The Powerful Connections of Minecraft’s Magic | Deep Dive

The minecraft world is a huge and complicated place there are mobs to find vast structures to explore and ancient past to rediscover yet throughout the world there are mysterious forces that unite the unique groups one such example is magic although we often take it for granted it’s not quite

As simple as we may think welcome to deep dive a series where we are slowly uncovering the hidden secrets of minecraft tonight we’re going to take a look at magic an often used but ill-understood part of the game throughout the deep dive series we’ve slowly been uncovering the lore about

Various aspects of the game most of these have been looking at a specific mob such as the piglens or illidars however in our discussions we’ve unfortunately been lacking analysis on some of the much larger scale components of minecraft we’ve been focusing on the trees and forgetting about the forest in which they live

I do want to say that this video is best experienced if you’ve seen the illegal deep dive in the withered deep dive as i’ll be covering topics from both of those i highly recommend you watch those first minecraft is a world of rules and to understand the game more deeply we must

Also understand the rules which all entities follow magic is fundamental to how the minecraft universe works it’s time for us to analyze it join me for a dive beneath the waves Perhaps the best way to understand magic is to look at the things that are explicitly magical the most obvious of this group is enchantment which allows a user to take an ordinary item and infuse it with special properties the main way that this is accomplished is through the use of the enchanting table

A player takes their equipment puts it on the table along with some lapis and enchants the weapon consuming experience in the process although this seems pretty simple it’s actually quite complex so let’s break it down starting with the enchanting table itself the enchanting table requires three main components obsidian diamonds and books after

Construction obsidian and diamonds are not used again this seems to imply that they serve as stabilizers rather than some active ingredient that’s not the case for the book in fact the book is the primary connection between the person enchanting and the table itself as a player approaches the book willingly reveals its pages

Then when the player puts an item in the slot it flips to the appropriate page revealing the possible enchantments although we don’t know for sure what’s happening from a lore perspective the fact that there is text underneath the enchantment seems to imply that the player is reading the possibilities from this book

Yet this naive approach cannot be completely correct instead the player has at best a loose translation of the text they seem to be unsure of what exactly the enchantment process is going to do there’s a bit of a wild card here there are a few ways we could go with this

One interpretation is that the magic is inherently chaotic and that the actual enchanting process cannot be fully understood however i think there’s a better option instead what if the player simply lacks the knowledge to completely understand what the text says the translation is essentially correct but there’s a chance to get even better

Enchantments than just that in other words the text is not flat out wrong just not quite as descriptive as it could be to more fully understand this we must recognize a bizarre yet crucially important property of the table the suggested enchantments are static until an enchantment is made

That means that for each object type the possible enchantments are limited until an option is chosen upon which new possibilities are created there’s no way to reset this list without performing a new enchantment even stranger is the fact that this list of three exists irrelevant of which table or item is used

This seems to imply that the enchanting list is not a property of the table rather it is somehow connected to the player themselves the idea of the player having a deep connection to magical forces is something we’ll look at more a little bit so keep this in the back of your mind as

We continue let’s go back to the idea of books there’s something we’ve neglected to mention thus far bookshelves surrounding an enchanting table increase the strength of the enchanting list it’s as though knowledge is being transferred into the table we can even see an animation of the glyphs flowing from the bookshelves

And the connection doesn’t end there it’s possible to enchant a book itself for later use this gives further credence to the idea that there’s something inherently powerful about the words themselves yet simply the words are not enough enchantment requires two more things experience and lapis lazuli lapis is

Unique in the sense that it has no crafting uses beyond acting as a die rather its primary gameplay mechanic is with enchanting i view lapis as a catalyst a necessary component for the enchantment to occur we are unfortunately limited in detail about how this works since we really

Only use lapis for one thing so for right now i’ll take that as a given on the other hand experience is not so simple let’s take a closer look and see if it can help us explain how magic works experience is a particularly strange quantity in minecraft

The most common way to gain it is to kill mobs releasing the experience stored within but even though this is the most efficient method we have to be careful about relying on it too heavily for explanation there are many other places in the minecraft world where experience occurs naturally

