At this point, I think everyone's familiar with the Nether. Minecraft's version of
HE-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, seemed to have thought that this was an ideal location to build
big parts of their civilization. Why, though? I always felt like I was missing something there.
What was so appealing about hellfire and brimstone that they thought that this is
going to be the perfect escape from all the horrors that they created in the overworld? Well,
my friends, after my last theory about a Piglin invasion in Minecraft legends, 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.
Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the Piglin of the Internet that will offer you great content
in exchange for a click of that subscribe button. As I've already mentioned, a couple of months ago,
we did a theory based on the upcoming Minecraft spinoff: Minecraft Legends, a real time strategy
game where we unite the overworld in an effort to defeat the Piglin invasion coming from the Nether.
Looks like a really interesting game. I'm actually incredibly excited to see it come
out, but we deduced that the lore being presented to us in the trailers of that
game might not be the actual truth. Feels like that's been happening a lot recently.
While the game presents us as the heroes. The Piglins are actually invading because
the ancient builders invaded them first, destroying their home in the Nether. In
that episode we pointed to the ancient builders doing what they always do over-farming resources,
which eventually lowers the biodiversity of the area, making resources much harder to find,
and thereby making it harder for the Piglins to survive. So what did they do to cause such
a shift in biodiversity? Well, dear theorists, I once again pulled out my trusty theory pickaxe,
started digging, and I struck Diamond. Not really. That would actually be incredibly
impressive given that they don't spawn in the Nether. But what I did find was Mojang dropping
little hints that give us a window into the early years of the Nether. 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. You can't even place the stuff. It literally evaporates if
you even try to pour it out. Well, 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
Piglins, new blocks like Ancient Debris and Soul Soil, and a whopping four new biomes to explore,
one of which is going to be of great importance to us today; The Basalt Deltas.
This biome is definitely one of the most striking things you're going to come
across in the Nether. When you arrive, you'll notice the eerily quiet ambiance
in 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 hexagonal patterns, which creates these beautiful tower-like columns.
You find these structures actually all over the world, including Giant's 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 Soul
Sand Valley. If you want to make your own basalt, you need three ingredients: Lava;
makes sense, Soul Soil; a material that's only found in the Soul Sand 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. Ah,
wait nevermind 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 ice box. 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?
Nobody. Nobody wanted round two or three or four or five or…there's a sixth movie
in development?! ah, who am I to talk? This is our 33rd Minecraft theory. In fact If you
didn't realize we had so much Minecraft content, it probably means you're not
subscribed. So why don't you just go ahead and do that right now, we always have the hottest
Minecraft theories in town. Definitely one of the cooler Minecraft channels out there.
And don't worry, there are plenty more bad puns waiting for you on the other side of
that subscribe button. yall subscribed? Cool. Let's take a look at the evidence
that shows that the Nether went through an ice age. Not the cringey 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 soul soil and
the sedimentary nature of soul sand. Large blocks of blue ice, cutting through the landscape of
sout soil, hitting the lava, creating the basalt that we see in the soul 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 the 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 is 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 soul sand 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.
That is 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 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 caused 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,
their crafting tables, their torches and fires, their animal herds, their smelting.
And 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, fires 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 got
a bit, 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 Piglins 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.
And if you like this theory, you can always check out our last Minecraft theory where
we talked about how the ancient builders completely wrecked The End. Seriously,
there's nothing that these guys aren't able to ruin. Link to that video is on the left. Or you
could check out our deep dive into Netherite, what it is and why it's so scarce. Spoiler alert. Also,
the ancient builders' fault. That video is the one on the right. As always,
don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you all next week.