The Secrets of Minecraft’s Ancient Pyramids | Deep Dive

Minecraft is a game with many mysteries right from the very beginning the player is dropped into a vast world with little guidance and forced to discover things on their own although mostly empty there are some intelligent creatures around however not every place is a simple village scattered throughout the world

As evidence of an ancient past in the form of large structures with riches deep inside who built these what was their purpose why are they here to find the answer we must examine the clues both subtle and hidden in plain sight perhaps we can discover the meaning behind these mysterious places and in

Doing so gain a greater understanding of the lore of minecraft welcome to another episode of deep dive where we examine the most obscure and interesting parts of games there’s a lot of stuff for us to find join me for a dive beneath the waves But first we have a sponsor and it’s been queue with their space-saving screen bar i guess i’m a real youtuber now how about that anyways the screen bar is a new type of lamp that’s designed to reduce screen glare and save space it pops right onto the monitor and

Connects to the computer using a usb port i’ve been using the screen bar for several weeks and i have to say i’m impressed it really does a great job of lighting up the area with minimal interference as a content creator i spend a lot of time on the computer so any product that

Reduces glare is a benefit to me same for me as a student working on homework is much easier without a desk lamp taking up space check out the link in the description to learn more almost every person that has played minecraft has stumbled upon some of the ancient structures found throughout the world

Perhaps they hacked through a jungle to find a pyramid there solving a puzzle before getting startled by a booby trap or maybe they found a large pyramid in the desert falling down to find several chests of loot before suddenly being blown up by a tnt trap or the more adventurous explorer may

Have discovered a deep water ocean monument defended by terrifying ocean guardians no don’t go that way whichever category you fit into there’s something intriguing about these strange buildings where did they come from initially we may think of villagers as they seem to be the most advanced species in the overworld

But that doesn’t quite make sense first of all villages don’t spawn in jungle biomes making it less likely that they built the jungle pyramids also villagers exhibit no knowledge of redstone how could they have constructed the complex booby traps in the desert and jungle temples furthermore ocean monuments spawn deep

In oceans far away from the mainland villagers can swim but just barely are we really supposed to believe that this bumbling society was able to construct massive underwater pyramids i just don’t buy it so what about the next option the enderman in my previous video i outlined evidence

For the endermen being the most powerful mob as they are capable of creating and destroying the world and from a basic level the enderman makes sense they’re known to build in cities and they spawn throughout the overworld however there are a few critical pieces of evidence that preclude them as candidates

Although they can pick up tnt we have no evidence of them understanding how to build redstone as found in jungle temples and desert pyramids furthermore endermen are notoriously allergic to water is it really conceivable that they would have chosen to build a massive structure in the ocean

And even if they could why it seems as though they were far more interested in resources from the nether such as blaze rods these questions are pretty hard to answer on their own evidence within the structures themselves is limited we need to look elsewhere to find the

Clues that will lead us to the answer thankfully there is something decomposing deep underwater let’s literally take a deep dive for once to a structure added in the aquatic update shipwrecks within the ocean biomes of minecraft we can occasionally find sunken ships these aren’t some little boats made with

Five wood on a crafting table no these were majestic vessels take a look at this excavated specimen notice its large length it also has an internal room presumably for the captain as well as space beneath the deck it even has places for cannons and the chests contain equipment for battle

Including gunpowder tnt and armor the ships clearly were designed to use sails given the huge masts they look very similar to an 18th century ship although i don’t have the nautical or historical background to give you an exact guess on the time frame it appears as though these ships were

Designed for long voyages as evidenced by the now moldy food stored within there’s a treasure chest that contains diamonds bottles of enchanting and other riches as well as a chest with tactical equipment such as books compasses maps feathers and clocks another thing worth pointing out is that shipwrecks

Can be made of almost every type of wood from the more common oak and birch to rarer types including jungle and dark oak each ship also uses multiple types of wood at once this seems to imply that the ships required some sort of transportation infrastructure just to be built

They most likely couldn’t have been constructed by a single city in one place due to the necessary resources all of this evidence points to seafarers that were well traveled and used to sailing long distances they had explored enough of the world to build their ships out of a variety of

Materials and they’d mastered the art of preparation they also had fairly advanced technology with knowledge of navigation writing and enchanting so the question remains who were these sailors once again i really don’t think it was the villagers the timeline is a major reason since villagers exist in the world today wouldn’t they still

Be sailing and exploring villages also lack the infrastructure required for such large ships and they don’t spawn in jungle or dark forest biomes both of which are potential ship materials we should consider the enderman for an important reason in ships in a previous video i proposed

A theory where endermen began in the end and discovered a way to get to the overworld check that out using the card above in this theory the endermen eventually colonized the overworld and the nether before being trapped in the end after accidentally summoning the dragon endermen weren’t able to build in ships

Before they went to the overworld as evidenced by the type of loot found within and since interim are notoriously allergic to water perhaps they were the ones who built these overworld ships although this kind of makes sense it still doesn’t explain our fundamental question who built the ancient monuments i’m

