Game Theory - The Minecraft Nether Is FROZEN!

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he breaks down the hidden LORE of the Nether in Minecraft! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick, Tom Robinson, and Mike Keenan (The Pokémon Biologist) Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Tyler Mascola, JayskiBean and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: Caitie Turner (Caiterpillart) Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

At this point, I think everyone's familiar with the Nether. Minecraft's version of E.E. Double Hockey sticks. A separate closed dimension with a bedrock ceiling and floors covered in fire and lava. Not exactly the most inviting of holiday destinations, but hey, at least the weather's consistent. But while the conditions have always been dangerous, this channel's favorite Minecraft characters, the ancient builders, seem to have thought that this was an ideal location to build big parts of their civilization. Why, though? Always felt like I was missing something there. What was so appealing about Hellfire and Brimstone that they thought that this was going to be the perfect escape,

from all the horrors that they created in the overworld. Well, my friends, I started digging, and what I found absolutely floored me. Buckle up, because the reason for the Nether being such a hot commodity is going to give you chills. Oh, internet, welcome to game theory. Before the Nether Wars of Old, before the arrival of the ancient builders, was a world that looked very, very different.

It wasn't filled with lava and barren wastelands, but instead was a thriving ecosystem that contained the most valuable thing to sustaining life, water. That's right, there used to be water, in the nether, and I can prove it to you. And not only that, I'm going to explain why it ain't there anymore. Put on your biggest, puffiest coat theorists, we're going into the nether, and it's going to get cold. Now, I understand that the idea of water existing in the nether is a huge claim.

It can't even place this stuff. It literally evaporates if you even try to pour it out. But while this is certainly what happens if we go to the nether now, I'm not convinced that it's always been that way. And the reason for that is 2020's Nether Update. I'm telling you guys, this update is the one that just keeps on giving us new lore. The Nether update completely overhauled the Nether as we knew it, adding new mobs like the aforementioned piglands,

new blocks like ancient debris and sole soil soil, and a whopping four new biomes to explore, one of which is going to be of great important to us today, the Basalt deltas. This biome is definitely one of the most striking things you're gonna come across in the Nether. When you arrive, you'll notice the eerily quiet ambience and the large towers of the new basalt blocks

poking out from the sea of lava. But what you might not know is that those large pillars of volcanic rock weren't something formed out of the minds of Mojang, but rather you can find these things out in the real world. Basalt is a substance that makes up around 90% of all volcanic rock found on Earth. When molten lava erupts from a volcano and flows across the surface, it immediately starts to cool.

If the lava has a high level of silica and cools quickly, it becomes a black volcanic glass that you might know as obsidian. On the other hand, if there are low levels of silica, like in 90% of lava, then the rapid cooling is going to create something else, basalt. It might not appear as interesting as obsidian, but this rapid cooling can sometimes cause the outer parts of the rock to contract, causing them to crack in hexalt hexagonal patterns, which creates these beautiful tower-like columns. You can find these structures actually all over the world, including giants causeway in the UK,

Devil's Tower in Wyoming, and now they're just in the nether too. But basalt works slightly differently in the game than it does in the real world. While basalt blocks can certainly spawn naturally in the basalt deltas and the Sol Sand Valley, if you want to make your own basalt, you need three ingredients. Lava makes sense, sole soil, a material that's only found in the Sol San Valley, and blue ice, which is basically the Russian nesting doll of Minecraft ices. You take nine ice blocks and craft them together to create packed ice. You take nine blocks of packed ice and then craft them together to get super packed ice.

Oh, wait, never mind. It is just blue ice. Super packed ice, though, a lot more fun. Also, can I just say, Mojang, your ice is already blue. It was always blue. Naming aside, this means that you need a total of 81 blocks of ice. Just to make one block of blue ice. Point being, they're really cold, which I suppose makes sense when real life basalt towers are made from rapidly cooling lava.

So good job, developers. Way to know your science. In the game, the only place cold enough for blue ice to form is on the bottom of icebergs in the frozen ocean. You can also find it stored in snowy tundra village houses and in the ancient cities in a structure literally called the icebox. The main thing you'll notice is that none of these locations are the nether. There is zero ice of any kind in the nether. It is simply too warm of an environment for it to make sense. So the question becomes, how could basalt form in the nether if there was never blue ice to be found there?

But what if there was blue ice in the nether at one point in time? Way before we ever made it there. What if the nether had an ice age? Whoa! Yeah! Who's up for round two! Nobody. Nobody wanted round two, or three, or four, or five, or... There's a sixth movie in development? Ah, who might have talked? This is our 33rd Minecraft theory.

