Game Theory - Minecraft Has A Zombie Virus INFECTING the Overworld!

Episode Date: November 12, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he explains the secret virus infecting the Minecraft overworld! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick and Justin Kuiper Editors: Tyler Mascola, Pedro Freitas, Forrest Lee and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

Ugh, I am so done with literally every game being a zombie survival game. I get it. The Walking Dead was a popular franchise. Um, 2010 called They Want Their Genre Back. Give me something new, you know? Totally. Hey, you want to go gather some resources? Sure. They ask you how you are you. You just have to say that you're fine. They're not really fine, but you just can't get into it. Oh, internet. Welcome to Game Theory, where we're all blockheads.

So today we're going to be talking about some of the changes that were added. with the Nether Update earlier this year, and then using that information to go back and examine one of the oldest parts of Minecraft, the zombie. Zombies are such an omnipresent part of pop culture nowadays that it's easy to overlook them, which is kind of ironic, considering what made them explode onto the scene

in the first place was how horrific they were. And now, they're mundane again, such as the Circle of Life, or the Circle of Undead. It's a Circle of Undead. And of course, the zombie jockeys are just always terrifying. Those things will mess you up. Anyway, in all of my exploration of Minecraft lore up to this point, I've tended to skip over them for exactly that reason. They're just kind there.

Me, generic hostile mob. In a world full of fire-breathing dragons, three-headed withers, exploding moss monsters, and teleporting Slender Man, there's just so many other cooler things to talk about. Zombies are just very easy to overlook, but you know what? That was dumb of me. Short-sighted, because they are the bedrock upon which Minecraft is built, in a very literal sense. These guys have been a part of the game since the game since the game. the beginning in update 0.2.0. So if anything has an importance to the lore, it's probably them.

And you know what, they do. With some of the updates made to the nether, I believe we now have some very interesting leads as to what zombies are and how they plan to the overall narrative of the game. Today we're talking about how the zombies and other zomified mobs might just be the most important clues for discovering what may have pushed an ancient race of builders to flee the overworld and live in the end. One of the things that sent me down this rabbit hole, was reading Minecraft, the island, and official Minecraft novel. Yes, in absence of new FNAF books, I've now moved on to Minecraft novels. Yeah, yeah, I'll get to you guys too.

Maybe. Anyway, the book was a surprisingly compelling read. I have expected this to be some lazy video game tie-in novel, but it's so much more than that. For one thing, it's written by Max Brooks, who you might know as the author of World War Z. One of the best zombie apocalypse stories in recent memory. It certainly was enough to get my attention. And once I started reading, it became clear to me that he was chosen to emphasize the horror of Minecraft's world. Take this excerpt.

I stopped and backed away. Its clothes were ragged and filthy. Its flesh was a mottled green. Its eyes, if you could call them eyes, were nothing but lifeless black points in a flat, unmoving face. Memories flooded my mind. Images of creatures I'd known from stories, but had never seen in person. And here it was, approaching me without stretched arms. Numb with fear, I sprinted for the hill.

I wasn't thinking, wasn't planning. Terror drove my every step. This is a Minecraft book. Like, what? Oh, and by the way, the audiobook is narrated by Jack Black, so, you know, imagine that terrifying passage, but instead of being read by professional YouTuber Mat Pat, it's being read by professional YouTuber Jablinski Games. But Nights at Fridays, that's where I wanna be. Professional Fnaf, YouTuber Jablinski Games. So, let's begin with what we know about Minecraft's zombies. For one thing, they only seem to spawn in the overworld.

There are some reports of them spawning in the nether, but those are extremely few and can never really be replicated. It's thought to be either a bug or a remnant from some mods, but if they are indeed limited to the overworld, along with their variants like the husk and the drowned, that prompts the most obvious question of why? Why do they only exist in the overworld? One explanation I've seen tossed around online would be that the zombies are just zomified villagers, and as such, you'll only find them in places where you're find other villagers, aka the Overworld. But the fact that zombie villager exists as a separate

mob type with its own look kind of throws that theory over the bus. Why do zombie villagers look like villagers and normal zombies look just like us? These zombies seem to be the zomified remains of builders like Steve. And yet, like the zombie villagers, these OG zombies or vanilla zombies, hmm, tasty zombies, are only found in the overworld. If zombies are truly the remains of dead players or a race of ancient builders from the past or whatever, why wouldn't you find zombies anywhere that Steve-like builders are able to go? Like the nether and the end, it's suspicious. Well, I think the answer to this question lies in the behavior of another mob, the zomified piglin. We actually talked about the zombie piglin previously on the channel

back before the 1.16 Nether update. And since then, there have been some, um, noteworthy new changes with this particular mob. Back when I did my first video on them, there was really no explanation for what could have created humanoid zombie pigs. The only thing that we had to go on was that they spawned when lightning struck near a pig. And since then, as the Mojang team has further developed the Piglin mob, it appears as though Minecraft wants that feature removed. Quote from lead creative designer Jeb on Twitter, At Jeb, will pigs struck by lightning become zomified piglin or regular piglin?

Jeb's reply, we will likely remove that feature because it'll work differently. This tells me that even though, as I write this, lightning near a pig still spawns a zombie-fied piglin, it's more a thing that's been grandfathered in as an Easter egg to OG players, but no longer represents the new lore that they have in mind for this particular mob type. So what spawn mechanic does reflect how piglins, not pigs, canonically become zomified piglins, visiting the overworld. I'm serious. If you take a piglin out to the overworld or the end,

after 15 seconds, they turn into a zomified piglin. as a result of standing in the overworld and breathing. And I mean that literally, it seems like the only plausible explanation for what could be happening here, that the piglins, upon traveling to the overworld, begin breathing in something that just magically turns them from a perfectly well-functioning living creature into a flesh-starved zombie. It's bizarre. Something about being in the overworld turns piglins into zombies. As I see it, the only explanation for this is some sort of airborne zombie virus.

Now, that might seem crazy at first. After all, we and the villagers are all able to run around in the overworld all day, breathing in the same air without turning into zombies. So what gives? Well, that question is best answered by turning to some very real and some very tragic history. As you might have learned in your history class, when European colonists came to America and started interacting with the native population, it didn't go well for the indigenous Americans.

In fact, it's estimated that over 90% of indigenous Americans were killed in the decades. decades that followed. It's just horrific, but why I bring this up today is how they died. Because while the Europeans that settled in America certainly did kill plenty of indigenous Americans in warfare, most were killed by diseases such as smallpox, measles, and influenza. Diseases that were common in Europe, but completely new to the indigenous population of the new world. In many cases, they weren't even getting these diseases from people who were displaying symptoms of the sickness. The European explorers were asymptomatic carriers of the diseases. These were all diseases that Europeans had been dealing with for generations.

And with each passing generation, the people who managed to survive dying from some terrible epidemic passed on their antibodies and immunities to their descendants. With each generation, Europeans gained stronger and stronger immune systems, which meant that formerly devastating diseases were no longer quite so deadly. So when the Europeans brought these diseases to the new world, exposing a population whose ancestors had no opportunity to build up those same immunities, the results were devastating. But there's a part of this story that might strike some people as a gaping hole.

Why weren't the Europeans having the same problem? They too were in a new land encountering new people. Why weren't the colonists dying of the American diseases? Well, the answer is cities. Europeans lived in densely packed cities, which were breeding grounds for infection. Big gatherings of people all packed together in a tight space, are one of the easiest ways to spread a virus, go figure. Social distancing starts to get a whole lot harder when you're all packed together like sardines.

And all of that gets compounded far worse when you don't have modern conveniences like plumbing and clean water. If you want an indication of how big a problem water contamination was during this time, it took until 1535 to finally prohibit people from dumping their excrement into the River Thames of London. Yeah, they had to pass a law outlawing you from dumping your poop into the water that ran through its most populous city. Reports from the Times say that the water ran black. M really makes you want to reconsider that Riverview property, huh? All of these factors combined to make European cities a breeding ground for all kinds of horrible diseases. North America, meanwhile, with its lack of densely populated cities,

stood in stark contrast, and hence the indigenous people of North America had no plagues. All of that is a fascinating and frankly tragic look at history, but what relevance does it have in Minecraft? Well, understanding the history of diseases and plagues in the real world, it becomes a lot easier for us to understand how this might happen in the fictional world of Minecraft. Let's just assume for a minute that there is a zombie plague floating around in the air of Minecraft's overworld and end.

We don't know how it would have started or why. Maybe it was the result of experiments trying to resurrect the dead. Maybe it was somehow tied to the appearance of the wither. Who knows? But let's just say that it happened. Well, in those early days, it wouldn't be pretty. Those who managed to avoid being turned into zombies would still have to deal with the menace of being attacked by the undead.

It could very well be that the zombie plague was responsible for wiping out the overworld's population. The reason that the overworld is filled with so many abandoned structures, like the desert pyramids, the jungle pyramids. Who knows? Some of the early members of this ancient civilization may have fled to the end to try and escape the plague. Like, I've been guessing for the better part of the last year. But over successive generations of natural selection, the people in the overworld developed stronger immune systems that were resistant to the airborne plague. The villagers of today are the beneficiaries of those many generations of inherited immunity. They only turn when they're bitten, which makes sense. One of the most important defense mechanisms that we have against infection is our skin,

and a bite bypasses that to inject the zombie virus directly into the bloodstream, delivering a viral load high enough to transform some villagers. And for as overthinking and overreaching as that statement might seem, design details of the game seem to support the theory. Some villagers will be zombified when attacked by zombies. while some others appear to be fully immune. 50% of villagers will simply lose health when attacked by zombies and eventually die without ever being turned, which tells us that some are immune or more resistant to the zombie curse.

Weird, right? It's an awfully suspicious detail. Why, though, wouldn't a zombie virus exist in the nether when it's both in the end and the overworld? My guess? Temperature. Warmer climates tend to be better at fending off pathogens, and likewise, when it's colder, viruses are more likely to be spread. That's why you're more likely to get a more likely to get a better. the cold in the winter, the flu in the winter, and why everyone was talking about the second spike of COVID happening during the fall and winter months. One of the reasons your body heats up and develops a fever when you're sick is that certain infections have a harder time surviving at higher temperatures. And what can be hotter than HE double hockey sticks itself?

The temperature down in the nether is high enough to effectively sterilize everything. Nothing says hot quite like pools of lava. This, in turn, would keep the nether clear of any zombie viver. producing a civilization of piglins whose immune systems never encountered the plague, until of course they're brought into the overworld. So, there you have it, friends, the invisible zombie virus of the Minecraft overworld. For as ridiculous as it sounds, the science of it actually fits a surprising amount of in-game details and behaviors.

Maybe it's time Steve and Alex spend less resources building swords and axes, and more time building face masks. After all, it's up to us to protect the immunocompromised hoglins. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.