The Nightmare of the Phantoms | Minecraft Deep Dive

One of the more interesting parts of minecraft is the wide variety of mobs to be found there are the fan favorites such as the creeper and the endermen as well as peaceful villagers and their evil counterparts of the illagers however there’s one that sticks out is extremely unique and that’s the phantom

Although it certainly had its share of controversy amongst the community it’s impossible to deny that there’s something strange about it compared to everything else why does it only attack players who haven’t slept is it even real or is it some dark hallucination welcome to deep dive a series where i

Explore some of the more interesting and unique aspects of games such as minecraft tonight we’re going to stay up late to examine the phantom hopefully our explorations will allow us to see how it fits into the overall context of the minecraft world join me for a dive beneath the waves To begin our investigation we’re going to start with their most unique aspect which is their spawning condition unlike every other mob in the game the phantom appears to be deeply tied to the player itself several things are required in order for phantoms to spawn first it must be night or a thunderstorm

Second the player must be above sea level and third there needs to be an unrestricted view of the sky the fourth condition however is the most interesting of them all it must have been at least three minecraft days since the player has slept if these conditions are met then groups

Of phantoms will spawn overhead encircling and dive bombing the player the final condition forces us to rethink some basic minecraft mechanics when talking about minecraft lore we often need to make a distinction as to whether something was designed to be lore a gameplay element or a technical limitation

A simple example of this is the void although it may be tempting to try and craft some complex theory about what the void is the reality is that it’s probably a technical concern all video games have something like it beneath the geometry it’s not even supposed to be seen because of the

Bedrock layer so i think it’s tough to argue that we can use it when trying to figure out the lore another example is the infinite water source does the fact that two buckets can magically produce an unlimited amount of water imply some deeply complex interaction between the two

Does having two buckets tap into some interdimensional cosmic water source allowing for infinite water at the expense of having an eternally dry nether no of course not it’s a gameplay decision designed to make things easier on the player especially if they’re trying to build using water or craft potions

Now let’s talk about sleeping initially we may think of this as a gameplay factor sleeping serves the very practical use of setting the spawn point with the added benefit of skipping the knight at first glance there’s really no reason to assume any lore implications it’s convenient from a gameplay

Standpoint to have a sleeping mechanic case closed right but that’s what makes the phantom so interesting it takes something that seems to be purely designed for gameplay and suddenly turns that on its head forcing us to fundamentally reconsider our assumptions there is some purpose to sleeping besides just the practical element

A player that refuses to sleep is suddenly assaulted by screaming beasts from above sleep has been morphed into something that we need to consider from a lore perspective so perhaps the best way forward is to take a brief detour into dreamland and really think about sleeping analytically

Players are not the only being that sleeps villagers do as well in fact every village house has a bed it’s part of the definition of a house villagers do not stay up late if they can help it preferring to stick to a schedule which of course includes sleeping vets can

Also spawn in igloos but as i talked about in a different video there appears to be strong evidence that a villager used this igloo so that doesn’t give us any new information there’s another place where beds can spawn woodland mansions however these are different illagers don’t use the crafted bed block

Instead they prefer to construct their beds physically sometimes creating ornate bedrooms we don’t ever actually see them sleep but it’s hard to imagine that they wouldn’t use them furthermore we know the illagers are physiologically similar to villagers so it’s no surprise that they would sleep as well

That’s it though we have three mobs that can sleep villagers illagers and the player out of minecraft’s 70 plus mobs that number seems somewhat low and to make things more interesting the phantom attacks exactly one of them the player we can force villagers to do a rush and sleep experiment but phantoms

Will not come after them there’s something special about the player that statement seems to be an inherent truth to minecraft one which i’ve sort of avoided because it’s a very complex topic but it’s not hard to see that the player is fundamentally different from the rest of the mobs in minecraft

They can build and craft whatever they want they can discover new things rule over villagers and farm mobs i’ve talked about this before but it’s hard to deny that they have a place in the lore the fact that there’s an end to the game tells us that the players actions matter

