Why Minecraft’s 4th Dimension Was CANCELLED

There is no limitation to the number of Dimensions that Minecraft can have in a technical sense Mojang themselves even added billions of them as a joke in 2020 but yet despite that we haven’t seen a new dimension since 2011 and our last major update to it was in 2015. there’s

A fascinating design idea that is quite public that is limiting Minecraft and today’s story will cover the entire history the potential way past it and even into the fourth dimension which has been missing for a while as well as the red dragon which is the weird diversion

Along the way I hope you enjoyed these deeper history videos if you do please do subscribe to the channel so you can see more stuff like this but hello I’m Abby X toy cat and I’m not gonna bury the lead here I’m going to tell you that

I’ve recently discovered one of the most early biomes in Minecraft was the Hellbound because in in Dev Minecraft you would be able to customize your entire world including the size but also including the theme obviously hell is the most drastic of these themes I mean just look around this but there is also

This and this and oh wow that’s Survival Island still popular World type even now but there’s also this way to a minute is that the afer chilling in 2009 Minecraft it does look like it might be but the actual story here is this biome later became uh the inspiration for the end in

Its early stages and that early stage end when it was much more functioned and modeled on Heaven than whatever the end currently was uh that is what later became the inspiration for the aether mod which later would become one of the most popular ideas for the fourth dimension however it’s actually based on

This third dimension and honestly presents one of the big problems but I think we need to take a few steps back to explain how the end went from this to this and from this to this and so let’s do that right now did you know the Ender

Dragon was actually one of the earliest features ever planned for Minecraft You Might Recall how Notch spoke a lot in early TIG Source Forum posts about what he planned for with the game but he also made this vision for survival on his own Tumblr which is now deleted but it’s

Archived and you can see what he planned for Minecraft in 2009 as early as the 14th of June he says in here when referring to the endgame that while it could be fun just to see how long you can survive in survival mode I believe

There is Need for some kind of goal make the most money in a month question mark kill a big Evil mob in the shortest time I don’t know yet and that is the earliest reference to a big mob boss being the end of the game however at the

Same time although this could have been the plan he had all along it is much more likely that lots of the things from this were scrapped and then later came back because if you look through this grand plan there are a few things which turned out to be accurate such as at the

Bottom of the game screen having an inventory list and a health bar selecting things from the inventory list will work like it does now of the scroll wheel or buttons directly he also references that the difficulty levels would range from challenging to Impossible since he wants the game to be

Different he does say if it’s not fun to always be challenged to add easier difficulties but we never did get anything from challenging to Impossible just a hard and normal and an easy and then even a peaceful so to take a small diversion and look through some more of

These predictions uh one of my favorite ones is the idea that there’ll be hostile mobs roaming the map goblins troll wolves whatever fits they will be blocky winking face and then there’s another reference to having two sets of tools as well as armor and helmets and

He says there’ll be an iron as well as a steel which you get by combining iron and coal obviously that one didn’t pan out but yeah this was the very first reference to lots of things which would later become Minecraft features lots of things which wouldn’t but most notably

The end some form of end boss there which wasn’t referenced again until 2011 Notch hinted at a third playable dimension in the middle of this year and it was going to be called the Sky Dimension directly contrasting the hellish never added the previous year with floating islands instead of KV

Neverak this year was incredibly busy for Minecraft as they geared up for a release though and it wasn’t really discussed until much later that year and it wasn’t how you’d expect at all if you take this Notch tweak from 2011 he references how 4chan the slash V board

Is petitioning him to change the name from Enderman to farlanders how about we just renamed the fall lands to the end instead this to me shows two things one that notches there her reading criticism and thoughts about his game even as they’re in that huge crunch in the

Months before release but it also tells us that the end was clearly a name they thought had been freed up that didn’t exist anywhere else because if they were considering renaming the farlands as the end they could have been considering this as the place where you find the uh

The Enderman which would have been ridiculous but I think if you look at the far lands it has just as much identity and feel as the Sky Dimension ever did and so even when October rolls around and we get our first look at a new Dragon it isn’t explicitly in

Something called the end as you can see in this uh early screenshot the dragon is a very very early design model it’s much blockier than the finished release but the end as a whole has mostly taken form here in fact here’s something quite interesting so Notch deleted most of his

Post to do in Minecraft on his Tumblr and as well as his YouTube channel uh soon after he sold the game and was kind of done with it however he made a whole separate YouTube channel just to post these two videos one of which is this

Weird dark footage of the end with no towers and the second of which is entitled why the Ender Dragon won’t spawn in the Overworld these two videos alone confirm that there was going to be a dragon the ender dragon as the end of the game and that obviously there was

Going to be some other Dragon for the Overworld about that though this is the most famous unreleased Minecraft feature perhaps of all time it has come up again and again in the community and it was announced not long after the Ender Dragon was added as best I can tell in

This tweet from Notch off 2011 October the 12th which is really really not that long off the Ender Dragon was being added because he says that after release I will totally work on slightly less dangerous dragons that don’t destroy terrain and can land and whatnot they

Will be red this is a red dragon one that is going to be less dangerous to both you and presumably also the terrain and this is a really good idea that people absolutely fell in love with however he said it’d be after release and so it was something that was pushed

Into the future and obviously it’s easy to dismiss now because Notch doesn’t work on the game however not long after this Jeb J did also confirm himself that he would add it to the game interestingly in this exact same post he thinks that adding fish mobs would be a

Bigger challenge because of how many mobs would be on screen at one time but that did eventually release in 2019 Jeb isn’t the only famous developer who’s commented on this and mentioned that he could do it but just hasn’t gone around to it because dinnerbone also confirmed

In this particular post uh not only that the red dragon would be coming but also that he wants boobies I mean I think this is a fun reminder of how different the messaging uh was allowed to be nine years ago in Minecraft imagine a Minecon live now where Jeb talks about how much

He’s going to that night I mean I would watch that but it would be a very different tone to what Minecraft goes for now uh but yeah it is a good point to say that Minecraft has said multiple times they are going to add the red

Dragon so where is it I don’t notice any other dragons in the game the simple answer I can come up with is that the dragon was a disastrous amount of work that just no one felt like replicating to make in the Overworld which would also then go against a lot of Minecraft

Rules about natural disasters and whatnot do you want to have a boss style mop or should it be something that’s friendly that you come up after I think something like a mountain update like we recently had would be a great opportunity because he could perch really high and that could be a

Challenge to going up there however it’s something that Minecraft has basically uh said they’ll get round to but ultimately is a lot harder than it sounds like but if I had to guess based on all the information we have available and the last reference to it being several years ago every Minecraft

Developer who’s been motivated to work on it has later gone oh God this is an amount of work that I am not comfortable with and so that is seemingly Where The Red Dragon is it’s on the big list of ideas that Mojang is totally going to

Add when they get the time for it but as you know if you’ve worked on a creative project getting the time for something can be really hard however they did get the time to specifically release Minecraft so November 2011 rolls around and the big launch party goes ahead they

Add the third dimension into Minecraft alongside a whole host of other features and this poem it was added by a man called Julian out and 11 years later there’s controversy about whether it’s really owned by Minecraft but for now let’s just know that it was added because Notch wanted something that felt

Weird for Minecraft and so nine minutes of rambling about the universe is in fact deliberate and honestly beautiful I think weird and maybe a bit beautiful is how you might Define the entire end fight because the way you get to this Dimension is you find a stronghold then

You put eye offenders into the end portal you go in and wow there’s a dragon it says boss Health at the top and you’ve got to kill this dragon by taking down her sources of Health regeneration and then taking her down herself just like the poem says that

Everything you need is inside of you they clearly believe that this Dimension with just three main features was perfected uh it’s a place to Jewel the dragon and no changes were made until they eventually decided this Dimension needed some content years later I’m just kidding they did actually change the sky

In 1.3 which does look a lot nicer especially with night vision but you realize very quickly that yeah this was all for a very long time and it makes you realize the end as a whole was just a single purpose Dimension it was a place to fight the dragon and not a lot

More Honestly though this guy really is just about the only thing that makes the biome unique that never has three core parts to its identity the eight to one scaling versus the Overworld the unique mobs and blocks and the difference in physics water cannot exist outside of

Cauldrons and lava flows much faster and further so when you compare these three things versus the end you’ll realize only the second one belongs to that and even then if you compare the list of blocks and mobs this is a much weaker end than ever even now after these

Updates uh here’s a fourth experiment for you to make you realize why identity is so important imagine an Overworld with infinite different biomes you can teleport between them every minute but you won’t know which part of the world the portal will take you to well you’ve just created the 20w infinite snapshot

To be fair the thing that makes uh some of these Dimensions different are the different conditions whether that’s Overworld caves or sky but you’ll be barely notice the difference between Dimensions but based on the never and the ones based on that end there is very little that really differentiates the

Three major Dimension types when you actually change the blocks and everything else about them which is the biggest thing that should help you realize that these Dimensions don’t have enough identity in their own right it should be really clear when you’re in the end not based on seeing all the End

Stone around but based on how the dimension itself actually functions even the never is missing a little bit compared to what it could directly have but the end is just absolutely missing and so that’s why they decided to make we’ve been asking for this forever but it actually already came and was the

First update post Microsoft purchase I mean obviously it’s a big update and it’s very important but it’s overshadowed by other things in that update let’s say and so this update is famous for adding other things and then the end islands with their new structure and terrain and ability to teleport

Around the dimension this update even added as tommaso puts it a feature which is a lot like Mario 64. uh this was the world’s first ever announcement of the elytra by the way an incredibly game-changing feature uh but this end update wasn’t just about adding the end

Islands as amazing as they were it wasn’t just about the chorus fruit and tipped arrows and all of the things in between it was also where they substantially changed the ender dragon fight at least for players not on the console edition here’s another fun tangent where a dimension got a lot of

Its identity from 4J Studios because they drastically altered the end fight when they added it to consoles the Xbox 360 at the time was capable of running the end and but they decided rather than porting it over directly why not make a much friendlier fight so that players

Wouldn’t be confused on these consoles at first it seemed a bit weird to change the entire fight but there are three major changes that they made when they introduced 1.0 to the consoles back into u9 and the first one arguably made the end a little bit easier it centered all

Of the obsidian pillars around the end portal this is a much better way of doing things you might argue because now they’ll be uh within some distance of each other and closer to where the dragon can actually defend them so maybe not actually easier in any way the

Second change they made was that two of the towers would always have these iron bar cages around them this was a really seriously cool addition and then the Third change was that the dragon wouldn’t just have physical attacks she could also fire dragon’s breath as well so this dragon’s breath was just an

Attack at the time the acid attacks were huge and scary and honestly this was an example of Minecraft console edition not just taking the Java and porting it over but actually making it actively better they did make make the game’s technically different for a while there

But the end result was that whenever a Minecraft developer from the Java Edition played the console they went wow yeah this is cool why don’t we make this into our Edition something they did in 1.9 in the end update although it’s got a different name though we won’t be

Referring to right now it’s definitely 1.9 the end update and uh that’s when they finally took that from the console to the PC there’s a whole tangent here about how Minecraft Bedrock could massively learn from this so many exclusive features started on Bedrock or Java and then later made their way to

The other Edition and it feels like right now if for some reason the Bedrock Edition didn’t have the end they would just Port the end exactly how it was from the Java Edition rather than saying why don’t we use this as an opportunity to make it better like 4J Studios did

Back in the day by the way since this update not only took the console edition end fight but also added those end Islands I mentioned earlier when those same end Islands came to console they actually did Port them in in my opinion and inferior way it was very strange

Because you could go through these end gateways but it wouldn’t take you to an entirely different part of the dimension with endless end Islands because there was no infinite Terrain in console instead it will take you to these very small self-contained Islands there were four of those per consolidation world

And it’s one of those incredibly weird artifacts of the console edition just having less space to play around with and so that is something I need to mention because yeah of course on Bedrock you can not only have an infinite end Island you can not only have the console edition end fight but

Also because render distances have gone up so much if you play with above 60 chunks of render distance you’ll see that you can actually notice the end islands all the way from the mainland something which was never intended even when this end up day came out in 2015.

Again it was definitely called the end up day didn’t have another name this was the last time they updated the end in any serious way and so what has happened in the years since I think an end update is so hard to Define in terms of scope

Though you could add more mobs and blocks you could add more biomes but I think the harder thing to do would be to give the dimension a point outside of good loot and a leech shows why bother exploring the depths of this Dimension I really racked my brain on this for a

Really long time and the best answer I can give is I guess to find more of these teleporting and Gateway things this is the only Dimension you can hop across so quickly the closest thing this place has to an identity that doesn’t come from its blocks and its mobs is

That you can go across the entire thing very quickly but because unlike the never it doesn’t scale any amount the other world there’s one way in and there’s one way out and they happen to be about 100 blocks apart there’s basically no reason to come out here for

All of this teleporting maybe if there’s something fun that happened here maybe the difficulty scales as you get further and further away from the end island or maybe the loot scales or the challenge the reward whatever it is the reason to be out there should be something which

Gets better and better the further out you go because otherwise why is it infinite once you find your first end City you’ve basically finished this place and so finding new biomes if they were super super rare could be that identity but I think there is a serious

Gap missing and so that is what brings us into the fourth dimension King B dogs who is the developer behind the Aether specifically said the Aether would not be coming to Minecraft he also specifically said that if there was going to be a new dimension it’s important for it to have its own

Identity and so the reason we don’t have a fourth dimension is because why do we even have a third I have a giant tunnel and a village and pillage Outpost in my end but what is the point besides being deliberately weird the best thing about this Dimension is the fact that there is

A nothingness void between the main island and the end where you can build anything you want and there’s no background to it whatsoever uh but is that enough of a reason is is my fun build where I covered an entire uh and Island in sand interesting enough to you

Or is that just me being quirky it you know maybe it can be both thank you if so but like if you look at this you realize that the only real difference here is that there is a lack of non-enderman mobs which is really fun if

You aren’t having all of your sand moved around by Enderman but it is is actually a interesting identity You could argue the lack of difficulty out here can make it the end game for building in Minecraft but I think they need to lean into that and do a much better job at

Making players feel like that’s the case before you can add a fourth dimension where would a fourth dimension go what Niche would it have everyone points to the ancient city portal but until you can say what should be on the other side and why it should be there I think the

Fourth dimension is a non-starter I like that we have the early game law to where that place might be what it might do but I think it’s going to be a long long time until we see the end updated and before you know as many developers Jeb

Himself included have said until we have an end update we cannot have a fourth dimension is that good thinking is the fourth dimension ever going to be necessary is a you know like perfect trifecta of hell heaven and then the regular Overworld in between them is that enough already these are all

Questions that I’d like to actually hear your thoughts on uh but for now this has been the slightly secret history off the end I hope you enjoyed the journey that we took through the red dragon and the console edition and let me know if you like these history of videos where I

Actually take the time to dive into each of the tangents that I know you know usually I just say as an aside like there’s the red dragon but I think it’s much more fun to dive into them let me know what you think and maybe consider liking or subscribing if you really

Liked it thank you to notaloo for editing this together and I look forward to seeing you in the next one goodbye Thank you foreign