For example breeding animals drops experience as does trading with villagers it also seems to be tied to blocks it can be obtained by mining coal and lapis furthermore any type of smelting also generates experience so although death and destruction is the most efficient way to gain it it seems clear that it’s

Not restricted to these extremes rather experiences found throughout the minecraft world there are many different entities capable of storing experience it occurs naturally in mobs in the player but there do exist artificial storage devices bottlezo enchanting are one example although the player does not know how to construct them many other civilizations do

The ancient builders knew since we find bottles in shipwrecks and cleric villagers can trade them for emeralds the bottles are also found in pillager outposts which means that at least three distinct civilizations are or were aware of its existence because of this it should be pretty obvious to

Us that experience is something that is physical in the minecraft universe not simply a gameplay mechanic the locations we can find experience are far and wide from blocks to animals this leads me to one of the main points of this video i view experience as a fundamental quantity in the minecraft universe

It’s somewhat analogous to energy in real life in several ways first it is conserved which means that is neither created nor destroyed second it can take different forms for example a hand cranked motor can turn mechanical energy into electrical energy powering a light bulb it’s still energy but it’s been

Converted into charge and then released as light i propose that the same idea is happening at the enchantment table the experience stored within the player is converted into useful work by changing the form of the energy it’s still the same fundamental quantity but it’s useful in a different way

Just as kinetic energy and electrical energy are used for different things the grindstone all but confirms this by allowing us to disenchant and receive some experience back out of an object some of you may find an issue with this argument since the amount of experience

We get back is not equal to the amount we put in a similar issue occurs when the player dies why aren’t all of the levels dropped on the ground but only some of them how can energy actually be conserved in this case i would counter by saying that

Experience is conserved but some of it is converted into forms that are not easily accessible working with experience causes some of it to get dispersed into the environment it’s similar to how friction works in real life energy is dispersed and lost is heat it still exists but not in a way where

We can easily recover it from the evidence we’ve discussed we’ve learned that experience exists in many different places throughout the world and it can be released under certain conditions but there’s still one thing we haven’t quite understood yet which is why does so much of it become concentrated in living beings

The experience gained for killing a monster is much higher than that of smelting stone is that just the way it is or is there something deeper happening which we’re missing to understand this problem we’re going to talk about another form of energy which i discussed extensively

In the wither video this is called soul energy we discovered this by examining soul sand and realizing that there are screaming faces on the texture i argue that these are literal souls when using the soul speed boots enchantment we can see animations of little blue ghosts rising up and dissolving into the world

Evidence of the soul energy that was in the soul sand this soul energy can be put to use in many ways for example soul fire burns hotter than regular fire using the souls in the sand as energy but perhaps there’s no greater use of soul energy than wither skeletons

I suggested that the wither status effect is the draining of life force converting it into soul energy in other words any sentient being has some amount of soul energy just by being alive the withering effect steals this and puts it into the sole sand under the right circumstances this

Stored energy can be released in an incredibly powerful outburst by building soul sand and wither skeleton skulls in the right configuration a wither can be produced causing untold destruction once it finally dies it drops another star which i said is a soul energy storage unit

This can be used to create a beacon a powerful block which can provide positive status effects at a distance there are other ways that soul energy can be used to cause status effects we can understand this by taking a look at the second most common magical system in the game

Potion brewing brewing uses a brewing stand which can be crafted from stone and blaze rods each brew requires an ingredient and a catalyst in a similar way to enchanting in this case the catalyst is heat in the form of blaze powder potion brewing is an iterative process

Requiring several steps to make the most useful potions the first step is to create an awkward potion using another wart remember netherwarts are created from soul energy so any complex potion is ultimately powered at least in part by soul energy the next step is to add the main ingredient to

Determine the primary effect every single one of these possibilities was alive at one point from sugar to turtle shells to spider eyes perhaps this trait is what allows it to shape the soul energy into something useful afterwards further ingredients can be added such as redstone to increase the

Time or glowstone to increase the strength but they don’t fundamentally change the potion in the same way that the mob drops do so unlike experience soul energy has the restriction that it must be found in a living dead or undead entity with the exception of soul sand it’s a far more specialized and

Restricted form of energy and it doesn’t appear latently as often as regular experience does nonetheless there are definitely some similarities between the two that are worth considering they can both be stored they can both be used for practical purposes in the world so long as a certain catalyst is present

