Pixlriffs – Defeating The Arch-Illager Without Weapons! ▫ Minecraft Dungeons: No Weapons Challenge

Yes yes we did it ladies and gentlemen we have made history hello everyone my name is pixel rifts and in my last video about Minecraft dungeons I spent some time punching everything and wondered whether it was possible to beat the game without using weapons this idle curiosity has turned into something of

An obsession until finally on one of my Tuesday twitch streams I took on the final boss of minecraft dungeons and emerged victorious in this video I’m going to show you how I did it and all the lucky loot drops and refined strategies I picked up along the way to

Refresh your memory about this challenge in the previous video I outlined some rules the basic challenge is to beat the game without using melee or ranged weapons except for the two occasions on which you have to use a bow to progress through the tutorial level it’s possible

To skip the tutorial but then you don’t get the fishing-rod artifact right away which is kind of vital for early game strategy anyway I also decided to avoid magic artifacts which could be used as weapons like the corrupted beacon or the harvester and enchantments like electrified and fire trail which

Weaponize your dodge role the only things I could use were armor and armor enchantments artifacts which have a physical effect consumables like potions food or TNT and pets although I later decided I didn’t want to use pets at all if I could possibly avoid it the previous video also explains how I beat

Creeper woods and pumpkin pastures using only the early game armor artifacts and my fists so go check out that video if you want some background about this challenge we pick up having just beaten the Avoca boss at pumpkin pastures which unlocks the wandering trader and a couple of other artifacts we can include

Into our strategy the most effective of these is the wind horn which pushes enemies back a few blocks and slows them down allowing me to get more punches in before they can retaliate I headed to creepy crypts to try out this strategy and gather a few emeralds salvaging any

Weapon drops I had collected along the way it got a little dicey here and there but I made it out alive back at the camp I traded in some emeralds for a spelunky armor and the wandering trader gave me eight of regeneration perfect for some extra healing when my health potions were

Still on cooldown with those acquired I moved on to the next level soggy swamp and it was here that my strategy evolved making my way through soggy swamp was a mix of the same techniques I’d already tried and tested using the surprise gift armor and sharp nuts to spawn potions where I could

Using the Death Cap mushroom to increase my attack speed boots of swiftness to run away effectively and more recently the wind horn to push enemies back and give myself some room the wind horn also allowed me to push enemies off ledges into the water where they just died

Automatically sparing me the trouble of punching everything on the map even if they didn’t drop any xp for that so everything continued as normal until I reached the tunnel section where the game immediately threw an Enderman at me thankfully the teleporting shenanigans of the Enderman combined with wind horns

Slowing him down gave me enough room to throw down a regen totem and heal up between his attacks eventually enough punches connected and the Enderman was defeated yielding perhaps the luckiest drop I’ve ever received an ember robe this unique armor improved my movement speed and artifact cooldown and came

With two enchantments which allowed me to keep surprise gift and further decrease artifact cooldown and perhaps most importantly could deal burning damage to enemies within melee range now on top of punching enemies I was also chipping away at their health with this burning aura and if I took a shadow brew

I could damage them without them even knowing I was there the biggest test of this strategy came at the end of the level where I had to take on the corrupted cauldron boss there is a lot going on in this fight it’s one of the harder boss battles if you don’t have

The right setup or strategy but luckily there are a couple of spots in the boss arena you can hide behind to recover so that’s what I did hide behind the house generates some potions with surprise gift run in and deal some damage then run back behind the house and heal up

Any time I could get a shadow brew and a strength potion together I could chip off a decent amount of its help in total the fight took about 20 minutes and towards the end I tried calling the wolf pet in to distract the purple slimes the cauldron spawns which might also have

Done some extra damage to the boss itself it was painful to salvage the unique daggers that the cauldron dropped but I wasn’t going to use them anyway the Ember robe was now a huge part of the strategy as I took on cacti Canyon the cooldown bonuses let me use my

