Game Theory - Even The TREES in Minecraft Have LORE?!

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

Join Game Theory Host Tom as he explains the lore of the new Creaking Mob in Minecraft!

Minecraft's Trees have law now? Yep, in a new update Mojang has created Moving Trees, a new mob known as the Creaking. But what is this thing really? Why is it here and what can it tell us about Minecraft's ever-expanding history? Well, if you're feeling stumped, don't worry, theorists, because I have the answers, and I won't leave you behind. You know me, I'm a stickler for detail and a real sap for law. And it turns out the Creaking's bark may be worse than their bites. Hello, internet. Welcome to Game Theory, the show that's always helping Minecraft's law branch out.

Okay, okay, I'm done with the puns. For now. Instead, I want to talk to you guys about something I have been so excited for. Minecraft's new update, The Garden Awakens. Inside, this update was a brand new biome called the Pale Gardens. A biome that Mojang says is... It's supposed to feel like it's dying. And they nailed it. They've got new grey-colored moss. gray leaves, gray grass, gray wood, even the sky in the biome is gray. So, as a Brit, I felt right at home. But it's the awakened part where things get really crazy. Because alongside all of these new gray blocks, a brand new mob has come out of the woodwork.

Literally. It's called the creaking. And while it looks like the tree's surrounding it, it's a little more aggressive than your average tree. When you're looking at it, it'll be still as a, well, true. But turn away and it's lights out for you. Blink and you're dead. They are fast, faster than you could believe. Don't turn your back.

Don't look away and don't blink. Again, with the British references, Mojang is practically begging me for a theory at this point. So, I took a look and let me tell you theorists, for a mob that just seems like another reason to hate the Minecraft night time, this thing is oozing with sweet, juicy resin. I mean, lore. From how it spawns to how it dies, or doesn't, as the case may be, this one new mob paints a fascinating picture about Minecraft's history. And for once, it has nothing to do with the ancient builders.

Hooray! Progress is being made! So watch your backs, theorists, because we are going to try and uncover the hidden law of the Minecraft creaking. Let's start with the detail I've already mentioned. The creaking uses the same mechanics as the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. The Weeping Angels were original monsters created for the show, with the core idea being, look at them, they stand still, look away, they get ya. However, that's really the only connection these two monsters have.

The Weeping Angels' main goal was simple. Send people back in time and feed off the temporal energy they left behind in order to stay alive. But we aren't getting sent back in time by the creaking. We're just getting bonked over the head with a big stick. So, while it's a cool and definitely creepy mechanic, I don't think this is where Mojang is hiding the law. Instead, the answers are actually being hidden in the same place the creaking are inside the trees. If you hit a creaking, it was.

won't take any damage, but you will get a trail of particles that lead you back to a specific tree in the forest. From the outside, this looks like just another tree. But chop away it a little and you'll find another block known as the creaking heart. This is the thing keeping the creaking alive, so much so that the creaking can't walk more than 32 blocks away from it. It is literally tied to the tree where its heart is. And if you do as the game title suggests and mine this heart, the creaking will crumble before your very eyes. So, while the creaking look like living trees, they're actually more like a physical manifestation of the tree's heart or spirit, connected to, but not physically the same as the tree they've spawned from.

And once I realized that, my mind was immediately taken to something I've talked about a surprising amount on this channel over the last year. Greek mythology. I'm sure my history teacher is delighted that I'm putting that ancient history module to good use. Here's to you, Mr. Bastable. You see, in Greek mythology, there are the spiritual beings known as nymphs. These are basically the personification of nature itself, and they are usually tied to a place, landform or, you guess it, trees. All of these nymphs have different names, powers and stories depending on the type of tree or place they are connected to. But for us today, the ones we need to focus on are the dryads, specifically the subcategory of hammer dryads. The dryads were the nymphs associated with oak trees and were

seen as the protectors of those trees, making sure they grew and that no. one chopped them down. But the hammer dryads had an extra reason to protect the forest. While regular dryads would just appear near the trees they were connected to, hammer dryads were tied directly to the tree's life force. So if the tree died, so did the hammer dryad. Are you beginning to see the connection? A personification of nature tied to the life force and location of a specific tree, namely

one that is made of a type of oak. The creaking are Minecraft's version of the Hammer Dryads from Greek Myth which actually ties in really well with Minecraft's general ethos. The ancient Greeks had very strong feelings about respecting and protecting nature. It's why so many of their mythological creatures and gods are connected to nature and the elements to show people what would happen if we didn't take care of the world we lived in. In one story, King Erysithyn, the king of Thessaly, cut down a sacred grove, and the dryads were so angered that they prayed to the goddess of agriculture, who made the king so hungry that no food fulfilled him.

and eventually he ate himself. Yeah, Greek mythology is dark, man. If you've followed this channel for a while, you'll know that we believe that Mojang has been passing on the same message throughout Minecraft. The respecting nature part, not the eating yourself alive part. The story of the ancient builders is all about what happens when you over-harvest resources and don't respect the natural world. Mojang drawing inspiration from the dryads is them going back to their roots.

Only this time, the roots are fighting back. And for good reason, I mean, just look at this place. The Pale Garden is grey, lifeless and barren. When I first watched the trailer, the tree textures reminded me a lot of basalt, a rocky block that is made from lava. And the particle effects and mossy floors gave me ashy vibes as if the forest had been burnt down. But this dying aesthetic that Mojang was striving for really becomes clear when you consider the Pale Garden's location. While the Pale Garden is a new biome, it's actually a variety of the dark forest. and will only generate adjacent to that dark forest biome.

The dark forest has luscious green leaves, rich dark wood and plenty of flowers spread across the landscape. It really feels alive compared to what we're seeing in the pale garden, almost as if those parts of the dark forest biome are dying. They've been over-harvested, and now the spirits of the forest have literally come out of the trees in order to protect it from those who would destroy the biome further. The question is, who is responsible for the destruction of this forest? forest. Is it us? Now that I live in America, I could see the appeal of chopping down a few pale oak trees for a white picket fence. But no. For once, this isn't the fault of us players, and

surprisingly, it's not the fault of the ancient builders either. This time, it's down to the third most talked about suspects. The ones who happen to have a large, naturally occurring structure inside the dark forest bio, the woodland mansions. That's right, our culprits today are indeed the illogers. Not only are these guys living right in the heart of the very forest that has been destroyed, but if you put any kind of illiger near a creaking, whether it's a vindicator, an evoker or a pillager, they will run for their lives. In fact, the illagers are so afraid of this thing that even a vindicator that's been named Johnny, who usually just goes on a murderous rampage of anything, will still run away from it.

This creature is so terrifying that even the one that is on a psychotic killing spree is afraid of it. Maybe that's what Danny should have used to escape Jack Nicholson. More interesting about this particular detail though, is that they are the only mobs to react this way. If you put any other mob like a cow or a frog or even a regular villager, they just act normal. No running, no screaming, no nothing. Which implies there is some connection here beyond the creaking just being a spooky new mob. These two species have a history.

At first, I thought this history would be pretty straightforward. One of the illiger's primary weapons is an axe, after all, which naturally would make you quite a threat to any forest. You chop down a few trees, take a few logs, the forest gets mad at you, and before you know it, you've got an army of tree nymphs trying to kill you. However, as I looked into it, I discovered that it goes way deeper than that. And it all comes down to this. One of the other new materials in this update, resin. This material forms on trees containing a creaking heart when you hit a creaking.

You can also collect them by breaking a creaking heart without a silk touch tool. But there is one more place you can find yourself some resin. The woodland mansion. specifically in their item chests. And it's not just one or two pieces either. You have a 44.5% chart of finding it in any of the woodland mansion chests, which means the illagers have a lot of this stuff. The illagers weren't just chopping down the trees for wood to make their giant woodland mansions.

