Game Theory - The Mace Just BROKE Minecraft... Literally!

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

Join Game Theory Host Tom as he explains the BROKEN science of the Minecraft Mace! *Credits:* Writers: Tom Robinson and Mike Keenan (The Pokémon Biologist) Editors: Pedro Freitas, Tyler Mascola, Axellent, Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick, Millie Ferris, and Shannon (Bomb0i) Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

Minecraft's new weapon is completely broken. Not only can the Mace literally one shot any mob in the game, but it can also negate any and all full damage. For most players, this sounds like the perfect weapon. But for me, it sounds a little too good to be true. And you know what that means? It's time for us to bust out those calculators and crunch the numbers to find out. Is the Mace truly OP levels of broken, or will the only thing that's broken by the end of this be Steve?

Hello internet, welcome to Game Theory, the show that's always got an ace up its sleeve, or should I say, Mace. Because in a recent update, Mojang released what might be the single most powerful, most unique, and all-around coolest weapon ever, the Mace. At first glance, it doesn't seem too impressive, it only does the same amount of damage as an iron sword, but the Mace's true power lies in the new feature known as the Smash Attack. Hmm, I wonder where Steve got that name from. By jumping from a large height and hitting an enemy as you fall, you can do massive amounts of damage.

And the further you fall, the more damage your smash attack does. Plus, according to Mojang, there is no cap on the damage you can do. But what's more impressive than that is that if you do hit your target, all of the full damage you would have received is completely negated. That's right, zero full damage. This is what makes the Mace the ultimate high risk, high reward weapon. But how is a simple Mace able to do all of them? that. Well, it's not really clear. There's no explanation in the game, as usual, and Mojang

has been weirdly cagey about it. But what stops you taking full damage yourself? Glad you asked. I don't know. Ugh, indeed. I guess that means yet again, it's our job here at Game Theory to answer the question the developers can't. Could you actually do all of that damage and still survive the fall? Would a skilled player wielding this makes be a one-man god-sworded? slaying machine or will that unsuspecting mob be the last thing that Steve sees before his demise. There's only one way to find out. Get your breeze rods ready, loyal theorists, because we are using

science to jump off of the mountain, that is, Minecraft's Mace. Let's just hope it's more of a superhero landing and less of a face plant. Obviously, the main thing that makes the Mace so unbelievably powerful is the fact it can negate all full damage if used correctly. But if we want to figure out just how or if that's all possible, we need to understand how the Mace gets its power in the first place. If you've ever dropped something like your phone from a high place, you may be intimately aware of the potential damage that can be done. That's because if you're holding something high above the ground, while it may not be moving, it still contains a specific type of energy, potential energy, energy that is just waiting to be released. If I then let go of that object,

that potential energy is released as it starts falling towards Earth, converting in the into kinetic energy or energy of movement. By the time that object hits the ground, all of that potential energy has been completely converted into kinetic energy, which leaves you with a cracked screen or a bump on your noggin if you get in the way. The higher off the ground an object is when you release it, the more potential energy it has, and therefore, the more kinetic energy it has when it hits the ground. So on that front, it does seem like Mojang were paying attention in high school physics.

The higher Steve's height is when he jumps, the more energy and destructive power the Mace is going to have. But how much power is it exactly? According to the Minecraft Wiki, the Mace's base damage is 6 and the damage ramps up the higher you fall from. You can one shot a player wearing full protection 4 Netherite armour from 30 blocks high. And if you jump from around 314 blocks high, you can deal enough damage to one hit KO the game's strongest mob, the warden.

But that's all in-game damage. I want to know how much damage the Mace would actually do. And for that, we're going to need to... need to turn to an old favorite, FMA. Not the famous anime, although that is one of my personal favorites. I'm talking about our favorite equation, force equals mass times acceleration. Let's start with figuring out the acceleration, as that's actually pretty easy to calculate. You may already know that on Earth, every object, be it a bowling ball, a feather, or a human,

has the same acceleration due to gravity of 9.8 meters per second squared. Unfortunately, that's not how it works in Minecraft. In the game, not every object. experiences the same acceleration due to gravity. Instead, different entities experience different accelerations. For players and mob specifically, they experience an acceleration of 0.08 blocks per ticks squared. Fortunately, what we do know is that one block equals 1 meter and 20 ticks equals 1 second. So after doing some quick conversions, Steve's acceleration due to gravity winds up being 32 meters per second

squared, which is over 3 times the acceleration we feel here on Earth. He is taking falling like a rock to our whole new level. But regardless, we have our acceleration. Now we just need to figure out his mass, which is a little more complicated. Steve doesn't actually have a cannon weight or mass. However, he does have a cannon height. And thanks to Steve's blocky shape, it means we can actually figure out his mass by first figuring out his volume. And to do that, we need to use my second favorite formula, density equals mass over volume.

If only I had some kind of relaxing lo-fi to help me concentrate while I do all these equations. Oh wait, I do! Law-Fi! If you thought Minecraft's music was chill, just wait to your listen to this. Yes, very demure, very mindful. I jested, but Matt Dan and the team have worked so hard to make this an awesome listening experience for you guys. They've also managed to sneak in a fun murder mystery with deep law, because of course they have. If you head on over to the YouTube channel, you can follow our hero Taylor as she accidentally finds herself trapped in the middle of this.

whole mystery. We actually just dropped episode 2 and let me tell you, it is full of juicy law for you guys to decipher. So you'll definitely want to go and check that out. Some theorists have already found a fair bit, but trust me, there is a lot more to find. Plus, we're releasing new tracks every Monday over on Spotify and in true theorist fashion, there are even secrets hiding inside the music too. Now that we've got the soundtrack to our complex math sorted, let's get back to figuring out the mace's damage using Steve's volume. First, we need is canon height. According to Mojang and their parent company Microsoft, Steve is canonically 6 foot 2 inches or 1.875 meters tall. And if you take a look at Steve's model real closely, you will notice that

he's made up of pixels. Specifically, Steve is 32 pixels tall. So, 32 pixels equals 1.875 meters, making the side of each pixel 5.86 centimeters or 2.31 inches. From here, we can calculate the volume of each pixel simply by multiplying the pixels length, by its width, and by its height. And given they're all the same, that equates to each pixel having a volume of 201.23 cubic centimeters. All I need to do now is figure out how many of these pixel cubes Steve is made out of to get his total volume. So, after a lot of counting, I can tell you that Steve is made out of 1,664 cubed pixels,

which gives him a total volume of 334,846.72 cubic centimeters. All that's left to do now is to find is density. Humans typically have a density of around 0.985 grams per cubic centimeter. So we can just plug that and our volume into the formula and wamp bam bam bibbiddy bow, we've got ourselves our mass, which comes out to a grand total of 329.8 kilograms, or just over 727 pounds. For reference, the average male in the US is around 90 kilograms or 200 pounds, which is less than a third of what Steve weighs.

I guess, much like Minecraft's cakes, Steve is just one thick, blocky boy, respectfully of course. But finally, we can go back to our original FMA formula. We have our A and now we have our M. So we plug those in and with that, I can reveal that the force of a falling Steve is. Drumroll please. Oh, is Yossi's still out? Huh, kind of expecting him to fill this in. Uh, editor, do you mind doing it? Thank you.

The answer is a whopping 10,553.6 Newtons. According to research done by Japanese scientists, it takes just 5,400 newtons to not just crack, but straight up smash a human skull, a la the mountain from Game of Thrones. Steve is delivering almost twice that amount of, that amount of force. Whatever mob or grief up, Steve decides to target, it is going to be completely obliterated. But if you think Steve is just going to be walking away from this experience, think again. With a successful smash attack, Steve immediately stops his fall, and while in the game, that seems to mitigate fall damage, that's not how physics works. As the old

adage goes, it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop. Once you hit the ground after a fall, while you might feel like you stop almost instantly, your organs, not so much. They continue to stay in motion after the initial impact. For a slow enough fall, it's no big deal. But if you slow down to abruptly, all of your squishy bits inside of you want to keep moving, leading to tears, bruises, and in extreme cases, permanent damage or even death. So it's less about how he's stopping and more about the fact he's stopping at all. Even if he hits an enemy, Steve is still slowing down extremely quickly and that acceleration, or more accurately, deceleration is what's going to cause him a problem. When we talked about acceleration earlier,

we were talking about the acceleration that all objects experienced from being in Earth's gravity. But on a more mathematical level, acceleration is about how much of an object's speed or velocity changes over time. If I drop a bowling ball from a height, it'll experience acceleration equal to 9.8 meters per second per second. So that means that after one second, the ball has gone from 0 to 9.8 meters per second. After another second, the ball will go from 9.8 to 19.6 meters per second, and so on and so forth. Acceleration is just the change in velocity divided by the change in time. That's why units of acceleration are given in meters per second per second. And you can find out how fast an object accelerates or, in our case, decelerates, by simply knowing the change in

velocity and the time it took to make that change. So to test this, I fired up Minecraft for my And had Steve perform some smash attacks from a height of 30 blocks or 30 meters the height it takes to kill a fully decked out Netherite player after running my test several times I found that Steve's velocity when he landed his attack was around 32.13 meters per second I also noted that on average it took Steve just 5th 6th of a second to go from top speed to zero So using our new formula for acceleration I was able to calculate that Steve's acceleration was 38.55 meters per second per second per We can now put that new acceleration back into our FMA formula, along with Steve's previously calculated thick boy mass. And from there, we can see that the force Steve feels from being decelerated that quickly

is... Second drum row, please! Look, I know I've already asked for one. I know Yossi's out and he normally deals with this. Come on, just do it for me, come on. The answer is 12,714 Newton. The human spine can only manage around 3,000 newtons before it's. It shatters, and the femur, one of the strongest bones in the human body, can break at just 4,000.

So, yeah, Steve's not looking so hot after this. And it's only going to get worse, the higher he goes. If Steve falls from a height of 314 meters, enough to one shot the warden, then the force that will be tingling through his body is an absolutely inconceivable 28,34 neutrons. Now, that's a lot of damage. Okay, so from those heights, He's gonna be flatter than a British pancake, but that does beg the question, what height could he fall from and survive? That turned out to be a much harder question to answer than I originally thought.

You see, humans, we're weird sometimes. Some people can die from a fall as little as a few feet, while others have been known to fall from literal aeroplanes and live to tell the tail. Obviously, the range of a few feet to a few miles is a bit too big of a range to be very helpful to us. However, there has been rigorous scientific research into the average height of a fatal fall. One study from the World Journal of Emergency Medicine analyzed over 460 patients who were admitted to hospital for a fall in order to figure out the odds of surviving as the height of the fall increases. They discovered that at around 12 metres or faulty feet, patients had a 50-50 chance of surviving. For an average person, falling from a height of 12 meters will mean traveling at 15.34 meters

per second when they make contact with the ground. Using FMA once again, we can calculate the force that a normal person experiences when landing that 50% fall, and it ends up being just 4,755 newtons. But remember, Steve is quite a bit heavier than your average person, and the gravity in the Minecraft world is way stronger. From 30 blocks, he was experiencing over 12,000 newtons of force. For him to hit that 50-50 chance of survival at just 4,755 newtons, he would only be able to jump from a height of seven blocks, roughly the height of a two-story house. High enough to be scary, sure, but not exactly high enough to feel like death is a fair outcome. Plus, at that height, his smash attack wouldn't even be doing enough to kill an

Enderman. That amount of force is enough to kill someone 50% of the time. So if Steve wants to improve his odds, he's going to have to go even lower. than that, making the mace less and less effective. Especially when you consider that by the time you're even able to get the mace, you have plenty of other effective and safer tools at your disposal. You have enchanted diamond swords, plenty of armor, or you can just do it the old-fashioned way and drop an anvil on them from the same height. But when you can't even kill an enderman without risking your life to a coin flip, this

high risk, high reward weapon is more like high risk, no reward. But you know what, if Steve is going to lose it all as soon as he uses this weapon, He might as well go out with a bang. Maybe someone, oh, I don't know, stole his diamonds and now he wants revenge no matter the cost. If Steve did decide screw it, forget surviving, just how much damage could I do with this thing? What would that be? At first, it seems kind of impossible, considering there is a limit to how fast Steve can fall. Steve's top falling speed or terminal velocity is 78.4 meters per second.

He cannot fall faster than that, and that would actually cap him out at about 31,000 newtons. That's pretty darn strong, but it's only a few thousand more Newtons from what we calculated for his warden killing jump. And I think we can go bigger. The game does say there's no limit to the amount of damage he can do after all. So let's kick terminal velocity to the curb and keep climbing. And you know what, we might as well get rid of the height limits while we're at it. So with no more limits and a few more calculations, I discovered that if Steve was willing to climb a mere 6,000 blocks, about two thirds the height of Mount Everest, After he'd jumped, he'd be hitting the ground with the same amount of energy as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

That is going to destroy literally everything within a 600 by 600 block radius. Enough to destroy pretty much any mega build that Diamond Thief could make. That'll certainly send a message. But you know what? Even that didn't feel like it was enough. I wanted to keep going. I wanted to take this to its absolute limits so that I, I mean, Steve, never had to look at anything that thief ever touched ever again. What would it take to destroy the entire planet?

According to research, the energy required to destroy the Earth is a mind-boggling 2.25 times 10 to the power 32 joules. Now, we've done enough math in this episode, so I won't bore you with all the conversions. But what I will tell you is that for Steve to destroy the entire planet, he would need to jump from a height of third and final drum roll, please. Yes, I know. I know I've done it three times. Yes, I know I'm overdoing it a little bit. Please, just one more. I'm not gonna do it again. Please. Thank you. The answer is a small 2.253 trillion light years. That's 22.5 million times the length of our Milky Way galaxy, 163 times the length of the observable universe. That would take a long time, but oh, would it be so worth it just to see the look on his face when I come crashing down and destroy everything he holds dear? That's what you get for stealing my diamonds. I may have some pent-up aggression I need to work through.

Can we bring the law fight back? So calming. But there you have it, theorists. The mace really is the most broken weapon we've ever seen in Minecraft. Just not in the way Mojang intended. At the right height, you can literally destroy anything or anyone you can imagine. But it comes at a cost. Due to the force he's experiencing when stopping, even from a very small height,

That epic superhero landing might just be the last thing poor old Steve ever does. At least until he respawns. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching.