and resources it takes to grow it in the first place. Same with the potato, then you gotta catch and kill and clean and cook the rabbit, then you gotta forage for mushrooms.

That one dish – that one rabbit stew – to us as players living in modern times, and as Steve who is literally a superhuman in this world, is completely unremarkable. But to a villager in this primitive society, that one steaming bowl of soup is sucking up a

Huge amount of time and resources – for just one meal. Which makes it worth its weight in gold – quite literally. The long and short of it is that currency is only worth the value that we ourselves place on it. The earliest currencies back in 9,000 BC were cattle and other livestock,

Mostly because people knew that those things were valuable. Animals provided labour, food, transportation, and that value could be calculated. Fast forward to 1,200 BC, and you see China changing the game by using cowrie shells as currency. You know, those shells that today

They make necklaces out of and sell in beach souvenir shops next to shark teeth, sand dollars, and novelty soda koozies. In fact, cowrie shells are one of the longest and most widely used currencies in history. They could’ve bought you a cow, or a tract of land, but

Today they’re on a rung below boogie board and fun noodle. Sure, at this point we all jump around Minecraft’s over-world without a care in the world, but if you look at it from the perspective of the villagers, it’s a brutal existence, where every night could

Mean death at the hands of the rampaging mobs. It’s a rudimentary society where people aren’t just wearing jewelry around for the heck of it. Here, the things that are valuable are food to survive, weaponry and armour to defend yourself, basic shelter to

Help you live through the night. When you’re operating at that level, a shiny green stone with limited function, while certainly special and pretty, isn’t particularly valuable. It’s only worth the days labour that it saves you, the 6 bread loaves that it buys.

But today, we’re beyond all of that. Food is plentiful, we have ourselves shelter to keep us warm, angry mobs aren’t knocking on our door every night – hopefully… So for us, it’s about prestige, it’s about signs of wealth – the bigger TV, the fancier

Car – and that is why suddenly a shiny green stone mined out from the earth is much more valuable. It’s frivolous, it’s rare, it’s unnecessary, and thereby worth millions. Kind of makes you wonder what our currency will be in the future, thousands of years from

Now. Fibre optic bits, plants from pre-global warming days, or maybe nothing at all. The age of Bitcoin and digital currency, where our wealth is literally numbers in a cloud, are here. Currency is worth whatever society needs it to be worth, and it could be that

We’re fast approaching a time when society tells us a bunch of 0s and 1s are now the better currency than gold, or paper, or gemstones, or cowrie shells, or anything else. So how much is a Minecraft emerald worth? I dunno, how much is it worth to you? Watch

Out Steph, it looks like it’s gonna be a bundle of sticks for our next anniversary. But hey, that’s just a theory – a Game Theory!!!!! Thanks for watching. And hey, if you wanna watch me calculate the actual value of Minecraft’s diamond armour,

Which that one does have a solid result in the end, click the box that you see on screen right now. That is a very special episode of the show, it was the first one that my friend Ronnie Oni Edwards worked on – our first ever team member – and one that we’ve

Sadly lost since then so, if you want to check out that one, we much appreciate it; and heck, while you’re at it clicking buttons on screen, consider clicking the subscribe button. Doesn’t mean a whole lot, but you know what, that number helps, because it adds to another meaningless

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Thank you all so much for watching, I got another Minecraft theory up my sleeve that’s gonna be coming out in the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, something different next week. Alright, see ya then. [Outro Music]