Let's take a look at the evidence that shows that the nether went through an ice age. Not, uh, the cringy movie type either. Besides these massive basalt biomes, we actually see evidence of an ice age in one of the other ingredients for basalt. Soul soil. Take a look at the texture of the block. the waves and streaks on its surface. Other dirt and sands in the game don't have textures like this, but there are places in the real world that do,

and that's thanks to glaciers. While glaciers are made of solid ice, they actually flow just like a river of water would, just much, much slower. This movement of ice ends up shredding and tearing up the solid land it travels over, leaving behind sediments and streaks in the surface, just like we see in the streaky texture of the sole soil and the sedimentary nature of sole sand. Large blocks of blue ice cutting through the landscape of sole soil,

hitting the lava, creating the basalt that we see in the sole sand valleys, and more impressively, the basalt deltas. But the nether's covered in lava. How on earth could ice have ever formed there? I hear you and I understand, but in real life, there is a precedent for this. Iceland. Iceland is essentially one giant volcano that's been constantly spewing lava onto its surface, and despite the myth that Greenland is icy and Iceland is green,

Iceland is in fact very icy. An icy place can absolutely be volcanic. The two things aren't mutually exclusive. What makes a place volcanic is whether magma from Earth's center can make its way to the surface and erupt as lava. Meanwhile, something like a cold climate is determined by a variety of other factors. Things that are completely separate from whether or not there is a volcano in this location. Considering the nether's a closed-off system with no sky, it seems very clear that ice was plausible here. The nether wasn't always so hot.

Instead, it was cooler, maybe even frozen. And, just like we've always suspected with Mars, if there's ice, that means, water and water means life. Something that we know has to be true thanks to the fossils that we find throughout the nether. These massive rib-like structures are found all around the Solsan Valley and they can get as high as seven blocks tall. Considering a block in Minecraft is one meter tall, that means that a single rib from this creature is seven meters or nearly 23 feet tall. As one tasty and expensive rack of ribs. And that's just talking about the rib. Imagine the kind of creature that would be big enough to have a rib that large. If the nether, it's just talking about the rib that large. If the nether, it's, it's a little, was once icy, these creatures were likely some gigantic mammoth-like mobs that roamed free in the landscape. But obviously something changed along the way. How could the nether go from being a balanced, biodiverse environment with giant mobs to a lava-filled wasteland where only skeletons remain? This is where our good guy heroes, the ancient builders, come into play.

They would have escaped to the nether looking for resources and ways to defeat the wither that they'd created up on the surface, and so they would have seen all the luscious environments, the materials, and they would have farmed them heavily. We know that the ancient cities used polished basalt, so they probably mined a lot of blue ice in order to create it on their own. And sure, taking the only real source of water ain't the greatest move in the world, but that's not what really calls the downfall of the nether. What caused the downfall was the ancient builders moving in in the first place. You see, I suspect the ancient builders didn't just bring themselves. They brought their technology with them.

They're crafting tables. Their torches and fires. Their animal herds. They're smelting. Those things all release gases. CO2 from creating fires and burning fossil fuels, to all the gases that release when you smelt metal, to methane from cow farts.

All of them are greenhouse gases, because their presence in the atmosphere causes it to warm significantly, much like the air inside of a greenhouse is warm. And unlike in the overworld, where these gases can escape out into the atmosphere, I suspect in the closed ecosystem of the nether, these gases began to collect.

They had nowhere else to go. They were stuck forever under the bedrock ceiling. Bit by bit, the nether started to heat up. The ice, Which was already being farmed away by the builders began to melt. Faster and faster until one day it was just gone. All the water had dried up. You were suddenly left with a hot series of caves.

Fire spontaneously bursting out of the ground. The large animals that once roamed there in peace began to die out due to asphyxiation. There just wasn't enough fresh air to go around. And soon the builders would die too. The only ones able to survive were those who found another escape route. A new portal. Gotta admit, though, this is a pretty impressive new record for the ancient builders. They just doomed the nether without even trying.

By the time Steve walks in from the overworld, millennia have passed, and the gases have long since dissipated. But the damage has been done. Animals are gone. Plants are mostly gone. Even many of the builders have died, with only the walking skeletons left behind. The once icy glacial temperature of the nether has become a fiery place of death as the temperatures have risen to unsustainable levels. Desperate to hold on, the ancient builders created ice rooms in an attempt to keep what remaining stores they had. But it was no use.

It was way too little, way too late. This is how the ancient builders wrecked the biodiversity of the nether, and no amount of gold is ever going to be able to fix the piglands home. In the end, Minecraft is revealing itself to be more and more a story of overuse of the land, disrespect for its resources, a warning to those coming later about the dangers of pollution. The story of Minecraft is one of protecting the world that you've been given, living in harmony with it rather than fighting against it, overusing it, milking it dry.

Mojang has been secretly hinting to us the truth of the nether for over two years, with all of these updates. But only now is it all starting to come together. Only now is it making sense. No wonder the piglins are so mad. Their home was ruined. The builders turned the thermostat up to inhumane degrees and then left it all to burn. Now that they're attacking, they're just bringing the fight to someone else's turf.

So the next time you think about the nether, remember this hot place's secretly cool origins. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.