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

Ugh, I'm already sick of literally every

game

being a

zombie

survival

game

. I understand. The Walking Dead was a popular franchise. It was called 2010. They want their genre back. Give me something new. You know. Hey, you want to go gather some resources. For sure yes. wondering how you're doing you just have to say you're okay, you're not really okay, but you can't get into that because hello internet, welcome to game

theory

where we're all dumb before we quickly start today's episode. Let's remember that this Tuesday, December 1, is the big show that I have been promoting for the last month.

We're doing our Million Dollar Grand Challenge to benefit Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital and their mission to end childhood cancer. It's a stream that's been a year in the making a stream that will feature your favorite creators like mr bestia mark has animations from brownly jaiden pokemane and

minecraft

speedrunner dream tune in for a massive show all day long with video games really embarrassing challenges lots of fun surprises in the way just something you don't want to miss is a new show every hour on the hour it's very elaborate but man it's going to be fun okay so today we're going to talk about some of the changes that were added with the other update earlier this year and then use that information to go back and examine one of the oldest parts of Minecraft:

zombie

s.

Zombies are such a ubiquitous part of pop culture today that it's easy to overlook them, which is a little ironic considering what made them explode. First of all, they came into the picture how horrible they were and now they are mundane again, like the circle of life or the circle of the undead, it's a circle of the undead and of course the zombie riders are always terrifying, those things will ruin you. Anyway, in all my exploration of Minecraft history up to this point, I've tended to skip them for exactly that reason, they're just there, meh, a generic hostile mob in a world full of fire-breathing dragons, three-headed cross exploding moss monsters and teleporting thin man, there are many other interesting things to talk about.

Zombies are very easy to overlook, but you know, that was foolish, short-sighted on my part because they are the foundation upon which Minecraft is built in a very literal sense. These guys have been a part of the game since the beginning in update 0.2.0, so if anything is important to the story it's probably them and you already know what they do with some of the updates made to the Nether. I think we have some now. Very interesting clues about what zombies are and how they plan the overall narrative of the game. Today we're talking about how zombies and other zombified mobs could be the biggest clues to discovering what may have driven an ancient race of builders.

Fleeing the Overworld and Living in the End One of the things that sent me down this rabbit hole was reading Minecraft the Island, an official Minecraft novel. Yes, in the absence of new FNAF books, I've now moved on to Minecraft novels. Yes Yes. Coming to you too, perhaps anyway, the book was a surprisingly compelling read. They expected it to be a lazy video game related novel, but it's so much more than that, for one thing, it's written by Max Brooks, who you may know as the author. World War Z one of the best zombie apocalypse stories in recent memory, it was certainly enough to grab my attention and once I started reading it became clear to me that it was chosen to emphasize the horror of the Minecraft world.

Take this excerpt, I stopped and stepped back. His clothes were tattered and dirty His flesh was a mottled green His eyes, if you could call them eyes, were nothing more than lifeless black dots on a flat, motionless face Memories flooded my mind with images of creatures I had known through stories but that I had never seen in person and here he was approaching me with his arms outstretched numb with fear. I ran towards the hill. I wasn't thinking, I wasn't planning. Terror fueled every step. This is a Minecraft book like what, oh and uh, by the way, the audiobook is narrated by Jack. black, so you know, imagine that scary passage, but instead of being read by a professional youtuber matpat, it's read by a professional youtuber jablinski games five nights at freddy's, that's where i want to be a professional fnaf youtuber jablinskygames, so Let's start with what we know about Minecraft zombies.

One thing is that they only seem to appear in the

overworld

: there are some reports of them appearing in the abyss, but they are very few and can never be replicated, it is believed to be a bug or a remnant of some modifications, but they are in fact limited . to the

overworld

along with its variants like the husk and the drowned, which raises the most obvious question of why they only exist in the overworld. One explanation I've seen online would be that zombies are just zombified villagers and as such. You'll only find them in places where you find other villagers, aka the overworld, but the fact that zombie villagers exist as a separate type of mob with their own appearance throws that

theory

under the bus, why do zombie villagers look like villagers and normal zombies?

Just like us, these zombies appear to be the zombified remains of builders like Steve, and yet, just like the zombie villagers, these og zombies or vanilla zombies. Tasty zombies are only found in the overworld if the zombies are actually the remains of dead players or a race of ancient builders. from the past or whatever, why wouldn't you find zombies anywhere Steve, like the builders, can go like the abyss and the end? It's suspicious, well, I think the answer to this question lies in the behavior of another mob, the zombified pig we're actually talking about. about the zombie piglen previously on the channel before the 1.16 nether update and since then there have been some notable new changes with this particular mob when I made my first video about them there really wasn't any explanation of what could have created humanoid zombie pigs . the only thing we had to go on was that they were spawned when lightning struck near a pig and since then, as the mojang team has further developed the piglen mob, it looks like

minecraft

wants to remove that feature. quote from lead creative designer jeb on twitter on jeb, will pigs hit by lightning turn into zombified piglen or normal piglen?

Jeb's answer we'll probably remove that feature because it will work differently, this tells me that although as I type this beam near a pig it still spawns a zombified piglen, it's more of a thing that's been protected as an easter egg for gamers. og, but it no longer represents the new lore they have in mind for this particular mob type, so what spawn mechanic reflects how piglins, not pigs, canonically become zombified piglens visiting the overworld? take a piglet to the overworld or at the end after 15 seconds they become a zombified piglet simply as a result of standing in the overworld and breathing and I mean it literally seems like the only plausible explanation for what could be happening here is that the piglens, upon traveling to the overworld, begin to breathe something that magically turns them from a perfectly well-functioning living creature to a flesh-hungry zombie.

It's strange, something about being in the overworld turns piglens into zombies, as I see it, the only explanation for this. It's some kind of airborne zombie

virus

that may seem crazy at first, after all, we and the villagers can run around the world all day breathing the same air without turning into zombies, so what gives a good answer to that question is Moving on to a very real story and a very tragic story, as you may have learned in your history class, when the European settlers came to the United States and began to interact with the native population, things did not go well for the Native Americans;

In fact, it is estimated that over 90 percent of Native Americans were killed in the decades that followed, it's just horrible, but the reason I bring this up today is how they died because while the Europeans who settled in America They certainly killed many Native Americans in the war, most dying from diseases like smallpox and measles. and influenza diseases that were common in Europe but completely new to the indigenous population of the new world. In many cases they did not even contract these diseases from people who showed symptoms of the disease. European explorers were asymptomatic carriers of the diseases.

A concept. that in 2020 many of us have become all too familiar with these were 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 decendents. With each generation, Europeans gained increasingly stronger immune systems, which meant that once-devastating diseases were no longer as deadly, so when Europeans brought these diseases to the new world, exposing a population whose ancestors They didn't have the opportunity to develop those same immunities, the results were devastating, but there is a part of the story that might seem like a big hole to some people.

Why didn't Europeans have the same problem? They too were in a new land, meeting new people. Why weren't the colonists dying of American diseases? The answer is that Europeans lived in densely populated cities that were breeding grounds for infection. Another thing we've seen pretty clearly in 2020. I don't know if you've heard of this. It seems that there are still many people missing. the memo, but large gatherings of people packed into a small space are one of the easiest ways to spread a

virus

. Imagine that social distancing starts to become much more difficult when you're all packed together like sardines and it all gets worse.

Much worse when you don't have modern conveniences like plumbing and clean water, if you want an indication of how big of a problem water pollution was during this time, it took until 1535 to finally ban people from throwing their excrement into the River Thames. London, yes. They had to pass a law that prohibited him from throwing his poop into the water that ran through the most populated cities. Reports from the time say that the water turning black really makes one want to reconsider that river view property, huh? All these factors combined to make European cities are breeding grounds for all sorts of horrible diseases. .

Meanwhile, North America, with its lack of densely populated cities, was in stark contrast, and thus the indigenous people of North America were plague-free. This is all a fascinating and downright tragic look at history, but what? Is it relevant in Minecraft to have a good understanding of the history of diseases and plagues in the real world? It becomes much easier for us to understand how this could happen in the fictional world of Minecraft. Let's assume for a minute that there is a plague of zombies floating around. in the air of the overworld of Minecraft and in the end we do not know how it would have started or why maybe it was the result of experiments that tried to resurrect the dead as we have talked about in a previous theory, maybe it was somehow related to the appearance of the withered who knows, but let's say it happened well in those early days, wouldn't it be nice if those who managed to avoid being turned into zombies still had to deal with the threat of being attacked by the undead, it could very well be that the plague zombie was responsible for wiping out the population of the overworld, the reason why the overworld is filled with so many abandoned structures like the desert pyramids, the jungle pyramids, who knows that some of the first members of this ancient civilization may have fled to the end? to try to escape the plague as I've been guessing for most of the past year, but through successive generations of natural selection, people in the overworld developed stronger immune systems that were resistant to the airborne plague. of which today's villagers are the beneficiaries.

Those many generations of inherited immunity only kick in when they get bitten, which makes sense. One of the most important defense mechanisms we have against infections is our skin and a bite bypasses it to inject the zombie virus directly into the bloodstream and deliver a viral load. high enough to transform some villagers, and as thoughtful and overreaching as that claim may seem, the game's design details seem to support the theory that some villagers will be zombified when attacked by zombies, while others appear to be completely immune. 50 of the villagers will simply lose. health when they are attacked by zombies and eventually die without even being transformed, which tells us thatsome are immune or more resistant to the zombie curse.

It's strange, right, it's a terribly suspicious detail, why wouldn't a zombie virus exist in the abyss when they're both in the end and the world, I guess, the temperature, warmer climates tend to be better at fending off the pathogens and likewise, when it's colder, viruses are more likely to spread, which is why you're more likely to get a cold in the winter, the flu in the winter, and why. everyone was talking about the second peak of covid that would occur during the fall and winter months. One of the reasons your body heats up and develops a fever when you are sick is that certain infections have a harder time surviving higher temperatures and what can be hotter.

In addition to the double hockey sticks, the temperature at the bottom is high enough to effectively sterilize anything that says nothing hot, like pools of lava. This in turn would keep the background free of any zombie viruses produced by a civilization of pigs whose immune systems never met. the plague until of course they are taken to the overworld, so there you have it folks, Minecraft's invisible overworld zombie virus, as ridiculous as it may seem, science actually fits a surprising amount of detail and behavior in the game, maybe it's time that steve and alex spend fewer resources building swords and axes and more time building face masks, after all, it's up to us to protect the immunocompromised pigs, but hey, that's just a theory, a theory of games, thanks for watching and one last reminder that game theory products are available right now. in time for the holidays, including my signature red vegan leather jacket built from scratch by me and also an incredibly soft game theory blanket along with a puzzle you can do while snuggled up in it.

Supplies are running out very quickly right now. so please make sure you grab them before they're gone, we even have some Black Friday deals so take advantage of them and I'll see you all this Tuesday December 1st for the massive St Jude livestream and then on Saturday. so that you know our usual episode of game theory