The Complex Puzzle of the Wither | Deep Dive

The worlds of minecraft are sprawling and complex they’re inhabited by many different types of creatures and mobs some of these are more advanced than others such as the villagers and their arched enemies the illagers but there are a few mobs that are different in seemingly fundamental ways

And perhaps no mob is more confusing and unsettling than the wither a player could complete the entire game without seeing one yet the wither is undeniably important but how what’s its purpose and why is it so unique compared to other mobs welcome to deep dive a series where i

Explore some of the strangest and most obscure mysteries in games such as minecraft tonight we’re going to take a look at one of the two boss mobs we’ll examine the clues both subtle and hidden in plain sight hopefully we can learn about what the wither is and begin to put the puzzle

Pieces together i should say that this video will be more understandable if you’ve seen the other minecraft deep dives but i’ll do my best to catch you up if you haven’t with that out of the way join me for a dive beneath the waves Withers are constructed using materials found exclusively in the nether including wither skeleton skulls and soul sand it’s worthwhile to see if we can understand what these materials are and how they fit into the overall context of the world the nether is an interesting place for several reasons one such oddity is that

It seems as though not all of its inhabitants are natives some came from other places a good clue for this is fire resistance many another mobs have this indicating that they are adapted to the harsh conditions for example blazes shoot fireballs and are even made of fire

Gas are also immune to lava magma cubes thrive in the brutal basalt delta’s biomes using their jumping abilities to navigate the stalagmites even striders although passive clearly belong here they walk on lava and they’re cold and shivery when on solid ground however there are mobs that seem to be

Foreign one example is the piglens survival is a struggle for them they’re not immune to fire and they live in decrepit structures unable to or unwilling to repair them furthermore they must engage in dangerous hunting parties just to survive the endermen also don’t belong to the nether if you’ve seen my previous deep

Dives you’ll know why i’ll explain more about the enderman later on there’s yet another mob that’s not native and that’s one we need to take a closer look at skeletons minecraft has many undead mobs all of these come with an implicit truth the undead mob was living at one point

The overworld contains several mobs like this mostly zombies and skeletons the fact that there are so many of them seems to imply that at one point there were far more living creatures than we see today so who were these zombies and skeletons when they were alive they weren’t villagers as they have

Their own zombie variant they weren’t piglens for the same reason and they probably weren’t endermen either physiologically they’re just so different i don’t see how any of them would fit with an enderman shape so we’re left with one option these undead mobs belong to a species that no

Longer exists in its living form these are the ancient builders and they were similar in size and shape to the player i’ve talked about them before there’s evidence that they used the sunken ships and constructed the monuments they’ve left behind a lot of loot as well something catastrophic happened in

The overworld however an event which is beyond the scope of this video for now it’s enough to know that the ancient builders existed at one point all of this evidently happened in the overworld that’s where most of these mobs are found a mass extinction event would be unlikely to be interdimensional

As the three dimensions are just so much different from one another with very few gates connecting them so it’s somewhat intriguing that we occasionally find skeletons in the nether deepening the mystery there are two different types standard skeletons and wither skeletons which are a larger variant that can cause a devastating wither effect

Clearly something strange is going on here we’ll start by examining the normal skeleton and then see if we can learn about the wither skeleton just to avoid confusion i’m going to be talking with respect to the nether some of the stuff i say won’t be true for the overworld

Skeletons spawn primarily in the soul sand valley biome they’re not the only bones here we can find huge nether fossils buried as well it seems as though there’s something special about soul sand that causes skeletons to appear nearby let’s take a closer look and see if something jumps out at us

It’s pretty well known that the texture of the soul sand block shows several screaming souls but is it possible that it somehow literally contains souls there’s actually evidence for this boots with the soul speed enchantment allow the player to walk quickly over soul sand and soul soil

In doing so there’s a unique particle effect that’s produced from the ground some sort of being with a face rise and turns as if it has escaped a trap it starts color brown probably coated in sand but as it rises it frees itself and reveals its true color

A beautiful light blue then it fades away this could actually be a soul the only other ghost that we see in minecraft is a vex which has a similar blue color so it would seem as though there really are souls trapped in the sand what’s more powerful though is that

We’ve learned that there’s a way to release them in doing so they’re converted to actual work the player can literally move faster souls have some sort of energy to them and there are ways to put it to use i’m going to call this effect soul energy as the souls appear to be the

Primary source of its power there is some other phenomena that can be explained using soul energy let’s look at soul fire it burns forever on soul sand and it’s also hotter than normal fire as evidenced by its increased damage it has a familiar blue color

