The Insidious Origins of Minecraft’s Zombies | Deep Dive

In many ways minecraft is a game of parallels there are passive villagers and the scheming illagers there’s an overworld but also a fiery and dangerous nether there are peaceful animals like pigs and sheep and then there are destructive mobs like the creeper yet perhaps no parallel is stranger than

The one in plain sight the difference between day and night when the sun is out the world exists in relative safety but in the dark swarms of hostile enemies approach wanting nothing more than to attack the player most of these enemies are undead zombies and skeletons they’re similar in size to

The player but they’re distorted infected with some bizarre disease that destroys their flesh and changes their behavior we can’t let the fact that this is so common distract us from just how strange it is what is this undead contagion anyways it seems to be magical in some

Way but how is it possible to explain such a weird minecraft phenomenon welcome to deep dive a series where we are exploring the secrets of minecraft tonight we’re going to take a structured look at the undead who have saturated the overworld hopefully through this process we can start to put together a

Bit more of the complicated relationship between magic and zombies this video will be best if you’ve been watching the deep dive series for a while especially these videos here if this is your first time then i’ll still explain things just know that there might be some finer details that won’t

Be mentioned with that out of the way it’s almost time to get started join me for a dive beneath the waves Before we dive in we’re going to take a look at this video sponsor a lot of us are pretty busy with school and work and while it’s good to be doing productive things sometimes it feels like there isn’t time to read i know that i’ve definitely experienced this frustration

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That’s only 5.95 us dollars a month ready to get started visit audible.com retro or text retro to 500 500 that’s audible.com retro or text retro to 500 500 thanks so much to audible for the sponsorship now back to the video we talk about magic a lot during the

Deep dive series and for good reason it’s one of the parts of the minecraft world that makes it so unique it’s connected to many aspects of the game seemingly wherever we go there’s something that’s magical this means that to understand certain elements in the minecraft universe we

Need to have knowledge of the underlying magic so instead of starting with the undead plague we’re going to start by examining magic during our journey perhaps we’ll stumble across some interesting connections to the undead one way to deconstruct magic is to examine what we do understand and see if

We can work backwards to find simple roots let’s consider a rough magical hierarchy think about this as a list in order of complexity at the very top we have the magically produced beings such as the vex these have no known existence outside of summoning and they do not require any

Materials they come out of thin air this is the most complicated type of magic in the minecraft universe we only know of one mob capable of doing it and there’s no evidence that it’s ever been done before below the vex is the totem of undying the ability to absorb one fatal blow is

Extremely powerful and it too is an item only discovered by a single group moving down we have the golems artificial or simulated life is powerful but it’s not at the same level as vexes since they require physical materials to construct the wither also exists somewhere around this area i’m not so

Sure it’s a golem but it has some similarities as we continue to move down the ladder we reach the beacon while the status effects it can produce are powerful it’s certainly not as complicated as a golem or of x further down are golden apples and then potions again some useful effects but

Not to the same level as the beacon these status effects are temporary and are on a much smaller scale things are a little fuzzy down here but enchantment is probably similar to potions it’s restricted to individual equipment and is relatively common throughout the world now it may seem

Like we’ve just reached the bottom of the magic hierarchy but we should nonetheless ask the question is there anything less complex than potions we have to think about it for a bit but there does appear to be something that would fit the bill suspicious stew this

Is a food item that often flies under the radar it’s not even found in the crafting book a player who consumes it gains one of several status effects ranging from fire resistance to jump boost to blindness however the duration is very short typically somewhere between 2 and 10 seconds

How does one make a suspicious dew it’s almost the same as mushroom stew made with brown and red mushrooms the difference is that suspicious stew includes an additional flour depending on the desired status effect for example a brown mushroom a red mushroom and a poppy make a suspicious stew with four

Seconds of night vision another possibility is combining mushrooms and dessert luette to cause temporary blindness let’s think for a second about how similar this is to potion brewing we are combining ingredients to produce a drinkable item that causes a status effect since these effects are short-lived it seems logical to put

Suspicious stew lower on the hierarchy than potions there’s another similarity between the two that is easy to overlook both use a base and an active ingredient in potion brewing the active ingredient would be the gas tier glistering melon phantom membrane and other similar items in suspicious stew the active ingredient

Is the flower how about the base in potion brewing it’s almost always another wart required to make an awkward potion similarly all suspicious stews need a brown and a red mushroom there’s a clear parallel between the netherwort and the mushrooms it’s as if they’re serving the same purpose in both types of

