Game Theory - Do NOT Kill The Ender Dragon! (Minecraft)

Episode Date: May 21, 2023

Welcome back to our deep dive into the lore and history of Minecraft. Today, we are going all the way to the end...er. The Ender Dragon. We are talking about the Ender Dragon. Have you ever wondered how or why it is there? Why do we have to hunt it to win? Well, it's a lot more of a tragic story than you would guess. Or maybe you've watched the rest of our Minecraft Lost History series and you KNOW it is going to be sad. Theorists, we need to SAVE the Ender Dragon!

According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that an Ender Dragon should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its massive body off the ground. The Ender Dragon, of course, flies anyway, because Ender Dragons don't care what Minecraft builders think is impossible. Internet, welcome to game theory. Now, today's theory is a bit overdue in my Minecraft lore series. The Enderman, the descendants of an ancient builder civilization transformed by spending generations in the end and some sifting off of a diet of course. porous fruit and presume that they must be at the mercy of this powerful dragon that rules over them. But if we dig into the evidence, it actually tells us something very different.

So today we're going to focus on Gene and her story. Oh, sorry, is that name not ringing any bells for you? Well, it should. It's confirmed by Minecraft Creator Notch and other members of the Minecraft development team that Gene is the official canonical name of the Ender Dragon. Apparently Minecraft Steve got his name the exact same way, a random comment by the franchise's creator, so as far as I'm concerned, these two names are equally official. Anyway, today is all about Gene and how we as the player have been

ignorant to the fact that for the past decade the game has been begging, nearly screaming at us to not kill her. That's right, we're supposed to spare the Ender Dragon. But to understand why, let's start at the beginning of the end. So to call Jean the Ender Dragon is a bit misleading. Sure, she's the only dragon found in the end, but the important detail we tend to overlook is that it wasn't always that way. The end gives us clues that, at least at one point in history, multiple Ender dragons made their home here. For evidence of this, just look at the end ships, found throughout the dimension. These things have dragon heads

mounted onto their masts. Clearly the spoils of battles against dragons that once populated this world. And this already tells us a lot of different things. Not only that dragons, plural, once existed in this realm, but also that a dragon hunting civilization existed. A hunter civilization that apparently must have been pretty successful judging by the dragon heads found at the mast. And if you're asking who these dragon hunters were, well, I think the answer at this point should be fairly obvious. Whoever constructed these massive flying ships were clearly builders.

The end ship is just this impressive feat of engineering, with floors constructed from the finest obsidian. There's also the fact that the ship is protected by Shulkers, a mob that you might be tempted to write off as just a weird creature shoved into the end to round out the enemies found there, but it is so, so much more. You see, if you read the entry for the Shulker in my favorite, go-to Minecraft lore book The Mob Beastiary, which, as a reminder, is written from the perspective of an in-world adventurer and researcher, the Shulker's perper blocks might actually be man-made. To quote from the book, the exterior of the Shulker may be a natural adaptation to help conceal it, or it may be engineered by the city's architects.

Huh, that is a weird thing to call out their book. What a huge logical leap to make. I don't know about you, but it seems to me like it's heavily implying that that is the right answer, that the Shulkers were actually in. engineered by builders. Still, whether these shulkers are a feat of bioengineering or just an instance of cleverly domesticating a native end species, one thing is clear whoever built the end ships were serious about science. So why were the builders hunting dragons? Were they merely trophy hunting? Tracking down the biggest and most dangerous game just because they could? We've talked in past theories how the civilization demonstrated a lot of hubris, convinced that their ability to build gave them the power of gods with power over life and death. So could the war against dragons just be enough?

extension of that. Maybe, but I don't think it's just that. Case in point, the Eletra capes that enable the player to fly. These capes are kind of like the final reward in a traditional game of Minecraft. You beat the dragon, you get access to the end ship, and boom, you find this unique item that can only be found here. And not only are they exclusive to the n-ships, but they have a texture and use that all but screams that they were made from the remains of defeated dragons. We clip their wings so that we ourselves could obtain the power of flight. I don't think it's a coincidence that the one major flying item that we obtain is being done in the one world where the main mob is a giant flying dragon. When the builders got to the end, they saw something they had yet to conquer, the skies. And so they were determined to tame those skies, just like they had done to the overworld and later the nether.

Fun fact, by the way, even though Eletra seems to be a made-up fantasy word for dragon wings, Eletra wings are actually based on real-life biology. Many insect species, especially beetles, possess Eletra. Though in the real world, Eletra wings themselves aren't used for flying, but instead as a protective outer coating covering the hind wings that the beetles actually use for flying. Anyway, with that little biology lesson out of the way, what I'm really interested in here is the story of the Ender Dragon. Or I guess I should say stories.

