The Weekly Thing – The Crazy History of Minecraft’s PEACEFUL MODE Speedruns

Peaceful mode is for all intents and purposes designed to make the game of minecraft easier the hunger bar never depletes and health regenerates rapidly that is in the unlikely event that you actually find a way to take damage even tnt explosions won’t take so much

As half a heart and of course no hostile mobs will spawn day or night surface or cave it’s e for everyone without so much as the mildest cartoon violence but back to peaceful making the game easier that’s not always necessarily going to be the case with no blazes or endermen spawning rods

And pearls are hard to come by especially in earlier versions of the game without piglens but speedrunners have never been known to shy away from a challenge this is the story of how a community of players took what was supposed to be minecraft’s mildest game mode and pushed

It to limits most never would have thought possible limits even beyond what can be achieved in the standard difficulties of the game this is the story of ssgp the first known set seed peaceful run in the pre 1.9 category was played by a japanese runner over 4 years ago in

January of 2018 but sadly no public video of the run appears to have survived some of the earliest known recorded footage of a pre 1.9 ssgp world record dates from a few weeks later when canada’s most famous son illumina completed a run in six minutes and one

Second the seed he used spawns him in the middle of a mesa biome from which he spends the first 1 minute and 20 seconds of the run traveling to a temple in a nearby desert granted a tiny bit of that time is spent gathering sand for pillaring up from the

Temple’s loot room but it’s clear that even though the movement and mechanics are as flawless as we’ve come to expect from illumina there’s room for plenty of optimization in terms of the seed after gathering emeralds diamonds and gold illumina leaves the temple and runs straight to the nearby desert village

Here he swiftly gathers up potatoes and carrots from the farms which he can exchange with farmer villagers for emeralds if you’re not familiar with pre 1.9 ssg runs players can actually use villagers to acquire eyes of ender illumina is playing version 1.8.9 the very last version of minecraft to offer

This trade as in 1.9 it was switched to ender pearls as a way to ensure survival players would have to explore the nether and kill blazes before visiting the end this was for most a slowdown but for peaceful mode players with no natural way to acquire blaze rods it made

Entering the end virtually impossible ever since 1.9 the only way for peaceful mode players to enter the end has been through portals which generate fully filled and so set seed peaceful runners playing recent versions simply use the same seeds as are used for regular ssg since one cycling the optimal strategy

For post 1.9 dragon fights doesn’t carry the same risk of death as do the dominant strategies in pre 1.9 playing in peaceful is hardly even an advantage anyway that’s why illumina and most other ssgp runners have chosen to play on 1.8.9 illumina trades with the cleric

To level it up and unlock the eye of ender trade all he needs is one to fill the portal on this seed so with that he leaves the village before going any further he chops down a tree using the planks and the gold from the temple to

Craft a whole set of tools plus a boat in a set seed run where you know exactly how many blocks you’re going to need to mine the extra speed of gold outweighs the durability of his diamonds after another 20 seconds of travel illumina finally reaches the stronghold

Digs straight down runs to the portal room and enters the end yes the ender dragon does spawn in peaceful mode i’m not quite sure why the whole point of peaceful is that there are no monsters and the dragon is about the biggest baddest monster of them all

But then again if you go to the end i guess you’re asking for trouble pre 1.9 dragon fights if you’re not familiar are very different from the newer version instead of perching at the center portal and spitting balls of dragon breath the pre 1.9 dragon will charge at the player directly it’s a

Much more difficult fight but with precise timing players can bait the dragon into flying towards end crystals which they can then blow up to deal damage to the dragon since explosions deal no direct damage to the player in peaceful mode aside from knockback ssgp players can do this

With minimal risk of death the end fight is sub-optimal to say the least with five crystals being used to kill the dragon in one last laughable stroke of bad luck the exit portal generates above illumina after the fight forcing him to spend precious seconds pillaring up to

The portal by modern standards this run and the seed are nothing special but the run and a small handful of runs a few days before it laid the foundations for the future of ssgp illumina’s attempts brought some short-lived attention to what was at the time a fairly obscure category and as

Such ssgp experienced a small increase in popularity over the following weeks familiar faces such as geosquare submitted their attempts at the record and a few days after illumina’s initial attempt the record was actually beaten once again despite a sub-optimal overworld in which over 20 seconds were lost runner admiral

Stapler also known as legendary strat developer matthew bolen was able to take the crown in a fantastic end fight after this the category laid dormant for quite some time about two months later runner spoonte topped the leaderboard with a time of 4 minutes 46 seconds but this was the only ssgp run submitted

World record or otherwise between admiral stapler’s 536 and april 26th 2019. that’s when german speedrunner nico kraft submitted a time using the same seed as spoonty that elevated ssgp to the next level his 3 minute 57 second time the first sub 4 in the history of

The category opened up a new era for ssgp runners and is still hailed by some as the most legendary ssgp speedrun of all time here’s how he did it nico’s seed puts him in a plane’s biome right next to a desert temple which he quickly runs to and loots instead of