The color of souls is this fire a result of souls being burned releasing soul energy as heat and light another mob has figured this out the piglens the piglens avoid all types of soul fire including lanterns and campfires it’s not because they might get burned regular fire will also do that

I think it’s superstition somehow they know that soul fire is powered by actual souls understandably they want to stay well away from that and can you blame them i would do the same soul energy has even more uses for example nether warts can only be placed on soul sand

They’re certainly not getting their energy from the sun they grow equally regardless of environmental factors therefore they must be powered by the soul energy from the sand itself nether warts are useful almost all potions require them there’s an argument to be made that at least some of the energy powering a

Health potion is ultimately soul energy this brings me to an idea that i’ve talked about before minecraft clearly has some type of magic we can enchant armor for example one way to interpret minecraft magic is that it’s fundamentally based on death and destruction enchanting requires experience and the

Best way to get that is by killing other mobs the player gains experience through death and it loses it by enchanting like real life energy it always balances out it’s not created or destroyed it just takes different forms this would presumably be true for soul energy as well

So the next question is where did these souls come from the answer seems obvious skeletons soul sand valleys are infested with them we’ve already established that the ancient builders are overworld skeletons but we do know that they did exist in the nether at one point we can find items like horse armor in

The nether fortresses the builders died leaving their soul energy in the sand scattered about with undead skeletons so what happened to figure it out we need to look at the wither skeleton since it gives us some important clues wither skeletons are scary they’re tall and they move quickly

Attacking the player with the sword their signature is a brutal effect known as withering when afflicted a player’s hearts turn black and begin to disintegrate withering is a strange phenomenon it’s different from poison as it can kill the player and only mobs that can cause it are immune webster’s dictionary defines

Wither as to lose vitality force or freshness i’m going to propose something here that may initially seem wrong but hopefully it’ll make sense by the end of this video the withering effect is the conversion of health to soul energy the wither effect extracts soul energy from a being their life force is lost

But soul energy is produced it’s most often captured in soul sand which acts as soul energy sinks storing vast amounts of it but why why do the wither skeletons do this there’s one more element that we still need to discuss and the most important of them all now

That we have a basic understanding of soul energy it’s time to investigate the wither withers are built using two materials soul sand and wither skeleton skulls upon construction the wither spawns and begins powering up after a few seconds it starts its rampage firing skulls that cause large explosions

It’s a very challenging fight maybe even harder than the ender dragon the withers attacks aren’t random it specifically targets other mobs mobs that are alive it won’t attack anything undead when one of the skulls kills a mob it places a wither rose on the ground if possible in certain cases wither skeletons can

Spawn on with the roses what we’re seeing is a life cycle the wither produces roses which can in turn create wither skeletons who could eventually be used to make another wither but this only tells half of the story to really see what’s going on we need to

Look at the wither from a soul energy perspective let’s assume that the wither status effect is in fact draining life force the wither causes the wither effect on nearby mobs that soul energy needs to go somewhere and the rose eventually uses it to produce a wither skeleton this offers a substantial improvement in

Soul energy generation capabilities as whether skeletons can move around and seek out mobs they do this as much as possible slowly building up reserves of soul energy when a wither is constructed that soul energy is put to use wither skulls suck it out of the sand

All at once and the vast amounts of stored energy creates the wither it uses this energy to attack with explosions some of these will kill mobs dropping roses and continuing the cycle however not all of the wither soul energy is used to attack when the wither is eventually killed it drops another star

This is like a soul energy diamond an item which has an extremely dense concentration of the soul energy from the wither there’s only one known use for the nether star to craft a beacon the color of the beacon is interesting once again it’s the same light blue that we keep finding

The color of souls the beacon is powered by soul energy from the nether star and it’s very useful it can apply a wide variety of positive status effects on a player it could be thought of as fundamentally similar to a potion although much more powerful remember potions are made using netherwarts which

Also require soul energy this soul energy cycle seems to make sense but there’s still something that’s not quite right which is the fact that the wither must be built by someone in that sense it really feels unnatural without external intervention to keep it going the cycle would die off

No withers means no roses and no weather skeletons it doesn’t feel like something that would just happen in nature more like something that was created artificially fair warning from this point onwards things are going to get pretty speculative i’m going to make a bit of a leap here

But if we read between the lines of what we’ve seen so far there’s at least a chance that what i’m about to say is correct so take it with a grain of salt throughout these deep dive videos i’ve slowly been developing the lore of minecraft and in my opinion the endermen are the

Most important mob of them all i’ll give you a quick recap of what we’ve discovered so far it appears as though the enderman began in the end before discovering portal technology and sending a few endermen to the overworld unfortunately they were trapped with no way to return

