Game Theory - Minecraft's FALSE Hero! (Minecraft Legends)

Episode Date: July 9, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he breaks down the LORE of Minecraft Legends! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick, Hannah Malek (HgMercury73) and Tom Robinson Editors: Pedro Freitas, Danial "BanditRants" Keristoufi, and AbsolutePixel Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Stand aside, Dream. If you thought Clay Drop in the Mask was the biggest thing happening in Minecraft news this week, think again. Because today we've got an expose on Steve. Yeah, that Steve. Turns out, Steve's the latest in a long line of heartless oppressors. Conquering lands, sucking out their resources, and then leaving them to die. How do we know this? Well, have you heard about the newest game?

Minecraft Legends? The whole thing is pure propaganda. Whole bunch of lies. So, let me ask again, who's really going to? mask off now. Huh, Mojang? Oh, internet, welcome to game theory.

The show where we're still trying to bribe Mojang into telling us what's canon. And if people are asking, you know, is that fact, did that really happen? You know, we're not saying that that's exactly what happened, but maybe it did. Do you think it did? What's it going to take, Mojang?

How many emeralds we're talking about here? Because whatever it is, I will make it happen. You see, friends, today we're diving into the newest addition to the world of mining and crafting, Minecraft Legends, an action strategy game that based on first few trailers seems to be bursting at the seams with say it with me now lore I mean just look at this thing you can see enemy mobs like zombies skeletons

villagers and are those baby creepers down there all of them uniting together to follow a mythical hero leading the charge against an invading force of pig and uh look at some of those pig people it looks like they've been hit in the gym recently what is going on with this game well whatever it is it seems important you know those mysterious broken nether portals that you find out in the overwork Half-filled frames of obsidian surrounded by magma, netherrack, and gold engulfed in flame? Minecraft proper never truly answers why they're there or how they get there. But it seems like the new game is gonna answer all of that.

Within the first 40 seconds of the announced trailer, we see nether portals bursting up out of the ground. Piglin armies charging through them ready for battle. And again, look at it. Netherrack with gold detailing. They are the same thing. It's likely these nether portals got dismantled by the United Overworld Army who broke them up in an to prevent more piglin forces from charging on through. So right off the bat, this new game seems to be positioned as a critical linchpin for fleshing out the lore of Minecraft. If new mobs and backstory are one of the things that they're putting into the trailer alone,

can you imagine what must be hiding in the game proper? I could spend hours pouring over this thing frame by frame to find all its little secrets. Except there's one teeny tiny little problem with that. The devs are refusing to tell us whether the game's canon or not. Quote from them, The events you'll take part in are neither fact nor fiction. They're simply part of a tale that's been passed down from villager to villager, which is exactly the sort of stuff that we see in the opening seconds of the trailer.

A villager holding a book and us zooming through the pages into the world of the story. Because let's face it, nothing helps the clarity of storytelling in video games like when a series introduces books of questionable canonicity. I figured now would be the perfect time to look into this game to start theorizing about its canonicity and how its story may be able to fit into the wider Minecraft narrative. Because let me tell you, friendos, I don't buy it.

I smell something fishy here. Oh, sure. This legend being passed down amongst the villagers, the narrative the game seems to be selling us on is all about a hero who unites the overworld to save us from pig-themed invaders. But I don't think it's true. Or at least, I don't think it's entirely true.

I suspect that what we're seeing here is actually a warning. A warning from a dying dimension. And it all boils down to one word, greed. In one of the early trailers for Minecraft legends called fiery foes, We're told some of the motivations the piglins have for invading. The one I like most tells of a peaceful land that did not know cruelty until it was attacked by invaders spreading the scourge of greed.

Huh, greed. The piglins are attacking because they're greedy? I mean, I guess I can see that. If you throw out gold when encountering a piglin mob, they'll forget they were attacking you and run straight for it, so clearly they are motivated by at least some level of greed. But something just seems off about this ex-examines. I mean, gold is actually pretty plentiful in the nether. It's literally all over the place. Sure, the overworld has gold too, but it's much more sparse than in the nether. It would make much more sense if the piglins were interested in diamonds or iron. Resources that you can't naturally find down in the nether. But nope, they don't really seem to care about those. Sure, you can find diamonds and diamond armor down in the bastion remnants, but those feel more like things that they've collected with no real understanding of their use or value. Considering that they choose to wear gold armor and use gold weapons, instead of opting,

for the much stronger diamond-based items. So the idea that greed was the thing that led the piglands to the overworld just doesn't make a lot of sense given what we know about their society. So if it's not that, then what could possibly be the reason for their invasion? Well, this isn't the first time that we've seen interdimensional invasion within the Minecraft universe. Maybe looking at that other instance, we can get a better idea of what's happening here in legends. So come with me as we explore Minecraft's dungeon crawler, the very creatively titled Minecraft Dungeons.

