Unsolved Mystery of Minecraft’s Disc 5

At the end of last month, I uploaded a video detailing the story of the two cursed Minecraft music discs, 11 and 13. Little did I know, nearly a decade after their release, the job wasn’t done just yet. In the new Minecraft 1.19 snapshot 22w16b, Mojang’s Samuel Aberg has added the first

New lore disc since the release of Minecraft 1.0, Disc 5. A track that seemingly warps time as we rush back and forth between the sounds of marching, a soft piano melody, eerie ambience and just about every creepy sound effect you can imagine.

In today’s episode of Minecraft Uncovered, we’re going to dive deep into the potential lore of Disc 5 and discover what Minecraft’s new cursed disc is hiding. Just looking at Disc 5, you can tell it’s different. Not just from the normal music discs we’re familiar with, but even from the other lore

Discs of 11 and 13. Even with the bicolored core of 13 and the shattered Disc 11, the standard black vinyl rim around the outside is consistent across every disc in the game excluding the red disc of Pigstep, which makes sense considering it comes from a different dimension.

Disc 5, though, is an outlier, a black disc with an blue, sculk-covered rim. That’s because this isn’t a standard overworld song, but one that comes from the Deep Dark, a new biome introduced in the 1.19 Wild Update.

But the appearance of the new disc isn’t the only thing that sets it apart from the rest; the track itself is, in my opinion, the most interesting and unique in the game. Let’s listen. Disc 5 opens with static, as did Disc 11, but 5 seconds in we hear ambience cut in swiftly,

Followed by the familiar click of a flint and steel. With bat squeaks and flapping wings in the background, we can safely assume we’re underground, and the staggered start of stony footsteps supports this. Slowly though, these steps transition to a louder, synchronized march, and you can hear

The metallic gear shifting on our new protagonist. The marching abruptly stops, pebbles crumbling beneath their feet, and after a sigh, a noise I can only describe as time travel wub wubs cut in: in reality, the reversed sound bite of collecting experience.

A sharp inhale joins the ambience, followed by an ear-piercing growl and scream, but suddenly, the beast and everything else slows to a stop. Time itself has frozen, shortly before transitioning into 22 seconds of actual music. A simple piano melody, reminiscent of the Aether soundtrack, which may not be a coincidence

As 1.19 and the Aether were made by the same man. At 1 minute and 2 seconds, time stops once more, cutting the music off and replacing it with static before the track cuts underground yet again, with the sound of bubbling lava meeting our ears.

After a moment, a rocky clink hits the floor, which surprisingly I actually recognized: that’s the sound of an amethyst geode being placed. The new terrain seems to cause a ripple effect of some sort, and an oddly high-pitched noise is heard in the background; we’ll come back to that.

In the midst of all this, we can hear two distinct mob sounds: the first being the scuttle of silverfish on the stone floor, but the second, unexpectedly, being the babble of an endersent, a character from the Minecraft Dungeons franchise.

Once the mobs quiet, our protagonist continues, clicking his flint and steel on the stone to set a fire for light, coughing from the smoke, and continuing to walk along his path until a sudden stop, before a brief sprint out into the open, seemingly reaching the

Surface of the overworld, the sound of hammering rain drowning everything else out. As they enter the new environment, time is stopped and the sound cuts off entirely with another odd, high-pitched whir: again, we’ll come back to this. The electronic zing leads into a staticky silence interrupted only by a single thud

Until time slowly resumes, apparently within a warped forest based on the ambience. A flint and steel starts another fire and the walking continues with distant thuds following behind. Scraping fills the air as the loud thuds get closer and quicker.

An intense din resounds throughout the underground, and the sound quiets once again before a shatter; another reversed bit of sound, this time the sound of glass breaking before the intense roar of a portal, opening before our eyes. Heavy breathing and a flint and steel click precedes our explorer approaches before the

Track goes quiet. A sword is unsheathed, then… a murderous growl rings through the air, with the final timestop cutting it off and slowly bringing the sound to silence as the portal seems to shut, distant rocks crumbling to the floor. When silence is finally achieved, time continues as usual, popping and static interspersed

Throughout the remaining seconds of the disc before it comes to a close. As you can tell, Disc 5 has some interesting additions that set it apart from all its peers, most notably the freezing of time through the track.

But it’s also clear that this disc cannot be interpreted as directly as 11 and 13, tracks made almost entirely of noises ripped straight from the game. Minecraft has no way to stop time. There’s no scraping in the game, the odd electronic high notes are completely out of

Place, and most importantly, the snarling beasts throughout the track are from a different game entirely. But that’s not to say that Disc 5 can’t be pieced together, both literally and figuratively. There is a tale to tell in this track, but one split into pieces, just as the disc itself.

Let’s start from the top. Our hero steps through the underground using a flint and steel to light his way, reminiscent of Disc 13 and 11. But as the sound continues, I don’t think we’re dealing with the same person. The sound starts with one man walking through an abandoned scene beneath the ground, but

It ends as a rhythmic march of the guards once protecting this Ancient City. See, 1.19 brings a lot more than just Disc 5, it also brings the warden and, more importantly to us, the new Ancient City fortresses of the Deep Dark biome.