Going to propose something that at first may seem a bit strange but if you’ll stick with me hopefully i’ll be able to explain it i think that there was another species of builders in the overworld before the internment traveled there i should mention that matt pat says something similar although he believes

That his species eventually became the enderman i disagree with that as explained in the intermittent video i’m going to suggest that these builders were the ones who built the ships we find in the overworld all equipment implies that they were humanoid armor food and the lake

Even the height of the internal room is too short for the enderman but perfect for a two block tall person i think the endermen who came to the overworld stumbled upon these builders and learned things from them perhaps the art of enchanting how to build nether portals or

How to make ships thus the internment modeled their in ships after normal ships in the overworld so if i’m correct in my assessment these builders would have been in the overworld at a similar time to before the endermen were trapped in the end even if my timeline isn’t quite right

There’s another big piece of evidence for them existing at one point zombies and skeletons these undead creatures have the same dimensions as a humanoid player and they are clearly different from villagers endermen or even piglens some mass extinction event killed all of them off though but what

Well we’ll save that topic for another Video let’s return to the shipwrecks from the chess contents we know that the builders had knowledge of explosives and redstone in fact tnt only spawns in two places naturally shipwrecks and you guessed it desert pyramids we can’t find it anywhere else so it seems likely that the people who

Built the ships also built the pyramids however the shipwrecks have another important item hidden which i haven’t mentioned this is the treasure map and it’s the only item which is guaranteed to spawn within the ship if we follow the map we discover a chest buried deep beneath the sand

It contains the loot we might expect gold iron diamonds and the like nothing too special however one item catches the eye the heart of the sea again with a 100 spawn rate this is clearly important it’s the only thing that no matter what the treasure map leads to

The heart of the sea is a strange blue ball visually unlike any other minecraft item it does however have a use it’s a critical component in crafting the conduit simply surrounded by some nautilus shells and you have one of the six types of items in minecraft that are considered rare by their color

Including music discs beacons and in-crystals similar to other rare items the conduit is used by building a structure around it in the world constructing a prismarine cage underwater with a conduit in the middle activates it and something fascinating occurs the conduit powers up transforming into a strange undulating entity

It attacks any hostile mob that approaches it also activates the conduit power buff to anyone nearby any player that is i should point out that this doesn’t work on enderman conduit power is an incredibly useful trait it includes water breathing night vision and haste essentially it includes everything that would be

Necessary for something like oh i don’t know an underwater building project perhaps the conduit has the additional capability of being expandable up to a 96 block range with a full cage pop a few of these down and building underwater becomes a breeze i’m sure many of you in survival

Minecraft have used the conduit for this exact purpose so the shipbuilders now had this powerful underwater technology and it led to two major effects first it enabled the builders to create vast ocean monuments with ease but it also had the additional benefit of acting as a key to these monuments

Dive down and build a conduit exploring the monument is no problem however without a conduit an intrepid explorer would be quickly destroyed unless they were particularly well equipped with potions and supplies this is because of the guardians before we discuss the guardians though i want to suggest an interesting idea

When the conduit is activated the buff symbol looks very similar to an eye the same symbol is in the particle effects are on the conduit a youtuber called gepomc noticed something interesting when comparing that symbol to the heart of the sea it almost looks as though the left is a

Closed eye and the right is an open eye is it possible that the heart of the sea name is more symbolic and this item is actually some sort of eye consider what if the purpose of the ancient ships was for more than just exploration what if they were searching for

Something a deep-sea monster whose eyes have special properties a giant squid perhaps were all the weapons and explosives on board not used for war against other people but for battle against an ancient and powerful being the builders could have sent their ships out to find these beasts before hiding

The treasure deep underground for later retrieval it’s a thought that seems at least somewhat plausible to me and it gives a reason for the supplies on board even if we don’t know exactly where the heart of the sea came from we need to talk about the guardians guardians are fish-like mobs that only

Spawn near ocean monuments they come in two varieties the smaller standard variant and the larger stronger version found deep within called the elder guardian guardians are very unique they have a bizarre laser attack that hits targets precisely at a distance and their eye follows the player continuously

However vision seems to be their only sense if a player hides behind a block guardians become unaware of the player and forget about them it’s almost as though they’re programmed to do one thing and one thing only attack enemies on site they’re not smart enough for anything else

The elder guardian is similar it attacks players that it can see with a laser it’s also capable of inflicting mining fatigue on a player at a long distance these traits seem especially useful in preventing an unauthorized person from exploring the monument some of you probably already see where

I’m going with this i’m not going to make an absolute statement but i think we at least need to consider the possibility that the guardians are mechanical let’s break it down guardians look similar to real-life naval mines used to protect waters from enemy ships elder guardians also cannot reproduce or respawn