Because when you actually look at the evidence inside the game, it seems to suggest a tale of multiple competing forces. On one hand, we have the N-ships, which seem to be pretty clear evidence that there were builders who were into dragon hunting. So the builders must have been anti-drable. Right? That's where the story gets complicated. Because as anyone who's tried to take down the Ender Dragon knows, there are Ender crystals spread across its habitat that are capable of healing it. Someone or something clearly wanted to keep this creature alive. And not only that, but the

end crystals themselves are not naturally forming. They're objects that are constructed artificially by combining an Eye of Ender and a gas tier and then encasing it all in glass. But what's especially telling about the end crystals is where you find them. On top of obsessively. city in pillars and inside of protective cages. In short, it looks like someone has gone through a lot of steps to make this ender dragon harder to kill. Not only by creating the end crystals, but by putting them on top of pillars that would be a challenge to reach and then encasing them in a further protective barrier. And something tells me that Jean lacks the opposable thumbs capable of forging glass. Something else is going on here. Someone. Some series of builders really wanted this dragon to stay alive. And so they built an elaborate security system to make sure that that dragon, stayed alive. And so we have evidence that suggests two conflicting stories, a ship that seems like the product of builders who are into slaying dragons, and a dragon protection defense grid that seems to be built for the opposite purpose. So what is going on here? Was there like a civil war? Did the builders who came to the end split into two factions? One side taking the role of dragon slayer and the other taking the role of dragon worshipper? If that was the case, why would anyone in their right mind side with the dragons? After all, the ender dragon is a hostile mob. Why would someone take it upon themselves to defend the dragons? Well, it seems to suggest that the hunters were too successful, to the point that they nearly hunted the Ender Dragon species to extinction.

In real-world ecological studies, there's something called K-selection theory that basically aims to explain how various animal species ensure that their offspring survive. K-selection theory is founded on this constant trade-off between quality of offspring and quantity of offspring. On the quantity side of things, you have insects, who can reduce hundreds, thousands, even millions of tiny little babies in a lifetime. Needless to say that when you're laying that many eggs, each individual ant baby is not going to be getting a whole heck of a lot of tender love and care. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, you got whales. With some species of whale, like the sperm whale,

having a single baby every five to seven years. This means that each individual whale baby is going to get a lot more parental investment. Its whale parents are going to spoil that thing like an only child. I bring this biological detour up because it brings up an interesting point about the animal The larger in animal species is, the more likely it is to favor quality of offspring over quantity of offspring. Smaller animals like insects, rabbits, and birds can afford to have a lot of babies at once, while larger species like whales, elephants, and rhinos are much slower to reproduce. The Ender Dragon seems to fit with that latter category. It is massive, and it only leaves behind a single egg.

But what this reproductive strategy also means is that megafauna. The big animals, while being attractive targets for hunters, are also the species species that are most at risk of being hunted to extinction because of how slowly they reproduce. During the 1800s, for instance, the Eastern Pacific gray whale was hunted for their blubber, nearly reaching the point of extinction. And mind you, these were not high-tech humans. These were guys in wooden ships powered by sails and armed with harpoons. Still, even with rudimentary tools, those guys were capable of making some substantial damage.

More recently, the African elephant population has fallen from an estimated 12 million near the start of the 20th century to a mere 390 96,000 in the span of a hundred years, with the main culprit being human hunters poaching them for their ivory tusks. Heck, even as far back as the Ice Age, many scientists believe that while, yes, the changing climate wasn't doing the woolly mammoth any favors, a major contributing factor to its extinction, were humans, at a time when they were just literally cave people thrown around pointed sticks. And when you put it that way, what the end ship represents looks far less heroic. Seems a lot less like valiant heroes to find the odds to defeat an insurmountable foe, and it starts to look a little lot more like humans doing what humans sadly do best. Find a large attractive target, hunt it down, and don't know when to stop. In fact, it's quite possible that there was no civil war between one faction of dragon hunting builders and another faction of dragon worshipping builders. Honestly, it could just be a simple case of a single civilization hunting the ender dragons to the point of extinction and then realizing,

whoopsie, we're on the verge of wiping this thing out. Time to reverse course. In fact, not only are we going to stop hunting these things, we're going to do everything in our power to preserve the only one that we've got left. And hence we have the still remaining defense mechanisms put in place to protect Gene the last Ender Dragon. And believe it or not, but this lines up perfectly with the behavior that we see coming from our Endermen, the evolved versions of our ancient builders. The Endermen peacefully coexist with Gene, neither attacking the other. But, true to their roots, the Endermen are still capable of dragon hunting if forced to. If they're hit by splash damage from one of the Ender Dragon's attacks while you're fighting it, the truce is off. They retaliate it and begin fighting for their their lives. That old dragon hunting spirit dies hard. Unfortunately, any hopes that the

enderman might have for restoring the ender dragon population are meaningless. Sure, they may have decided to stop hunting, but they were too late. While the ender dragon does leave behind an egg, that dragon egg is inanimate. There was just a female dragon gene to lay the egg, but due to the lack of a male dragon, her egg isn't fertilized. It's incapable of hatching. Nothing more than a trophy for whatever hunter might arrive to slay the last of the ender dragons once and for all. This also why I suspect that the player is unable to craft Eletra wings. Canonically, we lack the materials. Gene's body can't be plundered and harvested for enough materials,

and there are no other dragons that we can get the proper resources from. Therefore, we're left with the only Eletra wings that exist in the world in the end ship. Players of Minecraft, myself included, have long speculated that the act of freeing the end means liberating the Enderman and the rest of the end's inhabitants from the tyranny of the Ender Dragon. But it could be that the one who truly becomes free in that moment, is the Ender Dragon herself, left as the last of her species by a race of builders that hunted them to near extinction, and then preserved forever by those same builders who will never really be able to atone for what they did, or reverse the consequences of those actions.

An Ender Dragon forever alone, forever sad at the loss of a race. So in one hand, we absolutely shouldn't kill the last of this species, but on the other hand, it might just be freeing her from her quite literal eternal torment. But hey, it's just a theory. Theory. Thanks for watching.