As a more subtle point they can both be used to gain more of itself constructing a wither will cause withering and drain as much soul energy as possible experience can be used to craft more powerful weapons which in turn make it easier to gain more experience these similarities may not be a coincidence

Experience and soul energy are so similar that we have to consider the idea that there’s somehow two versions of the same thing two sides of a singular energy coin all known magic in minecraft involves one of these two energies so the obvious question is can we find a

Way to convert from one to the other going from soul energy to experience is actually pretty easy killing a mob seems to instantly convert whatever soul energy it had into experience which can be easily collected if soul energy is a more complex version which is only stable in certain

Situations then it would make sense to revert into experience once the being storing it died now what about the other way can we convert from experience to soul energy i think this is a very tricky thing to do especially considering the multitude of restrictions applied to soul energy

Accomplishing this would require a vast amount of experimentation and probably specialized equipment to have any chance of pulling it off yet nonetheless i believe that there is a group whose main purpose was to discover this conversion i am of course talking about the Illagers as i explained in my illager deep dive the pinnacle of their studies is the totem of undying i made the argument that the totem is fundamentally an experienced storage unit and that raids were designed to charge up their totems furthermore the store experience could be used for new types of magic

After our discussion today it seems as though thinking of the totem as an experienced battery only tells half of the story the magical capabilities it enables are nothing like what we see experience do it’s not making a sword sharper it’s summoning ghosts from the void and exerting control over death itself

The totem does things that experience energy simply cannot do on its own i believe that the totem of undying is the only item in minecraft capable of harnessing both experienced energy and soul energy and here’s why it has the power to literally create souls by summoning vexes which is the only

Ghost-like mob in minecraft furthermore one could interpret preventing death as generating a vast amount of soul energy enough to keep someone alive think of it as the anti-withering effect oh wait it actually does that by providing regeneration and absorption status effects are a soul energy trait found in potions and beacons

There’s no way to do anything like this using just experience this is the true achievement of the illagers the first known way to convert experience into soul energy and use them together that’s why their magic is so advanced this realization puts many of their mysterious rooms in a new context

Take for example their giant wool statues is it possible that they are attempting to imbue them with soul energy and create life itself or what about the prison cells are they pushing the limits of soul energy by experimenting on villagers the ravager looks awfully similar to a

Villager could this be caused from a twisted soul energy experiment or their disturbing alters what better way is there to learn about soul energy than by killing innocent beings we now have an explanation as to why the totem is so powerful which was something that i lacked in my previous video

It adds the final puzzle piece allowing us to really see what can happen with these energies however there’s still a few questions that we need to address when putting this all together one such oddity is why soul energy seems to be much more prominent in the nether than the overworld

I think the answer is that soul energy is more closely tied to heat than experience it typically requires a certain temperature to be stable almost any living animal would satisfy this requirement explaining their capability of storing it in potion brewing blaze powder provides the heat but beyond that the rest of the

Overworld is far too cool on average the nether does not have this problem instead it’s extremely hot which is why i think soul energy shows up here more naturally it’s just so much better suited to having it develop which is why withering effects and so many crucial potion

Components are exclusive to the nether there’s simply more time for the effects of soul energy to cause adaptations as with every video i encourage you to think about this critically and don’t just blindly take my word for it a lot of this does depend on whether or

Not you accept the idea of soul energy the method for getting stored in soul sand is somewhat ambiguous and i talked about this issue in more detail in the withered video another thing that makes soul energy tricky is that although we can see evidence of it it’s not as explicit as

Experience which has a number i think this goes back to soul energy being more specialized and less stable from a gameplay perspective it wouldn’t make sense to have the primary experience mechanic be connected only to death they would want a way to encourage other things like villager trading

Anyways there we have it hopefully this video helped tie together some of the things between other deep dives let me know in the comments what you think about this have i made a compelling case or do you see the world in a different way also feel free to join us on the rdn

Subreddit as well as the discord people have come up with some great ideas and i really love interacting with this community there are so many comments that i can’t read all of them so the discord and subreddits are a great place to go if you have a good idea

We’ll end with that this has been retro gaming now thanks so much for watching and i’ll see you all in the next episode You