Each monument comes with three of them once they’re gone they’re gone forever the world has a limited number also both types of guardians look as though they’re made from prismarine bricks the texture is very similar and killing either type can result in prismarine shards guardians can also survive above water

Something that no fish in minecraft can do this implies that despite their tail fins they aren’t actually fish they’re something meant to look like fish for even more evidence let’s listen to a few of their sounds This is subjective of course but they don’t sound natural at all to me even their high-pitched noises on land sound like some sort of polyphonic synthesizer for the sake of argument let’s assume that the guardians are indeed mechanical remember what i was saying earlier about the conduit being a key to the monument

The conduit seems to be almost perfectly suited to counteracting the effects of the guardians in fact they’re attracted to it like a moth to a flame only to be zapped and destroyed maybe guardians don’t have an off switch but the conduit essentially makes them useless what if the ancient builders

Intentionally constructed the guardians in such a way that the conduit would counteract them it seems like they were the only ones who had access to hearts of the sea since they only occurred in one place in the world so by building mechanical guardians they didn’t need to worry

About an on off switch since the conduit would protect them and only them from harming the monuments it’s actually a pretty clever evolution of their earlier traps jungle pyramids could be broken in by trying every combination or by just breaking the blocks desert pyramids are only safe if you don’t know

About the tnt once you’ve fallen for it once it’s easy to just break the pressure plate a second time but the ocean monument well you can’t just force your way in because of the mining fatigue add on top of that swarms of guardians and the ocean monument is almost impossible to attack

Unless you have the key then it’s a breeze i think it’s brilliant an impenetrable fortress becomes neutralized with the right item if you control that item you control the fortress let’s take a step back for a second a race of ancient seafaring beings explored the world and found many riches along the way

They hid some of these in jungle temples and some in desert pyramids which were protected by fairly simple safeguards however they also created ocean monuments which were far harder to loot and destroy the only way it would be feasible to access them would be through the use of

A heart of the sea which were buried deep under the sand and could only be found using treasure maps the jump from above ground pyramids to huge underwater monuments is a massive leap in complexity however it seems as though the builders experimented with smaller underwater structures first underwater ruins are similar in

Composition to jungle pyramids with mossy stone or desert pyramids with sandstone they also sometimes have prismarine and sea lanterns which eventually became the main building blocks of the monuments the chests contains similar loot to sunken ships with buried treasure maps showing up occasionally however these ruins weren’t useful in

The long run so the builders didn’t protect them with guardians and they eventually broke down maybe you subscribed to my theory at this point in the video and maybe you don’t either way is fine for the believers there’s still some stuff we need to figure out

The biggest question of all is where are these builders they clearly existed at some point but what happened i alluded to this earlier but the overworld is infested with undead mobs that resemble the player in shape and size including skeletons and zombies another notable addition is the drowned which are zombies that have

Well drowned it’s also worth pointing out they spawn with generation of ocean ruins others have speculated that these undead enemies are a result of some huge event which decimated a thriving species and i happen to agree i think that this is the species that built the monuments and the pyramids

Not endermen not villagers but a huge group that somehow all died resulting in undead remnants i have an idea about what happened to them but it’s too big to fit into this video if you’re interested in that theory let me know whenever we’re trying to figure out something like this we should take

The time to identify leaps of faith that we’ve made or evidence to the contrary one potential criticism is that if these builders existed at one point then it would make sense for us to find more evidence of their existence than just these monuments i would counter that by saying that it

Actually makes a whole lot of sense that the monuments are some of the few things that are still around in real life time erodes all but the strongest of man-made structures look at the egyptian pyramids some of them are over 4 600 years old so i think the fact that there are so

Few remaining structures make sense i also want to mention that these probably are the same people who made the mines buried deep underground after all they needed to get their treasure from somewhere and the mines certainly aren’t in use when we find them another possible question is why did

These people create ocean monuments just to store a few blocks of gold is there some other purpose and i think that’s a good point i’m not sure i have a good reason as to why they’re so big for relatively limited treasure my best guess is that the extinction

Event happened soon after they finished construction and they didn’t have time to fill them up but i don’t know for sure of course the biggest leap of faith is that these people were somehow able to construct guardians but there actually is precedent for this in minecraft iron golems and snow golems

Are two mobs that are built from inanimate materials the guardians could very well be the same type of thing it’s just that we don’t know the recipe so there we go that’s my theory for the story of the ancient structures do you agree disagree let me know in the

Comments the main purpose of this video is to get a discussion going i’m not claiming that this theory is absolutely correct i’d like to hear what you think is right or wrong about it and maybe together we can improve upon it and come up with something better

Also if you haven’t already join my discord using the link in the description we have a great community and it’s a wonderful place to talk about various minecraft theories i’ve seen some people come up with some really cool stuff which i may be featuring in a future video

If that interests you at all we’d love to have you it’s also much more likely that i’ll see your comments there anyways thanks so much for watching this has been retro gaming now i hope you all have a wonderful day and i’ll see you in the next video You