Game Theory - Minecraft and The Power of The Dead

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he breaks down the power of the Nether and what powers it! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick Editors: Pedro Freitas, Tyler Mascola and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Hey, nice kicks you got there. Wonder what I'll get. My turn. Here you go, shopkeep, one gold ingot. Wait, this is just a wad of string. Fine, here's another one. What do I get? Random barters suck.

Hello, internet. Welcome to Game Theory, the show that's taken a nether dive into the deep end of Minecraft's hidden lore. It's been almost two years since we started journeying down into this lore rabbit hole, but there's one area of the Minecraft universe that I've yet to cover in depth. My friends, we are long overdue for a discussion of the Netherlands. I meant the Netherlands, the Nether Space Lands, the Lands of the Nether, the Nether Regions. Oh, you know what I mean. The Nether is, in my estimation, one of the most misunderstood parts of the Minecraft canon,

and it all stems from the widespread misconception that the Nether is located deep beneath the overworld. Now, don't get me wrong, I get why everyone thinks this. The nether is located entirely underground with no sky above it. Dig up and you'll only hit a bedrock ceiling. And the fact that distance traveled in the nether translates to a much greater distance traveled in the overworld makes a lot of sense if they're concentric circles around a single core. Even the fact that they named the game starting position as the overworld seems to imply the existence of an underworld. A world associated with Hades, the fire-filled dangerous hexcape filled with dead souls,

which is exactly what the nether is. I mean, you don't even have to go that. far. By dictionary definition, nether actually means lower in position under or below. All the evidence is pointing to this one conclusion. Like it is a slam dunk of a theory. At least it would be if it wasn't 100% wrong. Don't shoot the messenger here, friends. Minecraft's technical director Nathan Adams confirmed this in a tweet, saying that the nether is a quote, separate dimension. While the idea of the nether being below the overworld is a common belief, it's not what they're going for. Well, you know what, Mojang? You could have fold.

us. Anyway, knowing that the nether is its own separate world connected to the overworld only through portals, has some shocking and unsettling implications for the Minecraft universe. First off, the idea of the nether as a completely isolated underground ecosystem is fascinating. It is quite literally a world with no sun. In gameplay terms, this means that there's no day-night cycle, but on a more basic level, it leaves us with the fundamental question of how would a world like this actually be able to function? Like, where is it getting its energy from? After all, here on Earth, Pretty much all our energy originates on the sun. Think about it.

Either it's a plant who performs photosynthesis to draw energy from the sun, or it's an animal that gets its energy by eating those plants, or it's a carnivore that gets its energy by eating those animals, which is just getting energy from the sun with extra steps. So how do you sustain life in a world with no sun? The nether proposes an answer. Fungus. In the nether, we have no plants, only fungus.

Instead of trees, we have huge fungi. Instead of grass, we have nileum. Even the weeping vines, which may at first appear to be plants, must be a fungus based on their red color variant. Plants are green because of their chlorophyll, which is how they use photosynthesis. Fungus, on the other hand, doesn't get their energy from the sun, which is how they're able to get colors like red and teal. But all of this leaves us with a big question. If the fungi aren't getting their energy from the sun like normal plants would, where do they get their energy from? Well, in the real world, fungi leached the nutrients that they need from the environment around them.

It's why mushrooms are often found attached to rotting trees and logs. Even when mushrooms aren't directly attaching themselves to decaying organisms, they're able to get what they need from the soil, which is filled with nutrients from the creatures and plants that died and decomposed there. When you look at it like this, it would seem like the nether should be a sustainable ecosystem, where various mobs like the piglands are able to survive by eating fungi, and when the piglands die, their bodies decompose and the nutrients are absorbed back by the fungi. It's all part of the circle of life.

But there's one big problem with this system. It just doesn't work that way. The way humans and piglins and fungi and Minecraft Steve and Alex work is that we get nutrients in a really inefficient way. It isn't like the water cycle where there's a fixed amount of H2O that gets cycled around. When you eat plants or hamburgers or fungi or whatever for food, it's true. Some of the calories in that food are going to go to help your body grow so that when your body eventually expires and decomposes, it's going to provide food for the worms. And the energy cycle continues.

But think about the idea of burning calories. Those are the calories that you eat getting converted into other forms of energy. like movement and heat. Even when you're sitting completely still, your body is still burning calories to do things like pump blood through your veins, keep your lungs breathing air. Heck, even the process of digesting the food in the first place

burns some number of calories. And that's all energy that plants and animals can't use. In short, the nutritional cycle of the ecosystem is losing energy, leaving the nether with a constantly dwindling supply of useful resources needed to sustain life. If you need a good visual example for all this, a paper from 2008 looked at what's

called the feed ratio for different animals like cows, pigs, and chickens. Cows, for example, have a feed ratio of 25 to 1, which means that for every 25 calories of feed that's given to a cow, we only get one calorie back of usable meat. This is actually one of the environmental arguments for vegetarianism, cutting out the inefficient middleman of these animals and just eating the plants ourselves. Or at the very least, switching to meats that have a more sustainable feed ratio like chickens, which have a feed ratio of 4.5 to 1. Still fairly inefficient, but not nearly as wasteful as beef.