Concoctions there’s some sort of fundamental similarity between the two the most basic connection is that both are fungi if we head to the nether we’ll find huge tree-like structures called huge fungi they’re made out of nether wart blocks which is strong evidence that the nether wart is a fungus furthermore mushrooms and netherwarts

Have a visual similarity you can just make out the cap while it grows from this it would seem as though mushrooms are an even less complex form of magic than suspicious stew potions and stew are both ultimately derived from fungus which implies that mushrooms netherworts and other fungi hold a

Foundational place in the structure of minecraft magic in the past i’ve discussed the idea of magical energy perhaps in a bit too much detail the basic concept is that magic in minecraft doesn’t just occur randomly it always requires some type of energy this applies to potions and suspicious

Stew the effects they produce are the result of magical energy coming from somewhere while potions do require blaze powder that doesn’t appear to be the most fundamental source of magical power instead it’s got to be the nether wart that’s what provides the magical base from which more complex things can happen

Similarly the energy in the suspicious stew is coming from the mushrooms it’s therefore logical to assume that fungus serves as a relatively dense source of magical energy but don’t take my word for it there are others in the minecraft universe who’ve discovered this the first place to look

Is the cleric villagers while the name might lead us to think that they are magical experts in reality they don’t seem to have much actual knowledge of potion brewing despite their brewing stands they don’t sell any true potions besides bottles of enchanting one reason for this is they have no access to

Netherwarts they must have at least heard of them since they’ll gladly buy words from the player unfortunately we don’t see any evidence that they know what to do once they have them what about the witch i’ve argued that witches are cleric villagers who’ve been outcast for tampering with the undead in

Igloo basements we can see that the witch was attempting to cure the zombie villager part of this included making a potion of weakness something we never seen normal clerics do but how did the witch brew a potion without netherwarts well it turns out that the potion of

Weakness has a special recipe it’s the one potion that does not require another word to brew instead it uses a fermented spider eye which contains a brown mushroom in essence what the witch was able to do was realize that the fabled netherworks were not necessary instead mushrooms

Could get the job done these mushrooms were exceedingly powerful even able to cure the zombie disease which had long plagued the villagers the witch had rediscovered the magical capabilities of mushrooms especially with respect to the undead let’s keep going with this when the witch was banished where did they go to

Swamps one of the few places above ground with an abundance of mushrooms furthermore the witch cultivates red mushrooms in a pot on the windowsill presumably they used these to brew potions in their cauldron it would seem as though the witch understands that mushrooms are a key source of magical energy

The theme of discovering the utility of mushrooms shows up in a different place the illagers are the group with the most complex magic far beyond anything the witch has ever done yet they too understand the importance of mushrooms their home base is the woodland mansion an extremely rare structure that is

Found in the dark forest biome dark forests have huge mushrooms scattered about something that is rare in other places furthermore we can find mushrooms in the mansions themselves there’s a room where the illagers are clearly farming them is it for food that’s not likely mushroom stew is not found in any

Chests owned by the illagers instead it appears that they survive on mostly bread which is found everywhere the prevalence of mushrooms inside and outside the woodland mansions is not a coincidence there’s a reason the illiters built their mansions here it’s the same reason for their mushroom farms

They understand that fungi are a crucial link to magical power but it goes even deeper much like the witch the illidar’s experiments tend to also deal with life and death creating artificial life summoning life from the void and preventing fatal blows and all of this is coming from fungus

Something about fungus causes it to be particularly connected to life and death but what It’s time to briefly exit minecraft and look at mushrooms in the real world mushrooms are in the fungus kingdom unlike plants fungi do not have chlorophyll this means that they are unable to produce energy using light through photosynthesis instead many mushrooms are saprotrophs this means that they feed on non-living organic

Material which helps break it down and recycle nutrients back into the ecosystem in other words some types of mushrooms grow using dead material now let’s go back to minecraft it seems logical to assume that the mushrooms we find in game works similarly to real-life mushrooms absorbing nutrition from other sources in the environment

This occurs in the overworld their existence on fallen trees indicates that the minecraft mushrooms are serving a similar role to the real-life mushrooms decomposing the dead and using whatever energy remains the nether wart does the same thing although it appears at first to be more specialized since it grows on

Soul sand we’ve talked about this before but soul sand is a very unique block perhaps more than anything it’s tied to death there appear to be screaming souls and these can be released using the soul speed enchantment somehow the soul sand is capable of absorbing energy from dead beings for

Reasons i won’t explain here it has to do with the withering effect regardless of the details no other words are particularly keen to use some of this energy much like mushrooms their power is derived from dead material yet there’s something strange going on with the warts if we explore the nether

We find huge forests of netherwarts these are the crimson and warped forests they’re completely overrun by fungus their roots sprouts vines shroom lights and nilium however despite these forests being made of netherwart blocks something is missing where’s the soul sand didn’t we just say that netherwarts

Needed to feed upon it as we think about it more questions arise why do the forested netherwarts look so different why do the small versions never show up while they have the same name something has changed in these forests there’s an interesting piece of evidence found in a

Block of the week article take a look at this quote fungi-based technology is quite often used to decontaminate polluted environments so next time you’re wandering through a particularly contaminated part of the nether and wondering why there are lots of mushrooms you’ve got your answer there’s a striking word used in that

Quote contaminated webster’s dictionary defines contaminated as soiled stained corrupted or infected by contact or association the fungi in the nether are feeding off of something it would appear as though that something is not natural an infection or a stain that shouldn’t necessarily be there instead of using soul sand these

Netherwort forests have found another source of energy a contamination and when we really start to think about it isn’t a lot of the nether contaminated for example soul sand valleys are in many ways the most unnatural biome in minecraft netherrack has been almost totally replaced by soul sand as we know

Soul sand is closely associated with death and the wither why is there so much of it in these valleys clearly a lot of something died here at one point this leads us to a bit of an unsettling question what would have the most to gain from a

Lot of death the enderman doesn’t seem very likely striders or ghasts nah it wouldn’t affect them no it’s the very thing we’ve been talking about this whole time fungus fungus thrives on death it absorbs nutrients from dead materials if for some reason there were to be a lot

Of death wouldn’t it primarily benefit fungus with that we have the pieces in place to tell a story about what may have happened and finally understand the undead plague we’re gonna go back in time the ancient nether was not the same as the nether we see today it was much more barren and

Generally devoid of life sure some things eeked out in existence the ghasts floated around the lava pits and blazes meandered through the wastes there were also occasional patches of soul sand with nether warts the soil was produced from the death of living nether beings however it was limited there were

Relatively few things dying at any given moment so there was not much for the nether warts to feed upon suddenly a portal appeared a curious group known as the ancient builders had discovered a way to teleport from the overworld to the nether these ancient builders were humanoid similar in size and shape to

The player there’s a vast amount of evidence for their existence such as the pyramids and ancient shipwrecks i’ve referred to them many times in the deep dive series the builders had just stumbled across the formula for interdimensional teleportation and for the first time there were outsiders in

The nether it was a dangerous place and the ancient builders were ill-suited for the hostile environment yet they explored the dimension anyways and in doing so discovered that the rare netherworks were powerful when combined with materials from blazes these warts could be used to brew magical potions so the builders set up permanent

Settlements by constructing nether fortresses here they could be relatively safe while cultivating netherwarts and blazes but as often happens in real life the introduction of foreign beings came with unintended side effects the ancient builders unknowingly brought with them spores of the overworld red and brown mushrooms and it turned out that the

Energy-rich environment of the nether was perfect for them they began to pop up throughout the dimension these were different from netherworts they were adapted to the overworld and thus did not need soul sand to grow meanwhile the ancient builders were becoming increasingly entrenched in the dimension it turned out that there were

A lot more useful things in the nether than they had initially realized for example netherrite was a superior material so superior in fact that they constructed huge bastion mining outposts the transformation of pigs into piglens gave them a substantial workforce for their mining operation suddenly the nether wasn’t quite as

Devoid of life as it used to be it was being quickly colonized by living things from another place the result of this was that there was much more death builders succumbed to the heat piglets burned in the fire pigs fell off of ledges the dead material began to accumulate for the saprotrophic

Mushrooms it was paradise there was more food than ever as a result the amount of fungi in the nether began to increase dramatically after all they never needed to look far to find something dead it was everywhere soul sand was becoming much more common now there were entire areas of the

Nether that were consumed by it with such a dense concentration of soul energy a new beast began to spawn withers these were extraordinarily powerful and extremely effective at killing they could quickly wipe out an exploring group of ancient builders what happened when they died even more soul sand was

Produced it was a snowball effect as soul sand spread to more areas bigger and bigger withers began to form they became so huge and so dominant that fighting one was a monumental task for the ancient builders and they were forced to avoid slow sand valleys whenever possible however they did

Realize that there was some benefit when a builder would die they would bury them in these valleys instead of risking the spread of sand to other places these valleys were dangerous anyways why not take advantage of it but the fungus was starting to change thus far we’ve talked about fungus being saprotrophic feeding

On dead material however in real life there’s another way which fungus can get its energy parasitism in this scheme parasitic fungi attack beings while they are still alive this can cause disease and other major problems for the host but has the distinct advantage of mobility furthermore certain types of

Parasites also use the host for reproduction a famous example of this is the cordyceps fungus which has varieties that can infect insects and arthropods in a terrifying twist the cordyceps takes control of the host forcing it to climb higher and higher then the fruiting body of the fungus bursts from

Its head spreading the spores to more victims there’s an obvious example of this type of behavior in minecraft mooshrooms found exclusively in the mushroom fields biome mushrooms are cows that have been afflicted with a parasitic fungal disease they’re so far gone that we can explicitly see the mushrooms growing on

Them we also know that mooshrooms are not a new species since it’s possible to remove the shrooms using shears returning it to a normal cow no this is an example of fungus acting as a parasite mushrooms have the ability to feed off of living cows no the worst can

Feed off of dead soul sand what if these two abilities could combine to produce a crossbreed a new way for the fungus to thrive and reproduce not living not dead but somewhere in the middle undead an undead being would have many useful traits for the fungus it could target and attack susceptible

Beings thus continuing the life cycle but the brain would be too infected to realize what was happening and attempt to cure itself and the best part of this entire thing there was a whole new dimension filled with potential hosts and these hosts had an awfully convenient habit of returning to the

Nether again and again the undead disease started slowly as novel infections usually do the fungus affected a piglet or two a couple of ancient builders contracted the disease yet it wasn’t long until the fungus began to completely explode in population in minecraft mushrooms only grow in low

Light levels the zombie fungus was no different while it was fine during the night time it was unable to survive the harsh light of day burning up in the sun thus the infected beings only emerged during the darkness the infection spread throughout the overworld it was so powerful that the

Number of ancient builders began to rapidly dwindle while they did manage to cure the disease at one point a critical component was gold for golden apples there was a lot of gold in the nether so the builders set up huge trips to bring as much gold over as possible

Yet as they gained more life-saving gold they brought the fungus over as well only making the problem worse and worse it didn’t take long for there to be a mass extinction event which ultimately killed off the species check out the above video if you want more information

On how this happened it’s too long of a story to tell here suffice to say the fungus was so effective that soon only the infected remained with the ancient builders gone things began to change in the nether the huge withers began to die off because of a

Lack of things to kill leaving only their bones in the soul sand valleys the parasitic fungus found some susceptible beings in the piglens but they were too limited instead the non-soul sand variants became the most successful fungus forests grew and with them new ecosystems developed no longer

Restricted to just soul sand the nether wart forests became the areas of the nether richest in life sure there was a contamination brought forth by the ancient builders yet as so often happens life found a way to take advantage of it this theory has a lot of moving parts so

Let’s take a step back to give a brief summary fungus is useful for many different magical purposes which implies that it’s getting its magical energy from somewhere we also know that fungus can be saprotrophic feeding off of dead material this is how we see it most often in the overworld and also with

Nether warts and soul sand however it is also possible for fungus to be parasitic we see an explicit example of this with the mooshrooms as more and more ancient builders came to the nether the netherwort fungus mutated with the overworld fungus and developed the ability to reproduce by converting

Living beings to an undead version thus fungi could get the magical energy necessary for survival without needing for the host to be completely dead this eventually spread to the overworld and it ended up destroying the civilization of the ancient builders as with all theories i encourage you to

Think about this critically instead of taking my word for it one possible issue is the following if the zombie plague really is fungally based then why don’t the zombies ever totally decompose i would once again bring up the mooshrooms it’s not in the fungus’s best interest

To ever kill the host rather it wants it to stay undead for as long as possible that’s why zombies attack villagers zombifying other beings keeps the fungus alive for longer essentially acting as a way to reproduce there may be some who disagree with the very premise that mushrooms are magical

You could very well interpret mushrooms eating dead material as just doing what they do in real life without any sort of magic involved and that certainly could be true but considering how much magic and life force seemed intertwined and also the magical uses of mushrooms i felt safe enough taking the leap here

Still this is a point which could defeat the theory if you disagree So there we have it that’s my theory the interaction between the various magical entities is very complex it’s something where we need to think about the game as a whole while also focusing on the details in this video we took evidence from several locations to understand

What’s happening i want to ask you does this theory make sense to you did i miss something am i totally incorrect the main purpose of this video is to get a discussion going with enough people thinking about it we can surely figure out how everything works if you think

You found something please mention it in the comments below you can also post it on the rgn subreddit or come over to the discord server we’ve had some really cool conversations and i’d love to hear your voice we will go ahead and end with that this has been retro gaming now thank you

So much for watching and i’ll see you all in the next video have a great day You