Game Theory: The Tragic Story of Minecraft's Zombie Pigmen (Piglins)

Then, also, Minecraft

theory

made me hit trees a lot and I have no doubt that teaching you how to knock down a tree like you do in Minecraft inspired tens of thousands of loyal theorists to try it for yourself, cutting down saplings faster. that an overly eager lumberjack why today i want to start the episode by doing some men theorists it's time to stop hitting and start planting my friend jimmy yes you may have heard of him he runs a channel called mr. Beast is a youtuber who seeks to make a difference, yes, you know that mr. beast along with another friend of mine, the incredibly smart Mark Rober, are currently working to raise twenty million dollars in order to plant 20 million trees by the year 2020.

Anyway, it's very strong numerically. It's in honor of Jimmy reaching 20 million subscribers, which you know is good for him. I'm not jealous of that or anything, but I'll let Jimmy and Mark explain themselves anyway. We went through a lot of different options on how to accomplish this and finally decided to work with the Arbor Day Foundation, they are the biggest and best. respected non-profit organization for planting trees and we got them to agree that for every $1 we raised they would plant a tree, which literally means that if someone donates $3 there will be three more trees in the world than if they didn't, it's pretty incredible, so What if I would like to be part of this massive movement to make the world a little greener.

A donation link to the fund is on the top line of the description. One hundred percent of your donation goes directly to the Arbor Day fund and every dollar will be one more tree on earth if everyone who watches this video gives a dollar. Well, I don't know how many people will see this video, but you know it's not a hard math problem to solve, it literally multiplies by one, so I trust you. be able to do the math in your head anyway that being said and us making a man for all the trees we cut down it's time to talk

zombie

pigs hello internet welcome to

game

theory

we gotta be honest I'm still freezing my knuckles after last week, today we continue our deep exploration into the lost hi

story

of Minecraft by looking at what I believe is the strangest part of the universe, the

zombie

pigmen

, and for me to call it the strangest is saying a lot considering that this is also a world full of living snowmen and laser-shooting puffer fish, maybe it wouldn't be so strange if it were a mob that was just a bipedal pig creature that lived on double sticks, but no, it has to being a zombified biped.

Pig who lives on a double stick who also carries a butter sword for reasons and also doesn't have non-zombified versions of himself anywhere on the planet. That's a strange collection of attributes and if we're 100% honest, it's probably because their origins are pretty strange. Tall, human-like pigs have been floating around as an unused idea in Minecraft since the beginning. A Minecraft user first came up with the idea for Pigman back in 2010 and the

game

's creator almost used them as a symbol for the game. villagers a year later it didn't happen and in 2012 it was not revealed in the documentary Minecraft the

story

of mojang that the game's signature creature, the creeper, was also born from strangely tall pig monsters, well, I mean, the vines were a mistake, no I know.

I have some modeling program to make the models and I accidentally made a toll instead of a log, so it was like a total thing with four little feet and that became the creeper, which is supposed to be a pig, so if I had to guess that zombie werepigs exist and are connected to creeper villagers and normal pigs simply due to a sequence of happy accidents, coding errors, and discarded ideas that eventually turned into cannons, but that's the real story of why zombie pigman is probably in this game. What interests us is the fictional story. How do these creatures possibly fit into the surprisingly deep and surprisingly cohesive Minecraft story we've been building over the past few episodes?

The builders have to be honest, this one started out as I have no idea how we're going to explain this, but at the end of my research, a pretty solid case, folks, to start piecing together the history of zombie

pigmen

, we first have to look at them. -game behavior to get clues Now obviously these creatures are most commonly associated with the Nether but on very rare occasions they can appear in the overworld when lightning strikes within four blocks of a pig a zombie pigman will suddenly appear which immediately tells us that these two creatures are somehow connected that the Pig Man at least at one point in his history was related to normal everyday pigs.

We also know that the Pig Man shares some kind of psychic link. No, that might seem absurd, but his hostile behavior patterns confirm that he attacks a zombie. Pigman and somehow everyone else within a massive radius will become aggressive and converge on Steve and it's not because they are listening to his attacks buddy as the sounds they make are relatively quiet and everyone is still aggressive even if that attack happens in a completely sealed place. outside of a closed box that should muffle the sound for any outside listener, the immediacy and aggression of their attack can only mean that they are linked in some way and lastly, it is also important to note that they do not start out as hostile, they just become They become hostile when they've been attacked, so under normal circumstances they technically have nothing against Steve.

It's just that Steve gets aggressive and suddenly they have a reason to defend themselves. Admittedly, this gives us a lot to work with, but it's still just a bunch of loose threads without something. To tie it all together, any theory I put together to try to explain it would be missing that axis of evidence anchoring the narrative, but then came this year's mine, Team Mojang's annual interactive livestream, all about the Minecraft franchise, complete with discussions about upcoming shows, big world premiere announcements and a lot of other things, this is going to look weird, but you can't press hello, I have to juice that sweet, sweet viewing time and this year, between sticky hands and whatever there is been, we received a lot of new information about the changes. are being rolled out to the Minecraft world over the next few months, these honey blocks point to blocks, but of all the new content it was the changes coming to Minecraft, one point, the bottom update, that really caught my attention, specifically the new pig Lin zombie pigman civilization. no more pig lin and zombie pig lin are here to stay pig lin is actually what we called pig man now pig ling is almost like a new civilization you know we added it to the abyss but there was one detail about this particular mob . that caught my attention, they are actually hostile towards the player, they don't like withered skeletons either, they don't like withered skeletons, for writing all these episodes.

I have to say that a lot of this game's story reconstruction is based on separating the spawn conditions. and hostile patterns of behavior, as in any good story, those kinds of details tell you the relationships between our main characters, so to speak, and hearing Jeb mention the hostility towards a particular mob really stood out to me, especially because, as we established during our episode. On the cross the skeletons of the cross are probably the remains of the ancient builder. There are many reasons why, but I'm not going to repeat them here. You just watched that video if you're interested, but for pig Lin. acting violently towards the withered skeletons, also known as the ancient builders, that was the last detail he needed.

There is hostility between these two groups. Something happened a long time ago between these two civilizations and has not been forgotten even long after our ancient civilizations have largely disappeared, so come on. Start putting all these pieces together. We know that the ancient builders started in the overworld and at some point created a nether portal and began exploring there. We know this based on the chests and fortresses that exist in the nether. they really could only have been built by them now this is where the piglet comes at some point the builders brought their pigs with them into this hostile environment again we know this based on the evidence of the lightning bolt, the pigs and the zombie pig lines They are connected and yet there are no pigs in the nether, which means they must start in the overworld.

Now there are two possible reasons for builders to do this: the first is simple food, the lower until the announcement of the new suckling beast mob that will also arrive with update 1.6. had a reliable source of food, but it is also the origin of the food that actually is, so when you get your food, you can't just have a nice farm, but you need to find this scary and aggressive pickled beast and get the food from there. For example, any explorer wanting to make a long trip to explore and forage the area would need to bring a dedicated food source, such as their pig barn, take them to the bottom, leave them there and boom, suddenly you have creatures similar to pigs in one place. where they have nothing to do with option two of why the pigs would be there, it's honestly a bit darker, it could very well explain the hostility that exists between these two groups.

Consider for a second if you had opened a portal to somewhere in another dimension. I don't really know, you'll just jump in, of course not, you'll try it, you'll most likely try it on some kind of animal, believe it or not, but pigs are usually the ones used as human positions for scientific experiments a large scale due to the similar size of their organs and decomposition rates to see if the things on the other side of that portal are safe, perhaps the ancient builders dropped their pigs sacrificing some of them in the name of science. Either way, pigs get taken to the abyss and I don't know about you, but that would definitely give me a reason to hold a grudge against the people who brought me there, whether they're humans or their withered undead skeletal forms, it also helps explain the undecided. - The aggressive feelings that the zombie pigmen have towards Steve are not aggressive towards Steve because he is not the one who brought them there, on the other hand, the Lin pigs are now aggressive towards Steve because, hey, he is a descendant of that ancient race of builders, so that explains. how a pig-like species would enter this hostile supernatural environment and why they might be angry at the withered skeletons, but this is obviously overlooking some small details that might also need to be explained, like how they became zombie psychic warriors with locked swords.

Quite a big logical leap to make your rights, yes, but believe it or not, it's one that can be explained entirely through Netherwart. Remember what I said about the Nether not having much food. That will also be true for the animals down here. I mean, really what? Would a pig eat there? Crops would require water. It is simply not possible to put water at the bottom. As such, the only thing they will be able to eat there is the bottom wart, but if that was really what the builders were feeding. main source of food, you would expect them to harvest it well, would you know?, but if you look at the essential elements of another fortress, those places that were built by the ancient builders as their home away from home as they explore the hostile underworld, you will see a lava pit room and surprisingly nether wart gardens.

Gardens placed there to harvest the only crop that could be grown in such a hostile landscape, so we know the builders were really harvesting the stuff, but then why are nether warts so important here? Well, also know that in the Minecraft universe, you literally are what you eat. In our Enderman video I linked the ancient builders being forced to eat the final native harvest of the Korus fruit to them slowly gaining the plants' teleportation abilities and well, yes, that was true. speculation, we don't even have to go to the kingdom of the Furies to prove this, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the mushroom, a cow mushroom hybrid that only reproduces in mushroom field biomes, also known as places where cows consume a diet mainly full of mushrooms. their milk is mushroom stew, their bodies are covered with that substance, but we know that deep down they started as normal cows, since when you cut them, they drop their mushrooms and transform back into a normal bovine, so if they pigs in the abyss really survived.

Outside of a diet made entirely of inferior wart, there is thepossibility that we can see that some of the plant traits carry over to this animal. Now here's the thing about the nether wart, even though I just called it a plant, it looks and acts a lot like a fungus. It grows through four stages and the two middle stages appear almost identical. It's a process that looks a lot like the life cycle of a typical mushroom. The lower wart is known as the lower stem in the code, like many mushrooms, it is composed of the fruit body at the top and the stem. below does not need sunlight to grow and instead thrives in the warm, dark environment of the underworld, like a real-world mushroom; in fact, many of the

minecraft

nether wart wiki equate the nether wart with the real world puffball mushroom which, although different in color, do not in fact match in terms of design and reproductive behavior and all of this is important because a diet of nether wart would explain how all zombie pigmen share a psychic connection.

When we think of a mushroom, we immediately think of the fungus at the top, but in reality, most of a mushroom's body is made up of super thin threads known as mycelium and the crazy thing is that these threads can run through dozens of threads. and dozens of feet connecting with a bunch of other plants and fungi, to such an extent that researchers now call it a kind of underground Internet, a literal network of fungi that shares information between plants from root to root and stretches for miles Like a wooden network, if you will, statements from fungal experts call it the Earth's natural Internet in a 2008 report.

The TED talk and that fungal connection could very easily be transmitted to our pigs, as we see with the fungi that eat that nether wart fungus, could slowly transform our overworld pigs into an interconnected network of large fungal hybrids and that's not all, the fungal networks also power their host plants. Immune systems simply connecting to the mycelial network makes plants more resistant to disease. Now look at the bottom wart. It is the essential ingredient for uncomfortable potions. The basis for over 90% of the game's magical abilities. You know what else? It is a key ingredient in potions.

Luminous stone powder. which is also found in the lower potions, keep in mind, which grant the drinker all sorts of magical properties, from increased defenses to create our quickness to, most importantly, fire resistance, fire resistance, just as we see with the piglets zombies, were immune to damage from fire and lava in In fact, this theory may even explain why we only see zombified versions of Pigman and not the normal style of Pigman, the new Pigman race excluded, obviously, the old builder race arrived into the abyss a long time ago and when their society collapsed, so did the coming and going. of the overworld as such, no new pigs were being brought into the abyss, which means that everyone we see here has been there for centuries at least, that my friends are a stale old pig, so how could a pig survive so long? time? magical properties one of its key uses is to make healing potions, it could be that the Pig Man literally cannot die from natural causes or simply how withered skeletons will not come back to life with the strange soul-saving properties that exist in hell.

The theory may even explain why they only carry golden swords. Check out the types of loot that appear inside the nether fortress chests. Those containing supplies brought into the abyss by the ancient builders. The only weapons we see appear in those chests are golden swords. That's what they brought and stored in those chests and since at heart they are pigs with no crafting ability, all the items you find there, like iron ingots and diamonds, are completely useless to them, the only thing they can use to defend themselves. It's just what they found lying in their natural environment left by their former masters, the abandoned ancient golden swords, so look at all the questions this theory answers, it explains how the pigs got to the abyss, why they would be hostile to the withered skeletons and They have complicated feelings towards us as descendants of the builders, which explains why we see deliberately cultivated nether wart in the nether fortresses and how a diet of nether wart could produce a sort of psychic link between all the pigment from the region of that nether wart combined with the local glowstone because let's face it, elite pigs or at least trying anything could also explain their resistance to fire, there's zombification and we even have an answer for why everyone would have golden butter swords and only golden swords, honestly , the only question I can answer. about this mafia is why they stand on two legs, I am not one hundred percent sure that it could be the evolution that Higgs learns to walk upright to use his hands to defend himself in the violent abyss and at the same time I want it to be possible for There may be fewer body parts touching the hot abyss, but I think we're onto something with this theory, something I suspect Mojang might want to clue us in on because if we get back to more of that mental confluence as they reveal the new biomes for the lower one, they spend a good amount of time.

He is the bottom wart of the forest and what they explicitly show us wandering around and they are the only mafia they show us in this preview some zombie pigs wandering through the forest and at home among the food and the landscape that they helped create He is a torn pig from its comfortable life in the overworld and taken to the depths of the hack to be used in the massacre of ancient people, but through chance and a large amount of mushrooms it becomes the beginning of a rival civilization. destined for greatness and then turning into zombies, but hey, that's just a theory.

Oh, game theory, thanks for watching. Just a reminder to wave your diamond pickaxe over the subscribe button. We have more Minecraft theories on the way next time, hopefully about the villagers and Illah Jers. Underwater fortresses are really interesting to me right now. I'll see you all for something different next week.