They affect the story they can free the end we can’t just ignore them and the fact that the phantom is so deeply tied to the player forces us to recognize this simply knowing that the player is different is still not quite enough however the list of their unique features is

Long which one of these makes them a target for phantoms at this point in the discussion we still don’t know so let’s shift our focus back to the phantom itself it may be tempting to think that the phantom is some hallucination from sleep deprivation that does seem to make sense as this can

Occasionally occur in real life but it’s clearly false hallucinations can’t kill someone by attacking them furthermore the phantoms drop phantom membranes on death a physical item which wouldn’t exist if the phantom wasn’t real there is tangible proof that a phantom is a physical mob not some bizarre figment of the imagination

We can find some additional evidence from an unlikely source cats they’re one of the tame-able mobs cats hate phantoms hissing at any that come near the player cats also have an interesting mechanic where they will sometimes bring an item to the player once they wake up it’s mostly the stuff you’d expect such

As string feathers or parts of a dead rabbit but what’s intriguing is that cats can occasionally find phantom membranes although this seems inconsequential it alerts us to a subtle point that may otherwise be missed phantoms exist somewhere in the world even if the player never stays up

This allows us to rule out the idea that the player’s lack of sleep somehow creates phantoms rather phantoms are attracted to a player cats are apparently able to find them sometimes let’s take a step back and review the evidence we know that sleeping is important by not sleeping phantoms are attracted

We know that phantoms are real physical beings that exist regardless of whether they attack the player now that we know phantoms are real let’s take a look at them a little more closely phantoms are a terrifying beast they’re the only overworld hostile mob that can fly and their air speed is second to

Just the ender dragon phantoms also have a very important property their undead this puts them in a rather large group including zombies skeletons zombified piglens and many more i’ve talked about this before but one important implication is that an undead mob was at one point living for some undead mobs

This is easy to see for example a zombie villager was clearly a villager and a zoglin was a hoglin there are many undead mobs whose original beings no longer exist in the world this group all has the same basic anatomy humanoid and similar to the player these are an extinct species of builders

A group which i’ve mentioned a few times before there’s evidence for their existence throughout the world but none of them survived becoming undead instead we’ll return to these builders in a bit for now we can recognize that many of the undead mobs can all be lumped into a single category

Now the phantom stands on its own among the undead mobs there’s nothing even remotely close to it that’s alive nor are there any other undead mobs similar in the slightest way nonetheless we know that there was a living version of the phantom at one point in time

So where is it and what happened this is one of the tougher mysteries we’ve covered on this channel to think about it it may be easier to eliminate some possibilities the main use for the phantom membrane is to repair the elytra does this mean that the elytra comes

From the phantom i don’t think so for a couple of reasons first of all phantoms don’t spawn in the end and elijah are found exclusively in the end second the elytra appears to be beetle wings in fact the word elytra refers to the hardened wing protectors in real life beetles

Phantoms are simply not beetles we can see a clear spine and skeletal system contrary to the exoskeleton found in insects phantom membranes are a material that happens to repair the elytra not something that came from the same place it’s a convenient substitution at this point it really does seem that phantoms

Are not related to anything else in the minecraft universe this is a very tricky subject now that we’ve examined the evidence we’re forced to make a bit of a jump here i’ll give you a fair warning usually in these deep dies i’m pretty sure that my explanation is correct

But in this case i’m less confident so please respond in the comments with your thoughts about what i’m about to say with that out of the way let’s see if we can find an explanation for the phantoms as i said earlier the vast majority of undead mobs belong to the ancient

Builder species wiped out by a mass extinction event these zombies skeletons and their variants attacked the player in the modern day but presumably they wouldn’t have done so before they were made undead we know that zombification can change or even reverse how entities act a zombie villager becomes deranged and

Aggressive compared to their mild-mannered counterpart and there’s also evidence that the ancient builders worked alongside the endermen so it wouldn’t seem as though they were inherently hostile when they’re alive what if the phantom is the same way is it possible that in its living state it wasn’t evil