The long and short of it though is that in no circumstance are you putting one calorie in and getting one calorie out. The system is constantly leaking energy. It's the basic principle of entropy, so how do you beat it? Well, on Earth, we have the benefit of not being a closed system. We import most of our energy from outer space. Now, that might seem like a weird thing to say, but it's entirely true. We're constantly getting blasted with new energy from the sun at a rate of 173 million gigajoules per second. To put that number into perspective, that's around 12 times New York.

city's annual power consumption, hitting the earth every second. And that means that while the nutritional cycle is constantly losing energy, it's also gaining a ton of energy as plants capture that from the sun. And mind you, it takes a lot of energy from the sun to sustain this. The only way the circle of life thing actually works is for literally 99.9% of life on land to be plant. Plans can harness energy from the sun. The rest of us are basically just freeloading off their hard work. So with all that context, let's talk Minecraft. The overworld works the same way as Earth. Lots of plants and the sun constantly pumping in new energy. But the nether doesn't seem to work that way. It's a closed ecosystem. There isn't energy coming from an outside source. So how can the nether survive? Well, when you think about it, the nether actually is chalk full of an abundant energy source. A much darker, more disturbing, and sinister source of energy. Souls. Like, seriously, there is nothing subtle about the horror of souls trapped in the sand beneath your feet in the nether. But the idea that these trapped souls might serve as a source of energy for the biome is actually well supported within established Minecraft lore. In the newly released Minecraft Dungeons, the souls that you obtain from killing mobs can be used as a power source for various artifacts.

And several months ago when I did a video analyzing the reveal of the warden mob with Dream, we pointed out that the warden appears to be powered by caged souls that are trapped in its chest. Heck, you've probably even harness the energy yourself if you've ever run a soul sand farm. It's the best way to grow Netherwort for making potions. In short, the body of a dead mob spawn might not have much energy in terms of raw calories, but apparently the power of the soul does. But that still leaves us with the important question of how. Even if souls are the thing providing a renewable source of energy to the nether, where did they come from in the first place?

After all, they're the souls of something, or maybe more accurately, someone. Well, a big clue might exist in the nether portals themselves. To build a nether portal, you need obsidian. And one of the easiest ways to make obsidian is by blending lava with good old 8. H2O, except there's a problem. While lava is certainly abundant in the nether, water isn't. In fact, you can't even pour water in the nether, which gives us really strong evidence pointing to the fact that the overworld portal was the first to be created, and it was the nether that was being invaded. In fact, the more you look into it, the more it makes sense. Consider, if you will, the existence of the warped forests. Well, the word warped probably makes you think of things like twisted or wrong. The word warp actually has a very specific meaning in the world of botany and agriculture. Specifically, warping refers to the process of taking river water that's rich in sediment, letting it flood over agricultural land, and then draining it all away, thereby transforming an area that was once dry and barren into now nutrient-rich soil. And while that might seem like a strange thing for me to bring up in a Minecraft video,

it might help explain why the warped forest feels like such an outlier when compared with the rest of the nether. Maybe the word warped here isn't so much a reference to the oddness of the forest, but rather to the way it was created. Think about it. Dry soil transformed into rich land. I mean, that is the definition of these small little pockets found in the nether. And what's more, the warped forest is relatively safe for us because the only mobs you find there are striders and endermen. Think about that for a minute. Striders are apparently so domesticated that they'll let you ride on them. They are naturally friendly to Minecraft Steve's race.

And Enderman, who, as we've hypothesized in previous theories, are actually our ancestors. The descendants of ancient builders who abandoned the overworld long. ago. The warped forest, both in its name and in the very nature of what it is, might suggest that it's not a natural formation, but something spawned by outsiders. Builders who came from the overworld, saw the nether as a hostile environment and sought to terraform it, transform it into something more like the overworld that they came from. There's a dark side to all of this too. Regardless of how life in the nether may have gotten started, it's currently a system that's reliant on the energy of souls to sustain it. In order to beat entropy, it has to pull energy from some renewable source. And unlike the overwork, It doesn't have a sun conveniently located overhead flooding the world with energy every day. In other words, the nether has two possible fates. One is to fade away as all its useful energy gradually gets converted to heat, and it's no longer able to sustain life. The other possibility is that it draws its energy from somewhere else, the constant influx of fresh souls from arrogant, overworld adventurers.

After all, the nether seems practically designed to harvest the souls of overworld adventurers. It seems that the only way to prevent your soul from being ripped from your body is to remain in a kind of constant state of vigilance. Allow yourself to grow tired and nod off in the nether and, well, you know what happens. The bed blows up. The moment your eyes shut and your mind starts to drift into dreamland, that's the end of your worldly existence. Just another fresh soul to feed a dimension that's hungry for energy. Now that gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, soul food. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.