Mining sand on the surface and using that to pillar up out of the temple he uses the tnt from underneath the chests which saves precious seconds because tnt blocks can be broken instantly next he sprints to a village where he breaks crops for villager trading a major advantage of peaceful speedrunning

Is that because hunger isn’t used up the runner doesn’t need to spend any time getting or eating food all of it can be put towards villager trading which is a big help especially in pre 1.9 versions of the game where hunger normally depletes very quickly 2 minutes and 8 seconds into the run

He’s done with villager trading and has his one eye to fill the portal including the time it takes to craft tools which admittedly could be a little bit faster given some minor mistakes and the time it takes to dig out building blocks for the end fight nico goes from

The village to the middle of the stronghold in less than 20 seconds sure the mining on the seat is a tiny bit slower due to the lack of a gold pickaxe but any time loss is far outweighed by how little travel is required nikko’s into the end at less than three

Minutes and this is the point where the run truly sets itself apart to all you normal difficulty players out there don’t try what you’re about to see at home pillaring up to the nearest end crystal he blows it up with impeccable timing docking almost half the dragon’s health

Plus getting an extra melee hit crystal 2 is just as skillfully handled with the dragon now being just one explosion away from death the rest of this run wasn’t 100 perfect by any means but with an end fight this great it might as well have been nico leaps into

The portal and cements his place in the record books with the first sub-4 in ssgp history nicocraft’s run brought ssgp to the next level in terms of times but it also gave it a massive boost in terms of popularity nico craft hd’s original upload of the run which by the way you should

Definitely check out now has over 11 million views which is an astronomical number for such a niche speedrunning category they say there’s no such thing as bad publicity but ssgp’s newfound fandom ended up inspiring a few copycats to try and take their share of the glory here’s the only known footage of one

Such attempt this run uses the same set seed as nicocraft’s run and so one of the runners wait wait runners plural uh okay anyway one of the runners heads to loot the desert temple while the other starts breaking crops correct me if i’m wrong but i don’t see anywhere on speedrun.com

That says anything about an ssgp duo’s category that’s not the only problem though the overworld is pretty normal for the most part setting aside the fact that there are two people for some reason but then entering the end portal there’s a splice you’d think with two people you’d be

Able to play the whole run fast enough not to have to edit clips together but i guess not the dragon swoops in towards the pillar the first end crystal set off and just like that three-fourths of the dragon’s health is gone that’s not how it’s supposed to work

With just two end crystals total and of course the help of some kind of splice or illegal data pack that increases damage they can brag to anyone gullible enough to listen that they have the world record As far as real runs go times gradually improved from this point on as more optimal seeds were discovered one seed which for some time was the category’s best had players use books and paper to obtain emeralds rather than crops but the latest and greatest barrier in

Ssgp would be broken on yet a different world by the runner who’s become the face of the category poisonous skelly skelly began his ssgp career with the modest goal of getting a sub 10 but started playing seriously when he heard about a 3 minute 44 second run played

Out on the book and paper seed he’d be able to do a lot better than that though on ssgp’s newest seed the seed begins in a desert and skelly spawns in with his render distance set at a few chunks a nice positive of set seed speedrunning in general is that it’s more accessible

Regardless of hardware limitation it doesn’t require the constant resets of rsg and since you know exactly where desert temples and other structures are ahead of time you don’t have to compromise performance by setting a high render distance skelly quickly blows up the temple chests with a piece of tnt which is

Faster than looting by hand and completely eliminates the need to mine extra building blocks and heads out less than a minute into the run skully reaches a desert village where he begins trading gold to the cleric for emeralds in a brilliant time-saving move he punches the villager towards a nearby

Blacksmith while trading allowing him to collect an eye of ender without wasting any time as far as getting to the loot chest the seed is incredible in so many ways not only does the amount of gold in the temple allow for runners to totally bypass the step of gathering paper or

Crops for trading but the pickaxe at the blacksmith means skully doesn’t have to spend a single second crafting what’s more the stronghold is essentially right beneath the village meaning that despite minor overworld mistakes skelly reaches the end at under 2 minutes looking back at the old seeds

Where runners would spend more than that time just traveling it’s incredible to see how optimized ssgp has become and as fast as the run seems now innovations like tnt jumps where players take advantage of the knockback from peaceful mode’s harmless explosions to launch themselves to the top of end

Crystal towers could allow times to drop even further if the history of speedrunning has taught us anything it’s that it’s impossible to predict what’s to come but right here right now this is as good as it gets skelly pillars to the top of the first crystal tower and sets off a well-timed

Explosion as the dragon passes he’s knocked off the tower and moves on to the next one where the dragon comes almost instantly there’s a certain element of rng to these fights and for skelly it’s going about as well as possible with the dragon’s health critically low it comes around for one last pass

In a puff of smoke the run is over two minutes and 53 seconds the first sub three in ssgp history comes to an end a huge congratulations to poisonous skelly on an incredible record and a huge thanks to him for his help on this video check out his youtube channel in

The video description if you enjoyed the video be sure to leave a like and a comment and subscribe for more videos just like this one as always thanks so much for watching and we’ll see you in the next one You