The phantoms have an uncanny ability to seek out players with a lack of sleep that in and of itself is not a bad capability in fact if used correctly phantoms could be incredibly beneficial i’m going to suggest that the ancient builders had a close relationship with the living phantoms

There are tangible reasons why they would want to do so we know that the ancient builders were explorers using their ships to chart the world surely sometimes they would get stuck trapped or otherwise incapacitated during their dangerous journeys rescue would be impossible unless there was some way that they could be found

And it just so happened that there was a mob capable of this a bird with a sharply attuned sense which could seek out entities that were weak with a lack of sleep perhaps their natural instinct was to hunt them perhaps it was something else either way the builders realized that

The phantoms had this ability which if harnessed could be very useful so they got to work training and taming the phantoms to be used for these search and rescue missions although it would be a tough task having phantoms would be enormously helpful in reducing loss of life in their

Explorations phantoms were not easily domesticated and they probably had a tenuous relationship with the builders compared to cats or wolves which were deep companions but that was okay since phantoms were tools not pets they did their job which was all the builders wanted then disaster struck the mass extinction event began

And the zombie plague began to their civilization cats and wolves happened to be naturally resistant as were other domesticated animals such as cows and pigs and not everything was so lucky some horses were afflicted and phantoms were not immune either those nearby converted to the undead

Form which are the phantoms we see today as more builders began to fall survival became tougher and tougher this meant even more late nights on the run hoping to escape the rapidly spreading disease the phantoms were trained to come and find stranded builders and they did just that

The problem was that they were infected hunting down even the most resilient of the group in a dark twist the beings designed for rescue became the final dagger in their fate this helps explain why cats hate phantoms they seem to have an innate sense of when something is wrong and

After spending so much time with the living phantoms they instinctively saw the problem with their undead variants although cats didn’t have a deep understanding of what happened they at least knew that something unnatural was going on hissing at any phantoms that came nearby as phantoms or birds it’s not unlikely

That some of them were attacked by cats leading to their avoidance of them skip ahead to the present day the player is very similar to the ancient builders both in capabilities and in appearance they may even be of the same species but that’s a can of worms i’ll say for a different video

Regardless they’re like enough that phantoms instinctively attack them after a lack of sleep the difference is that the player is not vulnerable to zomification so although they’re annoying at the end of the day they’re not that much different than zombies and skeletons they’re continuing to use their special capabilities even after becoming undead

As i said earlier this is speculation in every video i remind you not to take what i say as the absolute truth think about the facts and come up with your own ideas this topic is especially complex and although my explanation may be correct i could also be totally off base for one

I still haven’t explained how or why the phantom is capable of finding players with a lack of sleep i’m also assuming phantoms would do the same to the ancient builders something we can’t know for sure another thing that’s not explained is where the phantoms go during the daytime

The spawning conditions tell us it has to be somewhere in the overworld however we could ask the same question about zombies and skeletons so that issue isn’t limited to just phantoms the facts we’ve found leave some room for interpretation i can’t sit here and tell you i figured

It all out with this topic i’m especially interested in hearing your thoughts the phantom is often overlooked in lore discussions the point of this video is to get the minecraft community as a whole thinking about phantoms if you want a place to get your ideas

Out there come and join us on the retro gaming now discord we have a great community centered around minecraft lore discussions and we love to hear your ideas i want to get to the bottom of phantoms and this video is just a start also this channel recently surpassed a hundred thousand subscribers

This is a pretty big achievement but it’s not about me it’s about you the audience so i wanted to do something special to commemorate this milestone i always talk about how the purpose of this channel is to get people thinking critically about minecraft theories

What i’m going to do is make a video in the deep dive style covering several theories from fans of this channel it could be about something i’ve already talked about or it could be totally unique the important part is that you make it your own in the description there’s a

Link to a google form write out your theory in detail you can also put it in the comments if you want others to see it after a week or so i’ll read through them and pick the best ones and make it into a video

This is going to be a ton of fun and i encourage you to submit your ideas no matter how crazy once again thank you so much for 100k we’ll go ahead and end with that thanks for watching this has been retro gaming now and i’ll see you all in the next video you