Artifacts much faster and the burning aura made it much easier to take out crowds of enemies I even started targeting the more powerful enemies in a group assuming that the basic zombies of indicators would just burn themselves out in the background cacti Canyon has a couple of ambushes

And checkpoint fights but no real boss to speak of so I just made my way through the level methodically clearing out enemies as I went and running from anything that looked to chaos it after a couple of tough encounters I made it to the end of the stage and unlocked the desert temple

I found the ancient desert temple next came redstone mine which I was dreading because of two major factors the spawner z’ that can be found throughout the level and the redstone gold embossing at the end I had also forgotten that you encounter an Avoca at one point thankfully there aren’t too many

Objectives that hold you up in this level like creeper woods you’ve mainly got to rescue villages which I could sprint around the room and do quickly even if the Vindicator x’ did occasionally catch up to me at last i stood in front of the red stone golem

And while this fight was tough it was made much easier by the wind or an artifact slowing the golem down was essential to keeping a safe distance reacting to its attacks and allowing myself time to heal it took me out just once and by that point its health bar

Was low enough that I could respawn and finish the job moving on to fiery Forge I became aware that it wasn’t possible to decrease the difficulty passed at level 3 as he moved through the game it enforces this minimum level of difficulty and desert temple looked to be the same with the

Bump in difficulty enemies gain more attack power and HP while here I was still trying to fight them with no weapons so my first attempt at fiery Forge was more of a sprint carving through the level with speed potions and swiftness boots avoiding every enemy encounter I could until I reached the

Boss battle with the redstone monstrosity having played this casually I was confident that I could win without having to deal any damage because the boss arena has 4 redstone cores which you can overload sending out damaging waves of energy in each direction much as they do in the rest of the level the

Collision with the boss is kind of inconsistent sometimes it works better than others but if you just run around and activate the cause whenever they reset you can do some serious damage to the boss very quickly and with a bit of patience that was enough to take down

The monstrosity where soggy swamp had taken close to an hour fiery Forge took 12 minutes my biggest challenge was yet to come because the desert temple is more of a maze filled with redstone traps mini boss encounters with Enderman and ambushes which force you to fight undead

Summoners crowd control is not easy when you can only attack one enemy at a time and these guys were the absolute worst when they spawn zombies around them every few seconds luckily for me the level has a few bottomless pits I could throw enemies into once again using the

Wind horn which really helped me thin the crowd and avoid getting overwhelmed but I still took a bunch of deaths in each of these areas and by the time I reached the boss fights with the nameless one I had no lives left in the bank at this point it was all or nothing

I spawned a bunch of potions using surprise gift and woke up the nameless one from his eternal nap This was the longest fight of the whole challenge for a couple of reasons first there was no fast way to take out the skeleton guards he spawns each time the arena is large enough that I could drag them into a corner behind a pillar without the nameless one trying to

Attack me but I was still spending a couple of minutes taking out the skeletons then spawning potions again so I could sneak up with a shadow brew and deal some damage to the nameless one itself then once the shadow brew wore off nameless one teleports everywhere shoots powerful projectiles at you and

Has a ton of health so it was a very time-consuming process to do any meaningful damage beating the desert temple level took two hours and basically the last hour and 20 minutes of that was the boss fight but as with all of the other bosses my strategy and

Patience paid off and the nameless one was sent back to his grave naturally the game tries to throw a few more enemies at you on the way out but I had zero lives left and I wasn’t going to let an Enderman and a few summoners get the better of me

So I chugged a shadow brew and sprinted for the exit at long last of the arch Eligius castle was in sight as we queued up high block holes I noticed another bump in difficulty this level can’t be played below difficulty for and it was beginning to show in the health of

Enemies the sheer numbers that would spawn during an ambush and how often I would find myself retreating from Vindicator ‘s and Royal Guards there are checkpoint fights and key mob doors so it wasn’t possible to sprint through the level and I had no idea how I’d fare when I reached the throne room