They were collecting the lifeblood of the forest, the literal heart and soul of the trees, and slowly killing the forest around them. That is why the creaking appeared. They came into being to defend the trees from the illagers who wanted to destroy them. They struck fear into the illagers, so much so that the illagers had to stop using dark oak in their mansions. Which is why their interior rooms, rooms that were built later on, use completely different planks like birch or oak. They even went so far as to grow their own trees inside the mansion with sapling farms. The illagers were afraid that gathering more dark oak would anger the forest.

They are the reason the pale gardens exist. They over-harvested nature's resources and it took a toll on the forest, causing it to wither and die. And now the creaking will stop anyone from doing the same thing again. But then why collect the resin in the first place? Especially when it caused them so much trouble. Resin is only really used to create bright orange bricks that can give your builds a nice pop of colour. But we aren't seeing any of those blocks used in the Illiger's Woodland mansions. and we know it's not because of their lack of interior design skills.

You don't just build a giant chicken out of wool unless you have some real taste. Not to mention the fact that resin is a pain to get. It literally requires you to either attack a creaking directly or destroy their heart, which isn't fun when the creaking is trying to kill you. It's a lot of effort for the illogist to go to just to have it sit in a chest. So why collect it? It has to be for something we aren't seeing directly. But maybe it connects to the other factors we've already taught.

about. Resin is a viscous liquid that comes from trees and it's used for many purposes like varnishes, adhesives, food additives, incenses and perfumes. But when I went back to the Greek mythology that Mojang has been referencing, there was another sticky substance that came from ash trees. These are large oak-like trees, but with a more pale, almost grey appearance, very much like our pale oak trees in the pale gardens. The sticky substance they exuded was known as manor, a sugary, sweet, thick liquid that was considered an ambrose. Ambrosial food by the Greeks. Basically, foods that they believed belonged to the gods of Olympus.

And if a human were to eat them, they would be granted immortality, essentially becoming a god themselves. This is actually the origins of the Greek hero Achilles. While most modern versions tell us that he was made invulnerable by being dipped into the river sticks, in earlier versions, like three centuries earlier, he was instead anointed with ambrosia to make him invulnerable. What else is invulnerable? The creaking. And when you hit them, you can see.

this Ambrosial Immortality connection happening in real time. Hitting a creaking releases two sets of particles, some grey, some orange. But if you look closely, you can see that the grey particles move towards the tree and the orange particles, the ones that are the same colour as the resin, move towards the creaking. The resin is what is giving the creaking its immortality. They shed their old dead particles and they are replaced by new resin to keep them alive. Resin isn't just some new useless block. In the law, it's immortality juice.

And remind me, which other race of beings in Minecraft have a heavy focus on immortality? That's right, the Illegers. In previous theories, we talked about how the Illegers were working with the ancient builders to try and defeat the Wither using the trial chambers, which is why there are a pillager outpost like structures down in the ancient cities. But after the devastation of both the Wither, the Warden, and their ancient builder friends abandoning them for the end, they knew they had to protect themselves.

They began experimenting with life and death, figuring out how to control souls, turning the allay into the vex, villagers into ravages and bringing zombies to life. But most importantly, they created totems of undying, an item that stops you perishing after a fatal blow. It also gives you a bunch of buffs, including regeneration and fire resistance,

all to keep you alive for longer, to try and make you immortal. This is why the illagers were really, They were doing whatever they could to get their hands on the power of immortality. This resin, this ambrosia, this food of the gods would be the perfect thing to protect themselves from the threat of this world after the ancient builders, their protector since the days of legend, left them to die in the overworld. Using this resin, they could create their totems. But now there are nymphs haunting the forests, spirits of the trees that the illogers can't kill,

And so they run away in fear. Even the trees that were supposed to be the solution to their survival were betraying them, just like the ancient builders they once trusted. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching.