Imagine for a second that you’ve never heard of minecraft yes this will be a challenge as for many of us it was an important part of our childhood but now you know nothing about it no memes no history no minecraft live nothing it’s all gone now let’s say that one of your friends Told you about this great new game called minecraft you buy it download it and open the game how far do you think you could get with no outside help how much of the game could you reasonably be expected to figure out for yourself i’ve had this question in my mind for Over 10 years when the nether was added in 2010 it really bothered me that there was no way to know how to build a portal using the information in-game one of my friends had to tell me about it minecraft has changed substantially since then but it still suffers from This problem so how far could you get using in-game information only tonight we’re going to aim to finally answer that question here’s how this will work we’ll simulate a blind playthrough of the game as we discover features we’ll try to give them a clarity score from a scale of one to Five five means that the information about how to access the feature is clearly obvious in game on the other hand a score of one would be something that’s essentially impossible to discover without outside help so let’s get started when we enter a new world the game does Give us some basic hints move with w a s and d jump with space fair enough that’s pretty easy look around use your mouse to turn again pretty straightforward stuff we use our new found controls knowledge to explore a bit and we stumble upon a tree destroy the tree hold the left Mouse button the game tells us when we follow the instructions we discover that the tree does indeed break or at least part of it suddenly we get a notification stating that new recipes have been unlocked craft wooden planks the recipe book can help awesome but just how do we find this Recipe book is it in the menu we hit escape but there’s no recipe book option um is it a keybind options controls keybinds not seeing recipe book anywhere maybe it’s in the inventory ah that’s it there’s a book button clicking on it we see wooden planks on the side Selecting it moves our log into the crafting section and by selecting the planks we have just crafted our first recipe doing so unlocks several new recipes and our book updates accordingly let’s try making sticks yes this must be a crafting component since it appears as though we’ve unlocked the recipes to Several tools but the tools don’t show up in the book what’s going on here well let’s just make every other recipe available wooden button pressure plate crafting table could this be important there’s a symbol of it on the recipe book while we have one it’s not immediately obvious what to Do with it but another trip to the controls alerts us to the fact that we can use an item with right-click so we right-click once to place the table and again to bring up a different crafting interface now that’s more like it we can now craft our tools let’s make a wooden hoe When we pause the game we see something called advancements it currently tells us what we should do next as well as the following step mine stone with your new pickaxe there’s a picture of a wooden pickaxe so we make one and start mining after digging down For a bit we reach the advancement next up is construct a better pickaxe we return to the crafting table and make a stone pickaxe using our new resources the following advancement is a bit trickier smelt and iron ingot where we gonna find iron it seems logical that This is a use for our new pickaxe we begin mining and after a few minutes we break a new block resulting in raw iron but this clearly isn’t our final product we need to smelt an iron ingot it’s not explicitly clear how to do that but sifting through the recipe book leads us To a furnace it has its own recipe book and as we expected we can smelt iron and complete the advancement wood is a logical choice for fuel and before we know it we have our iron ingot night has fallen upon our world and we’re starting to see several hostile Enemies attacking us we can attack them back although we aren’t quite sure what this little icon means we also don’t necessarily realize that darkness causes enemies to spawn the game has no text suggesting that we should craft torches at this point in the game the possible advancements diverge we could protect Ourselves with a piece of iron armor contained in the recipe book we could make an iron pickaxe we could fill a bucket with lava the game has taught us the basics of minecraft the importance of mining and how to craft more subtly it’s alerted us to some other important Elements such as how there are different tiers of materials which can be used for tools and armor however there are a few critical mechanics that aren’t explained first the importance of food this one’s probably one we could figure out on our own and we’d also be helped by the Recipe book if we were to acquire raw meat another critical block is the bed tucked away in the adventure section of the advancements tree we see that it’s possible to sleep in a bed to change the respawn point but actually making this may be a bit more tricky as the bed Doesn’t show up in the recipe book as we’ve learned picking up new resources adds recipes that use them to the book right now we don’t know that we need wool at this point in the game the next step is to find diamonds in obsidian which isn’t too difficult after enough time Caving and mining we will eventually stumble upon both of these but making the jump to the nether will prove to be quite the leap though we need to go deeper advancement tells us that it exists but it’s not obvious how to make a portal the best clue we have are these Mysterious structures scattered throughout the world one of the nearby blocks is called netherrack which could indicate that it’s connected to the nether but even so we need to figure out that this is intended to be the portal figure out that it should be constructed upright figure out that crying obsidian Won’t work for the frame and then figure out that it has to be lit for something so crucial there are too many steps that have to be found consecutively getting to the nether is our first major roadblock despite some in-game help the level of problem solving required to light a portal is Far beyond anything minecraft has asked us to do thus far once we finally do make it to the nether an advancement tells us that we need to find another fortress this isn’t hard all it takes is some exploration it’s also likely that we will kill blazes When we are here since they’re a new enemy that will unlock the recipe for blaze powder which in turn will open up the eye of ender if we’ve killed an enderman we know that these are important because of an advancement i spy tells us to follow an indirei When we use one it leads us in a direction finding the stronghold is fairly logical when we discover the in portal there’s a 75 percent chance that there will be at least one eye avenger in the frame which serves as a tutorial once we enter the portal the dragon Fight is very doable blind it’s visually obvious that it’s being healed by the crystals and we can damage the mob just like anything else there are many new things to do once the dragon has been defeated the next generation implies that we can pick up the egg figuring out how we’ll take some Creativity and will require us to understand torch mechanics which we may or may not have learned the method for respawning the dragon is not obvious whatsoever the end again advancement tells us that it’s possible and that it uses in crystals however we have no idea what to do with them Remote getaway indicates that we can escape the main island while the end gateways are glowing we must still figure out that we need to use ender pearls otherwise we could make a bridge to leave the island the elytra is not difficult to find and using it is fairly straightforward However nowhere does the game explain that fireworks can be used while flying a crucial missing piece we’ve also killed shulkers during our in-city raid the recipe book tells us how to make shulker boxes and while it’s not mentioned we can figure out that they’re portable storage with some experimentation Now that we’ve completed the main story and explored the end let’s return to the overworld to see what else we can do if we wander for a bit we’ll stumble upon a village trading is easy the ui is intuitive iron golems spawn naturally here but instructions of how to build Them are nowhere to be found that’s better than the snow golem whose existence has no reference in the game whatsoever raids could be logically discovered but they’re also likely to happen by accident at some point one thing that’s much less likely to occur accidentally is curing a zombie villager despite the Advancement telling us it’s possible the information needed for this is found in a very obscure place hidden in the basement of some igloos once you’re down here the signs do help you with the process but getting to this spot is something that not all players are likely to do While we’re down here we notice that the brewing stand has a splash potion of weakness this tells us that the stand is used for potion making and it’s confirmed to be possible by the advancement we can guess that we need blaze powder because of the ui even so The actual process for brewing is a complicated sequence of steps the game fails to even explain the importance of netherwarts what about other types of magic the advancement in recipe book tell us that an enchanting table is possible once we make one the ui is fairly straightforward assuming that we’ve Discovered lapis however despite our ability to do simple enchantments we have no idea that we should increase their potency using bookshelves furthermore we can’t know which enchantments are possible without many tries with our newly enchanted gear it’s time to explore if we happen to have cartographer villagers in our village we Can then trade with them for explorer maps we’ll start by following the ocean explorer map along the way we stumble across a shipwreck containing another map this leads us to a chest of buried treasure it includes a curious item a heart of the sea the recipe book tells us how to make a Conduit but it does not tell us how to make the associated structure and while we will soon find the ocean monument it will be nigh impossible to defeat it without knowing about conduit power now we can follow our other map this one will take us far far away it’s not Explained in game that the nether can be used to travel to the overworld quickly so we have to make the long trek instead upon killing an evoker we pick up a totem of undying the advancement tells us that we can use it to cheat death we Must learn that it has to be held for this effect to occur all of this exploration has us worn out and we want to do something a little more low-key in our journey we saw some bees the associated advancement tells us what we need to do to get honey there Are also wild horses taming them isn’t difficult but we cannot ride them unless we’ve discovered a saddle an advancement tells us that other animals can be tamed including cats wolves and parrots however this type of taming is different and we’ll need to discover that these animals like certain foods we also saw a Fishing rod in the recipe book when we try to use it it’s simple and works as we would expect this has us excited to grow some plants but unfortunately the use of bone meal is not explained anywhere we have some music discs that we found in the mansion we can play them By making a jukebox which is a logical step unfortunately the process for discovering the rest of the disks is nowhere to be found at some point a skeleton killing a creeper will occur randomly but we have to be paying attention to know what happened we also Cannot know if we found every disk since there’s no list another creeper related feature is that mob heads are dropped when killed by a charged creeper this is another thing that’ll have to happen randomly for us to discover it although it’s much less likely we decide that it’s time to return to The nether to see what else there is war pigs alerts us to the existence of bastion remnants so we need to explore to find them along the way we see striders this boat has legs tells us how to ride them although this will only be possible if we’ve discovered how saddles Work once we reach the bastion oh shiny tells us that we need to give gold to piglens teaching us about their trading mechanic wow it sure is easy to get ender pearls this way we should have done this the first time we were here in one of the chests we discover ancient Debris and netherrite scrap this unlocks the recipe from netherrite while an advancement tells us it’s possible to upgrade diamond equipment it doesn’t explain that we need to craft a special workstation for this there’s an advancement for summoning something called the wither the prerequisite is picking up wither Skeleton’s goals we saw these in another fortress yet the advancement is silent on what we’re supposed to do with these to summon the wither if we’ve been paying extremely close attention we may have discovered that there’s a painting that appears to show these wither skulls in a certain configuration however we’d Still need to make the connection that the base is soul sand so it’s a tall task for us to discover on our own once we do kill the wither we obtain another star and the recipe book tells us how to craft a beacon the beacon’s ui appears to show it on a pyramid Structure with some experimentation we may be able to build it correctly during our time in the nether mining nether quartz has unlocked several recipes turns out there’s an entire category dedicated to redstone some of these items are easier to understand such as the buttons and levers but even critical Components are more obscured the inversion property of the redstone torch needs to be discovered through trial and error the comparator well good luck even people who use tutorial struggle with it furthermore minecraft does not teach the basics of circuit design whatsoever to become proficient we will likely need a considerable amount of exterior Knowledge at this point it seems as though we’ve seen most of what minecraft has to offer now it’s time to work on completion of the advancements 2×2 asks us to breed all of the animals but it doesn’t tell us which animals are breedable baby polar bears exist but we can’t Breed them mules are not breedable however for some reason we can breed the hostile hoglands we can also breed villagers but this doesn’t count for the advancement also we don’t know which items to use for individual animals suffice to say the 2×2 advancement is quite difficult to accomplish so too is A furious cocktail since there’s no list of the required effects discovering them manually will be frustrating that’s not to mention the hidden achievements which would only be discovered by the most enterprising of players and that just about concludes our experiment we’ve seen every major feature and several minor ones so how Did minecraft do how far could you really get with no outside knowledge in my opinion the most egregious issue is still the nether portal it’s one of the lowest scoring features but it’s absolutely critical if you want to complete the game this needs to be fixed it’s such an important milestone that it Shouldn’t be this difficult to find the ruined portals already serve as the ghost of a tutorial when the player finds one why not add a prompt that explains how to fix it alternatively the advancement text could be rewritten to explain how to build a portal in fact this would help with many Of the more mysterious features like elytra flight the wither the conduit and potion brewing the system for in-game help already exists let’s utilize it make the advancements more clear this would be an extremely easy way to improve the game for new players the other advantage to the system is that The player can choose if they want the help by looking at the advancement screen if you’ve been playing for a long time there’s simply no need for hand-holding it’s available as needed it’s time to start wrapping things up it was really fun for me to see how much The game is discoverable with no outside knowledge what do you think do you agree with my assessment i always love reading your comments so leave your thoughts below we’ll go ahead and end with that this has been retro gaming now thanks for watching and i’ll see you all in the Next video have a great day You Video Information
This video, titled ‘Why Minecraft Is Secretly Impossible’, was uploaded by RetroGamingNow on 2022-01-15 03:14:47. It has garnered 1584688 views and 76762 likes. The duration of the video is 00:15:21 or 921 seconds.
Minecraft is a game we all know very well. But let’s say you’d never played the game before in your life – how far do you think you could get in the game with no outside help? Tonight, we are going to attempt to discover the answer to this question.
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Note: This video will refer to the Java version of Minecraft.
Music by RetroGamingNow: “Unknown Enigma” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7vshK288xY “A Secret Mission (Outro Theme)” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og02e7XFuro