Eventually these few made it to the nether and found that blaze powder could power eyes of ender allowing them to return to the end as the endermen studied the nether they realized that blazes only spawn in certain areas there were also wither roses here which made traversing these places dangerous

Since the endermen were mainly interested in getting blaze rods they cleared out the nether roses and began construction on huge fortresses high above the lava lakes however what they didn’t realize was that the intense power and usefulness of blaze rods came at a cost the weather roses that they removed

Weren’t the problem they were a symptom of something more deeply wrong with these areas as they constructed their fortresses they found that a new type of enemy would spawn with their skeletons with a brutal life-draining wither attack as blazes continued to appear so did wither skeletons picking off the unsuspecting mob and

Killing them with the withering effect soon the endermen began to realize that the wither skeletons were closely connected to the blazes the energy for the powerful blaze rods came from the wither skeletons they had unknowingly stumbled upon soul energy the value of blaze rods was so great however that they chose to deal

With the skeletons rather than tear down their fortresses at least these skeletons were constrained in one place however there were more than just endermen using the fortresses the ancient builders also were there maybe they even helped construct the fortress there’s evidence in other places that endermen and ancient builders learned

From each other such as the similarity between sunken ships and in ships the builders also chose to use these fortresses to harvest nether warts for potion brewing if there’s one trait we’ve seen about the builders it’s that they like to think big they began to wonder about the nature of

This soul energy trade blaze rods and nether warts were clearly useful was it possible to harness this energy without the danger of wither skeletons running around maybe there was some sort of way to obtain a vast amount of soul energy all at once instead of needing to slowly build it up over time

This research eventually led to the design of the wither the builders hoped that the wither skeleton souls and soul sand would react in such a way that the stored energy would be released all at once ready for the taking they drew up schematics for the wither then one day they constructed it

But the builders didn’t realize the true power of soul energy sure another star was produced but with a huge caveat it was hidden inside of the wither a shockingly powerful mob that took the builders off guard they’d accomplished their goal of concentrated soul energy but they’d done it too well

Some of the energy gained sentience in the same way that a wither rose converted soul energy to wither skeletons wither skeletons converted soul energy into a wither the builders were eventually able to defeat the wither and i’m not sure if they made another one perhaps they recognize the great danger

They unleashed and vowed to never use it again or they saw the power of the netherstar and determined that it was worth the risk we don’t see nether stars or beacons and chests anywhere this sort of makes me think that they only built one that single wither though was one of the

Most unnatural moments in minecraft history okay i’ll be completely honest with you this is a theory that still has some issues the biggest problem is the nature of the withering effect is it actually connected to a location in the nether and the fortresses were built there

Or did i get it flipped and something about the construction of the fortress is caused withering i spent a lot of time thinking about this and i’m not finding evidence for the fortress itself being the cause the only thing that it could be is the blaze spawner but we see spawners all

Over the place without wither effects so i was forced to assume that the location in the nether matters and that the fortress was built there it doesn’t quite feel right though like we’re taking too big of a jump here’s what i will say i don’t see the production of the wither as a

Cataclysmic event contrary to some other popular theories the reason for this is that when we spawn the wither nothing like that happens it’s extremely destructive in the short term but is defeatable seemingly without long-term consequences rather i really do think that the wither is a manifestation of a disease

The same disease that causes withering the hardest part for me to understand is the wither rose as in the present day the only way to find them is through the wither itself however i have to think that they were natural at one point and it offers a convenient explanation as to why wither

Skeletons and blazes only spawn in one place i also wish i knew exactly how soul sand works it’s obvious that soul energy is contained within but i’m not completely sure how the wither effect gets it there is soul sand like a magnet for soul energy or is soul energy all around us

But the soul sand is the only block capable of trapping it i still don’t know for sure so it’s a little bit awkward for me to be here telling you that i don’t know how it all works but i’d rather be honest about this instead of creating some huge convoluted

Theory and making stuff up to fill the holes there’s this nagging feeling that i’m missing something big i just don’t know what so i’m gonna do something i haven’t done yet on this channel i’m going to ask the community for help in the description there’s a link to the discord

If you think you understand the nature of the withering effect and why it only happens in nether fortresses let me know i’m not opposed to doing a follow-up video on this i really just want to find the answer the puzzle pieces are in front of us can

We put them together in the right order anyways thanks so much for watching as always i enjoy reading your comments and i appreciate each and every one of my viewers the growth of this channel has been nothing short of explosive and i’m really happy to be producing content that people enjoy

Let me know in the comments what you want the next video to be about there’s so much mystery in minecraft and i can only hope to slowly uncover it this has been retro gaming now have a great day and i’ll see you all in the next video this