The main plot of Minecraft Dungeons focuses around the orb of dominance, a sentient object that's able to manipulate anyone around it. At the end of the main story, the orb of dominance is revealed to be the heart of Ender, a creature of immense power that looks like you crossed an Ender man with a spider. Of course, we defeat it and send it back to its own dimension, but that's not where the story ends. In the game's DLC, echoing void, the player is tasked with collecting six eyes of Ender so that they can travel to the end to finish off the heart of Ender for good. To do this, the player has to fight against Ender scent, these lanky, hammer-armed, incredibly powerful versions of Ender,

But um, why have we never seen these things before? Are they just a construct for the game? A mob to fill out the roster of a new title? Or is there an actual lore reason they're here and not in Minecraft proper? Well, as I kept playing, I started to see that this was only the beginning. As we're all very familiar with by now, the end in Vanilla Minecraft is a fairly desolate wasteland. You've got abandoned cities, a very limited number of mobs, and a singular type of plant, the chorus fruit. But over in the Minecraft Dungeons echoing Void DLC, the end actually looks very different.

You'll find that there are a number of species and subspecies that we've never encountered before in the regular game. In addition to the giant Ender sense that I just mentioned, there are also three types of Enderlings, Watchlings, Lastlings, and Snarelings. The End also appears to have plant life beyond just chorus fruits, with plenty of grass and trees lining the pathways through the game. This is a huge change from the barren yellow wasteland that we're familiar with in Vanilla. But why? What could this possibly mean? Is this just because a different developer worked on the game, or because they were looking for an easy way to expand the franchise? No. And we know this for a fact due to one creature, the endermites. You see, the loss of animal and plant life that happens between Minecraft Dungeons and

main game Minecraft is known as biodiversity loss. Something has caused the dimension to undergo a massive decrease in the number and variety of flora and fauna living there. Now in the real world, biodiversity loss is generally a marker that the ecosystem is dying due to factors like global warming, natural disasters, or the two that I think that apply to the end, invasive species, and over-exploitation of resources. Let me give you an example of how these sorts of dominoes fall. Back in 1926, the last of Yellowstone National Park's wolf packs were killed off by employees,

all as a part of an effort to reduce danger to humans that might be camping there. Good job, humans. Way to punish animals for the problems that we ourselves create. However, this set off a chain reaction of unintended consequences. By removing an apex predator from the ecosystem, suddenly the elk population exploded inside the park, and they began to overgraze. This then damaged the population of trees, which in turn lowered the number of birds that the area could support. It also made it so beavers were unable to properly build their dams, which caused higher levels of soil erosion along the river banks.

The erosion and overgrazing impacted the plant life near the river that shaded the water, which combined with the lack of beaver dams, raised the water temperature beyond what the local fish could tolerate. The ecosystem was in a death spin. The only thing to stop the downward spiral was a reintroduction of wolves back into the ecosystem, And this is what I suspect happened between Minecraft Dungeons and Minecraft. You see, if you've been watching our Minecraft theories for a while, you'll know that there's evidence to suggest an invasive species did indeed show up in the end. Us, humans.

Whatever you call the Ancestors of Steve, I call them the Ancient Builders. As we've talked about in past theories, it's likely that the ancient builders while on the run from some threat, like say the warden or wither, built an emergency portal to the end and then wound up getting stuck there. They were, whether intentionally or not, an invasive species to this new land. And since they had no way home, they had to start using local resources to survive. As we see in dungeons, it's likely that when they first traveled to the end, it was a thriving natural ecosystem.

They began to build cities using the local resources. Purple wood and purper blocks. There are also a number of new glowing blocks throughout Minecraft dungeons and cities. And given that most of the fauna that we see here is bioluminescine, it's likely that those were the plants used in creating those lanterns. All of this usage by the invasive species overtaxed the available resources, which in turn left the end to start its slow, low painful death spiral. It also didn't help that the builders hunted down the race of

Ender Dragons to near extinction in order to make their Elytra. Just like the Wolfpacks and Yellowstone, when you eliminate an apex predator from an ecosystem, there's going to be some unforeseen consequences, some dominoes that tip over that you didn't see coming. And here, it's the Endermites. You see, in the Minecraft Dungeons echoing Void DLC, Endermites are everywhere. They are literally crawling around the dimension. But in Vanilla Minecraft, yeah, not so much. They only have a 5% chance of spawning when you throw an Ender Pearl. So what happened here? Well, I suspect that by killing the Ender Dragon, the ancient builders killed off the mites only real predator in the dimension. And even worse, they probably gave them a massive feast. Hundreds of dead Ender Dragon carcasses that are

all ready to be munched on, allowing the endermites to reproduce and multiply at a rapid rate. And when the Ender Dragon carcasses were all gone, well, mites are known to also eat plants, thereby leading the remaining fauna to be devoured by the bugs. But once that was gone, there was just nothing left but waste land. The endermites slowly began to die out just like everything else in the dimension. The only ones that were able to survive were those trapped in Ender pearls, like the ancient insects that researchers are able to find trapped inside of amber here in the real world. The pearl is thrown and shattered in the game, setting free the ancient bug kept preserved inside. Which brings me back to the thing that started the whole theory in the first place, the piglins

in Minecraft legends. Because while Mojang is claiming that greed is the reason for their invasion, knowing what we know now about the end, we can start to piece together a different picture. Sure, greed might be the impetus for this invasion, but not piglin greed. In the trailer, we see piglins charging through the portal, except they aren't all piglins that we recognize. One of them is a massive, very intimidating looking piglin that seems to be what happens if you give a piglin brute some steroids. This shows us that, just like what happened with the end, the piglins and the nether also used to have itself a greater variety of subspecies. It also appears like the piglins may have been

able to bring through a greater variety of hog-like mobs to assist them. them, which would explain the Hogland stables that can be found in some bastion remnants. But by the time we reach regular Minecraft, Piglin Society has been reduced to a crumbling ruin. They're a species that hordes the last remnants of their most precious resource. This isn't about greed for gold. It's about resource guarding. A behavior that's able to be seen in dogs when they're insecure over losing access to something

that they deem important. This resource insecurity showcased by the piglins and the obvious drop in biodiversity that we see throughout the ecosystem points more towards the same issues that the end faced in dungeons, resource depletion, and ecosystem death. The piglins may look like they're on the attack throughout these Minecraft Legends trailers, but in reality, they're the ones on the ropes. And the reason for that, the ancient builders.

I suspect that they were the aggressors here, invading the nether, taking what was down there. And the only recourse that the piglands had was to go to the overworld to fight back or go extinct. So if this is potentially true, then why doesn't the game just come right out and say it? Well, like the famous saying goes, history is written by the victors.

I suspect the Minecraft legends might be written that way as well. We've just talked about the fact that the nether appears to also be facing biodiversity loss. Fewer piglin and hogland subspecies, a nether ecosystem that feels like it's being picked clean. It's the exact same thing that faced the end throughout dungeons. It was caused by ancient builders coming in and over-farming resources. So, is it that much of a stretch to believe that the same thing is happening right now in the nether? And immediately you can start to connect the pattern here. The ancient builders arrive in a new dimension.

They start farming its natural resources, they do irreparable harm to the ecosystem, and then the ecosystem tries to fight back. First, we saw it with the Heart of Ender in dungeons, and now we're seeing it with the Piglin invasion in Legends. So far, there hasn't been any indication that Legends will have us fighting in the nether, but I suspect that, at some point down the line in the DLC or something, we'll not only push the Piglin Army back, but we'll chase them all the way to their homes in the nether,

and then finish the war off down there. In turn, we'll leave their bastions in ruins, the crumbling remains of a once great society laid waste, by the armies of the overworld. And if that's the case, if we are indeed the reason that the world was decimated, of course we're not going to pass on the true reason to the villagers, the ancient builders would brand themselves as the heroes of this war, the underdogs, the ones that had to unite the overworld in order to fight the inhumane invaders from below the surface, and the villagers, safe and their healthy overworld with its abundant resources, wouldn't be any wiser. They'd just be blissfully ignorant of the truth, believing whatever they were told about the true reason these invaders were coming.

It was greed. Sure, the pig-faced creatures wanted our gold. And yeah, it might have been greed, but it wasn't the piglins who were greedy. So, is Minecraft Legends canon? Yes, no. The legend is canon. I have no doubt this story persists among the villager communities, but the story itself of an invading pig army? No, it's fiction. Or at best, it's a half-truth. It hides the reality that resource-hungry overworlds came, saw, and conquered,

with zero regard for the species that lived there. Who would have ever suspected that this game all about building? would have its roots tied to so much destruction. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.