Game Theory: What is a Minecraft Emerald WORTH?

Hrrmmm Hrm HAHAHAHAHAHA! Sonic: Eggman, you're done! Okay, the chaos

emerald

s explode yyyyy ~ Disappointed Sonic: Hmm. That! that's all? HEY Sonic: Shoot, it's not my day Mat Pat: Hello Internet, welcome to GAME THEORY! The only program on the Internet that pays its staff in Minecraft

emerald

s. Oh, surprise for all the team theorists this month! Mat Pat: Look guys, it's February, the adratos are very low. Ugh, if that gets better, I'll add some donuts. Man, you're right: YAAY, it's currency! - I can eat! Mat Pat: Anyway, with its 10th anniversary last year, Minecraft didn't just experience a massive renaissance here on Youtube.

Ahem... kicking Fortnite to the curb, but it also released some of its biggest content updates in years. Giving us everything, from the objective. bee blocks OH NO, NOT BEES! NOT THE BEES! Mat Pat: But of all of them, probably the most interesting was the renewed villager trading system. Before last year's 'Village and Pillage' update, villagers were giving randomly generated agreements that could range from: Trump The worst agreement, perhaps ever signed anywhere. Mat Pat: Until we get to this kind of Futurama: "Shut up and take my money." Mat Pat: Now, after the 2019 update, that randomness suddenly disappeared.

Instead, all trades start with a base price and then fluctuate based on a variety of factors: the villager's experience, their player status, and their personal demand for the deal. But it's that base price that interests me the most... You see, for the first time, it gives us a standard value for the emerald. An emerald, in the world of Minecraft, is equivalent to 1 stone axe, or 16 bricks, or 22 carrots or 32 sticks, or simply 1 stewed rabbit. And that's

what

I wanted to investigate today. What is the value of a Minecraft emerald, in real-world dollars? Can it really be quantified?

Does the dollar amount even make any sense? Should Team Theorist here be discouraged about getting paid in emeralds this year? Team Theorist: Yes! MatPat: Hold on guys, because by the end of this episode I think everyone will be singing a very different tune. At least I hope you sing a different tune, because I don't have much else to pay you with... So, when I walk to Kay's Jewelers, I drop my 32 bar package and get Stephanie, a nice emerald necklace for our anniversary. I should probably know how much I'm going to spend on it, right? Who knows!

Those sticks could be very valuable. *ka-ching* So, like I said, under the new trading system everything has a base starting price, with 1 emerald being exchangeable for many different types of items. Anything goes, from 6 loaves of bread to 32 rotten meats, 24 sheets of paper and 1 empty map. Which, let's face it, is literally just 1 sheet of paper, so the cartographer there is getting a great deal. Price increase for victory! So the first way to look at this problem is to simply price some of these items and see if they are all in relatively the same price range. As I look at the items, I will choose the ones that are pretty standard.

Things that don't really depend on weight or quality, like kilos of chicken or things like that. So, a loaf of bread. Probably the most nonchalant standard item out there. Keep your fancy $800 loaves of gluten-free Whole Foods rye bread out of here; This is a pure Home Pride buttered wheat carcass. That'll run you about $3 at your local Target, Vons, or Food Lion, my friends, so 6 will run us about $18 for that emerald traded. Carrots cost about 30 cents a piece, so 22 cost...$6.60. A sheet of paper costs like 2c, so... 24 brings us to 48c... for that 1 emerald. God, we keep going back, this is not good!

And you can already begin to see the problem with this methodology; 1 emerald is

worth

from 20 dollars to 50 cents! And that's without even getting into some of the more important items, like axes and shovels. The value range of that emerald is all over the place, depending on why you trade it. There doesn't seem to be anything consistent about its value. So let's approach the problem another way. Consider this: when you trade 22 carrots for one emerald, the farmer doesn't pay you just for the carrots. The carrots are usually there, literally next to that villager. I mean, we've all felt like evil capitalists before clearing a villager's garden, just to sell it to him, but that's exactly

what

he wants... or, at least, that's what I tell myself he wants for make the guilt disappear. far.

No, not only is the villager paying one emerald for the carrots, he is paying you one emerald for the carrots plus the labor costs required to dig them out of the ground. How much manpower are we talking about? MatPat: Wow, that's really not much work. Or is that it? Sure, as a player we can clear a field of carrots in seconds using our superpowers, but the villagers clearly don't have the same abilities as us. They can't build things instantly. They can't defend themselves against monsters and they farm much, MUCH slower than us. So to get an idea of ​​what 22 carrots would truly be

worth

to a villager, I mixed things up a bit.

I created a village with 5 villagers and watched them grow their carrot plots for a full day. It was boring. Maybe boring isn't the right word to describe this: it was frustrating in the same way it's frustrating to watch someone else struggle in a video

game

you're really good at. You just have to sit there while they just pick apart that ONE patch of carrots for no apparent reason! I mean, villager! Just pick it up! Simply grab the top of the carrot and pull! Just pull a little. Really why! Why do you leave that block unharvested?!?! OMG, it's like playing with my OCD.

It's literally the opposite of the "Try not to be dissatisfied" challenge. MatPat: Very good. Over the course of the villager's 5 minute and 45 second work day, the 5 villagers managed to clear 54 carrot plots which, if harvested without a fortune tool, produced 124 carrots. That means that, on average, each villager collected just over 4 carrots per minute. But remember that we are talking about in-

game

time. The Minecraft day lasts only 20 minutes, which means we have to count each minute as 1.2 hours of our time. In other words, the villagers are collecting 4 carrots every 72 minutes, or 1 carrot every 18 minutes. THAT'S..., not efficient, my friends.

So, to collect 22 carrots, it takes a single villager 6 and a half hours, a little more than one of his full working days. To round things out, that means a novice farmer earns about 1 EMERALD per day in salary. Mat Pat: Since picking carrots is not particularly skilled labor, and since carrot trading is done at the beginner level for farmers in the Minecraft world, I'm going to imagine that these villagers would expect the lower end of the salary scale for their equivalent position in real life. So, looking up farmworker salaries in crop fields on the PayScale.com website, we see that the average hourly rate for an unskilled worker is about $10.50.

Since the Minecraft farmer works 6 hours a day and gets a single emerald, it means that 1 emerald will be worth 63 dollars. That... is surprisingly low. Definitely a little better than the 50 damn cents we estimated before but still...-! This is an emerald we are talking about here. These things are called gemstones for a reason. Clearly something is wrong here. The values ​​of these stones are nowhere near what we would expect them to be. Which means it's time to do our calculations a third way. This time, working in reverse. We know that emeralds are valuable, right? That's why buying a decent piece of jewelry for your loved one's anniversary gift costs an arm, a leg, and your firstborn.

Estefania: Oh, hey! Oh, sorry for interrupting the recording. I just wanted to thank you. Thanks for the new necklace! I love it. MatPat: Well, I'm glad you liked it. It was either that or a bunch of sticks. Stephanie: Oh, by the way, have you seen Ollie? MatPat: So what would happen if we started with real life prices and worked backwards in the game? When I calculated the value of Minecraft diamond armor, we looked at the four C's of gemstone pricing: carat, cut, clarity and color, where the most expensive gemstones are those that are larger, not cloudy or scratched, They have a vibrant color (or color) and have a nice cut or design.

The same applies to both emeralds and diamonds. These things are huge and a great vibrant green color, but they are definitely not transparent, which means they are cloudy and have not been cut in any way - they are fresh out of the ground. . So technically, we'll be conservative and price them at the lower end of the emerald price scale. Size seems like it should be our biggest challenge, since who knows how big these things are. However, all we need to do is some simple calculations to be sure. We know that 9 rough emeralds can be crafted together to create a large block of emeralds.

And the dimensions of that emerald block will be 1 cubic meter. Since emerald has a density of 2.78 grams per cubic centimeter, our emerald block will weigh 2,780 kg or 6,128 pounds. For ONE block of precious stones. Remember what I said last week about how Link might not win, but he could certainly hold his own against Minecraft Steve in a contest of strength? ...Yeah, forget I said that. Now, divide the weight of an emerald block by 9, since it took 9 emeralds to make it, to get the weight of 1 single emerald, and we get 680 pounds (309 kg) for one, BASIC emerald in Minecraft.

That is a GREAT necklace! Since gemstones are measured in carats, and one kilogram is equivalent to 5,000 carats, a single Minecraft emerald weighs 1.545 million carats. According to Singhal Gems International, a low-quality emerald over 5 carats will cost at least $300 per carat and up to $7,500 per carat. Which means that our single emerald valued at 24 sheets of paper, 1 rabbit stew, or simply 32 slices of rotten meat, would have a real-world value in the LOW END of $463,500,000 - or, if it happens to be an emerald very desirable, $11,587,500,000 maximum. So, wait, we have an emerald worth 50 cents, 60 dollars, or 11 BILLION dollars, depending on how we calculate it.

The same. Emerald. All using perfectly valid methods to calculate the value of this thing. Then what is? Am I wrong in the way I'm calculating this? Well, no. You see, it all goes back to something I said earlier in this episode. Past MatPat: We know emeralds are valuable, right? That's why buying a decent piece of jewelry for your loved one's anniversary gift costs an arm, a leg, and your firstborn. Present MatPat: The thing is, we do NOT know that emeralds are valuable. In fact, we have a pretty solid understanding that in Minecraft they are not. Aside from being used as a trade item, emeralds have very limited use in the game world.

You can't build tools or weapons with them, you can't build armor with them, you can't eat them. Its only use is to select powers from a beacon: the player has to select one of the available powers and then insert an emerald into the item slot, and even here the emerald can be replaced with iron and gold ingots, or just a diamond . In the world of Minecraft, it has no unique functional properties. The problem we face in this episode is that we base the value of an emerald on how we value things. And we live in a very different society than the world of Minecraft.

We can mass produce paper, we can harvest thousands of carrots, we have machines that bake bread 24 hours a day. But in Minecraft everything is done by hand; It takes a long time to make a single loaf of bread. And just one rabbit stew? Think about what you are asking! You need a carrot, a mushroom, a baked potato and a cooked rabbit. As we discussed, the carrot alone takes 18 minutes to harvest, and that's without even taking into account the time and resources it takes to grow it in the first place. The same with the potato, then you have to catch, kill, clean and cook the rabbit, then you have to look for mushrooms.

That dish, that rabbit stew, for us as players living in modern times and as Steve, who is literally a superhuman in this world, there is nothing special about it. But for a villager in this primitive society, a bowl of steaming soup consumes an enormous amount of time and resources, for a single meal. Which makes it worth its weight in gold, literally. In short, the currency is only worth the value that we ourselves give it. The first currencies, back in 9,000 BC, were from cattle and other animals, mainly because people knew those things were valuable. Animals provided labor, food, transportation, and thatvalue could be calculated.

If we fast forward to 1200 BC. C., we will see China changing the game by using cowrie shells as currency. You know, those shells that they make necklaces with today and sell in beach souvenir shops along with shark teeth, sand dollars and new soft drinks. In fact, cowrie shells are one of the oldest and most widely used currencies in history. They could have bought you a cow or a piece of land, but today they are one step below the boogie board and fun noodles. Sure, at this point we're all jumping around the world of Minecraft without a care, but if you look at it from the villagers' perspective, it's a brutal existence, where every night could mean death at the hands of troublemakers. mobs.

It is a rudimentary society where people do not simply wear jewelry for the fun of it. The valuable things here are food to survive, weaponry and armor to defend yourself, and basic shelter to help you get through the night. When you are operating at that level, a bright green stone with limited function, while certainly special and pretty, is not particularly valuable. Only the days of work it saves you, the 6 loaves of bread it buys, are worth it. But today we are beyond all that. Food is plentiful, we have a shelter to keep us warm, angry crowds don't knock on our door every night - hopefully...

So for us, it's about prestige, it's about signs of wealth: the biggest TV , the most elegant car. - And that's why suddenly a bright green stone mined from the earth is much more valuable. It's frivolous, it's weird, it's unnecessary, and therefore it's worth millions. It kind of makes you wonder what our currency will be in the future, thousands of years from now. Bits of fiber optics, plants from the days before global warming, or maybe nothing at all. The era of Bitcoin and digital currency, where our wealth is literally numbers in a cloud, is here. Currency is worth what society needs it to be worth, and it could be that we are rapidly approaching a time when society tells us that a bunch of 0's and 1's are now better currency than gold, paper, precious stones or cowrie shells. , Or something else.

So how much is a Minecraft emerald worth? I don't know, how much is it worth to you? Watch out Steph, it looks like it's going to be a bunch of sticks for our next anniversary. But hey, that's just a

theory

: a game

theory

!!!!! Thanks for watching. And hey, if you want to see me calculate the real value of Minecraft diamond armor, which in the end has a solid result, click on the box you see on the screen right now. That's a very special episode of the show, it was the first one my friend Ronnie Oni Edwards, our first crew member, worked on, and one we've sadly lost since, so if you want to watch it. , We appreciate it very much;

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