Eventually my first attempt at high block halls was ended at the hands of a team of vindictive chefs but even after all this adversity I believed it could be done the level had a few pits in it which with time and patience I could push the more aggressive enemies into

Using the wind horn that would mostly leave the crossbow wielding pillages and a few spots where hand-to-hand combat was unavoidable and from what I remembered of the throne room from my first casual playthrough there were pits on either side where I could with the Royal Guard so I decided to

Livestream my next attempt at high block halls and the strategy worked with no weapons just an ember robe a death cap mushroom a wind horn and a regen totem we blasted our way through the illest castle and dispatched wave after wave of royal guards into the pit the last

Pillager defeated the door unlocked and we were free to move on to the final level of the game obsidian pinnacle where the arch elegy waits us yes bear fist Steve triumphant once again obsidian pinnacle has a minimum difficulty of 5 meaning the mobs have more health and hit harder than

Anything we’ve encountered so far added to that the platform’s we’re on are quite narrow so it’s easy to get surrounded the spring-loaded piston pads you used to traverse parts of the level can sometimes launch you into a crowd of heavy hitting of indicators there’s one section where you have to stand and

Fight enemies before the gate will lower and let you pass and through all of this I’m using armor which only gives me 20 extra health luckily there are sections of these platforms where we can once again use the wind home to blast the mobs off the side and into the void in

Some areas it’s possible for Steve to run around the walls onto these logs at the sides preventing enemies from chasing you or luring them into a wind horn trap the first attempt didn’t go well but I was convinced it was just a matter of patience and strategy and we

Could make it to the final boss on another livestream because at this point it was way more fun doing this with an audience I made a second attempt at obsidian pinnacle we passed the checkpoint fight rushed through the indoor section dodged around every red stone golem we could find and punched

Our way up the stairs until we finally stood at the threshold of the final boss fight oh my god we’re here we’re actually here this is it this is it I think we’re probably not gonna beat it if I’m honest I don’t think we’re gonna

Beat it I don’t know if the wind horn is gonna do anything to the Iligan horrendously powerful and does damage to you when you are close up and I don’t think I’m gonna be able to avoid that and I’m probably gonna die very quickly I was right the arch eligibles fight

Started and I was immediately outmatched to many extra mobs were spawning the arch illage a teleport everywhere and his projectile attacks were too powerful even the totem of shielding I had brought with me couldn’t hold back the onslaught we delivered a couple of swift punches but bare fists Steve was

Outnumbered and out muscled ah we got so close chat but I honestly didn’t think we were gonna get very far in that last fight ladies and gentlemen we made it this far bear fist Steve can retire a happy man or or in theory we can play through more levels we can

Level up the character we can get a better armor we can do some other kind of armor that has better abilities we can get higher level artifacts that will shield me for longer a wind horn that pushes enemies away more and we could try it again despite having my butt

Handed to me there was still hope I’d seen people with higher level characters who had HP in the thousands if I could level up and get hold of some better armor I might be able to withstand the enemy attacks long enough to deal some damage at least to get to the second

Stage of that boss and see what we were truly up against so I got on my grind i raided creepy crypt over and over again for emeralds and tried a couple of the other hidden levels in the hopes of getting some better gear and along the way I learned more about how the

Blacksmith and the wandering trader work in this game the players power which you can see on the inventory screen is calculated by their equipment the weapons and armor account for 75% of that power rating and the artifacts combined account for 25% so by immediately salvaging all my

Weapons I was preventing my power level from increasing crucially where this matters is when you return to camp because as far as trading with the blacksmith and the wandering trader goes your power level is locked into whatever gear you had on you when you return to camp so by equipping some weapons in

High level artifacts not using them but loading a level and immediately returning to camp I could increase the level of the gear I was getting from both of my friendly villages once I discovered this I was able to get some wolf armor which once again flipped my strategy on its head

This armor had the burning enchantment the same effect as my ember robe but instead of dealing one damage at a time it dealt 19 damage every half and it was enough to one-shot zombies on lower difficulties and as long as the more powerful enemies gathered around me

They would take 38 damage every second they were there this enchantment alone allowed me to take on the stages I’d already completed but at higher difficulty levels and I started farming the zombie spawn as I had once feared in the redstone mines I stood between four of them for about

An hour and went from level 30 to level 50 it gave me nothing extra from the blacksmith but I had a bunch of enchantment points I could use on any armor that seemed worthwhile my dreams of getting thousands of HP were sadly dashed there is a level cap on gear you

Can get from the blacksmith on defaults difficulty and even rushing through the other levels on difficulty 6 I didn’t get anything with a power rating above 39 I had over 300 HP now but I’d still need some strategy to defeat to the arch elegy that strategy came in the form of

Another wolf armor which once again had the burning enchantment but also had potion barrier and enchants that reduces damage by 90% for a few seconds after you take a health potion this was the final piece of the puzzle if I was only taking 10% damage from the archeology

And his minions I could get in there and punch and burn him until his final form appeared and then we would see who came out on top with potion barrier and the burning aura on my side I returned to obsidian pinnacle live on stream and we wiped the floor with the earlier groups

Of enemies I still rushed through the central corridors because red stone golems and Evo cos are not a trivial fight and I wanted to keep all the lives I could after climbing the steps one more time I found myself back at the arena for the arch image afoot but I still had my

Ember robe on me so the first step was to spawn as many potions as I had the patience for we take Shadow brews and swiftness potions if we needed them and save them for the heart of ender if we could after a few minutes we stepped up

And met the arch illage and this time the fight went my way the potion barrier was doing what I needed it to we could outmaneuver him burn him when we got the chance and blast the illah Jers with the wind horn it took a while and he spawned

Two redstone golems in the process but eventually I wore down his HP and the heart of ender emerged all right here we go the equation and now we have to deal with both event that I could shield myself from his attacks and the wind horn did slow him down but the redstone

Gollum made it difficult to stay protected and the fight got out of my control a couple of times luckily I had one last cheesy trick up my sleeve respawning after a death would place me back on the platform before the arena giving players the chance to catch their

Breath before returning to the fight and if I used surprise gift to spawn a shadow brew potion I could sneak up and burn the boss for a few seconds before it realized I was there then by rolling off the arena platform I could respawn back at the safe spot without losing one

Of my precious lights so slowly but surely we stealth attacked the heart of ender until finally with the red stone golem still standing guard bear fist Steve delivered the final blow yes yes we did it and the red stone golem is still there unbelievable we have a broadsword that’s right what

You gonna do well you undo big man the red stone golem did hang around after the final boss was defeated so I still had to take him out but then we were able to march up to the arch elegy the final cutscene at which point you

Might wonder why do any of this why make the game harder why bother with these weird rules and challenges why not just use gauntlets well for a start gauntlets aren’t really available until adventure mode nice try but I wanted to take on this challenge to peek the game without

Weapons because it just felt in the spirit of minecraft minecraft’ started as a simple creative sandbox game and has evolved into the leading example of how emergent gameplay and new ways to play can inspire a community and while some people might feel that’s what’s missing from minecraft dungeons I’m here

To tell you that this game has depth you have not considered ways to play you haven’t explored and maybe the developers themselves didn’t really intend but that’s minecraft for you will bear fist Steve continued his journey absolutely I’ve already made some headway into adventure mode and unlocked

The gauntlets and if I need them to punch my way to victory in the harder difficulty levels so be it I think we’ve earned it thank you so much for watching this video and thank you for believing in the way of bare fists Steve my name

Has been Pixar if don’t forget to leave a like while you’re still here at subscribe if you want to see more and I’ll see you guys soon take care bye for now