Now, we don’t have a canon backstory to the brand new feature, but such a huge and fortified town must have had guards, kings, enemies. As the time reverts to present day with the reversed sound of experience, our hero encounters one of them: an endersent.

Now, this might seem like a stretch considering the fact that, you know, endersents aren’t in the game. But it’s not actually as unreasonable as you may think, for one very important reason: endersents are part of the Minecraft universe. By Mojang’s own words, Minecraft and Dungeons share a universe, meaning everything from

One is in the other. Now, does this necessarily mean that endersent are being added to Minecraft? No, it’s a unique mob to the Dungeons games and we have their endermen brothers to take their place, but it does mean that an endersent encounter in Disc 5 is absolutely possible,

And considering the similarities between the sounds of the two, it’s almost certain that’s what we’re looking at. What follows, though, can’t be so easily explained: the 22 second piano melody cutting into an otherwise consistent lore track. As we mentioned before, it’s reminiscent of the Aether soundtrack, but even with the

Portal mentions later on, don’t expect the Aether making it into the game: that won’t happen for many reasons, least of all that Mojang has outright said they’re not adding any new dimensions until the 3 we have now are much improved.

It might have just been a stylistic choice, but there very well could be a deeper meaning we simply don’t know about: there doesn’t seem to be any credible theories on it that I’ve seen as of yet, and unfortunately, I don’t have anything to contribute other

Than the potential that this piece of track is not supposed to be here: a fragment of another disc, perhaps, accidentally combined with the other 8 fragments we have so far to create Disc 5. It’s not exactly a rock-solid hypothesis – after all, if you had the wrong piece of

A puzzle, you would probably know – but it’s the only thing I can think of. When the music ends, we cut back to a lava-flooded underground, which places us around 60 blocks below zero, likely on our way to the deep dark, if not already there.

When the amethyst is placed down, it seems to cause a chain reaction, which I can only explain by the idea of sand, gravel, or stalactites falling from the ceiling of the cave. In the midst of all this, however, is something interesting.

Not something you would ever interpret simply by listening to the track, but something that could potentially be vital to solving this puzzle. Opening Disc 11 in a audio spectrogram, a visualizer for the different frequencies of a track, allows us to spot an unusual figure in the midst of the audio as the electronic

Screech rings through the track: two perfectly straight lines above the ambience, joining together to form what appears to be the corner of a ceiling. And skipping briefly to about 30 seconds later, we once again hear a similar noise, this one

Forming the edge of two walls, ones seemingly built from planks, bricks or deepslate, just barely able to make out the texture of the surface. Right now, we don’t know what or where these are: perhaps an interior room in the Ancient

City, or potentially something new we haven’t seen at all: all we can say is this is definitely not a coincidence, and we’re seeing snapshots from the game within the spectrogram of Disc 5. Returning back to where we left off, another endersent babbles while silverfish slither

In the background, suggesting that if endersent truly are part of the Minecraft universe, they can be found here in the Ancient City of the Deep Dark. Our protagonist continues on his way, now running his way out of the deep dark, running

To the surface with the rain covering his tracks, the time stopping yet again where we see our second spectrogram vision of the tiled walls. When time resumes, we now hear sounds of the warped forest of the Nether, a stark contrast to our previous location, but still fitting for the aesthetic of the track.

Our adventurer continues as usual, clicking his flint and steel together for light, and heads on his way even as distant thuds follow. He scrapes his flint against the rock of a peculiar structure, lighting it, and a pleasing but frightening roar responds: a portal.

Not a dimensional portal, at least not to a new dimension, but the abandoned portal of the Ancient City, another new feature of the 1.19 update we know little about. This rectangular structure referred to as a portal in the games files, shaped similarly to the head of a warden.

The explorer approaches, the portal growing louder, but his noise has not gone unnoticed. Something on the other side has found him. The Warden. And as our hero gets closer to the portal, so do the beasts on the other side. By the time he steps through the portal, it’s too late.

The portal is open. The monsters are freed. The city is infested. And soon after, the city has fallen. Disc 5 is a tale of a lost city, a once-prosperous empire destroyed by the Warden and his minions, left to rot under the earthen floor of your world until an adventurer steps foot into

The ruins for the first time in millenia, discovering that the abandoned town still has one occupant left after all this time. The Warden is the protector of the Ancient City now, and you are an invader. So, either stealthily evade his sense by quietly circling the perimeter of the town… or prepare for battle.

Thank you all for watching, I hope you all enjoyed. I know literally nobody cared when I made the video on DIscs 11 & 13, but I saw the new disc and I had to cover it, so I did a quick Minecraft Uncovered speedrun any% and

Made a video in like 3 days, hopefully it didn’t seem too rushed. Anyways, uh, like and subscribe if you enjoyed and want more, follow me on Twitch if you want to see some chill streams of Minecraft and other games this summer, and join my Discord

If you want to theorize on Disc 5 or do just about anything else, pretty much every topic is welcome. That’s all I’ve got though, so again, thank you for watching, and have yourselves a good one, peace.