A lot of games can be considered a post apocalyptic future.
Bombs go boom, world dies. Years pass, life begins again, it forms whatever universe you like.
Yeah. I've hear so many Post-Apocalypse "theories" like that when I was younger that, when I decided to finally watch Adventure Time this past year, I thought all the talk of it being post-apocalyptic was *also* all "in theory"
You can imagine my surprise when it was very directly shown to not, in fact, be just a theory.
Funny thing was it was all subtly implied in the beginning where it actually had theories about it. Then they were like "Theories, guys here's a mutagenic nuclear bomb have fun".
I honestly think Adventure Time got the apocalypse train theory era rolling, since it was one of the most blatant examples. It also started off really subtle (not sure if it was even pinned down as a thing in the early seasons) until it became fully canon later on.
Splatoon is confirmed to be post-apocalyptic, but the apocalypse was actually climate change and the earth flooding from the polar ice caps melting, presumably.
Just once I want a fantasy setting WITHOUT an all-powerful precursor race/civilisation, show us a story about people figuring shit out for the first time
Hell, even sci fi is the same most of the time
It's tough to have absolutely 0 precursors, because then your setting will probably be stone age. Since a stone age civilization will probably either precurse any bronze or later age civilization. And while there's some stuff you can do in a stone age civilization, you're not going to have much cool buildings, weapons, transportation technology, etc. that makes a setting fun. And people "figuring shit out for the first time" will be happening on the scale of millennia, which is a pretty damn long time.
Not that it'd be totally impossible to work around all that. Just not easy.
Just having previous civilisations is fine, but the fact that they always seem better at everything compared to present civilisation is kinda overdone. Especially when magic is involved; it seems like magic somehow evolves backwards in most settings.
I want to see a setting where magic existed in the past, but it’s stronger today, and you can see how the “technology” evolved and got stronger over time. Usually it’s just “the ancients had the best magic ever, but then they all died, and now magic study is mostly applied archaeology”
Mother of Learning is a web novel that's great for that. There's a bit of "lost magic", but it's very much a setting where magic 99% of the time has evolved like a science and modern wizards are nearly objectively superior to their predecessors.
For another webnovel recommendation, [The Practical Guide to Evil](https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/) has a civilization that acts as a kind of "precursor" to the modern one, but it's literally just the Romans. They had amazing engineering and architecture, but that's about it. They act as a backdrop to the lore, due to having colonized the protagonist's country a really long time ago, but don't really play any relevant role as a precursor civilization (although, just like the Romans, they erased a lot of local culture and history). Magic is the best it has ever been and we see a lot of modern scientific developments (...after a while. I won't give the whole spiel on the *why*, but there are some areas that are technologically stunted, for certain reasons. Warfare's doing fine, though).
in "Frieren" current day magic is way stronger than it was before, it's a plot point in the beginning of the manga (a character defeats a demon that has been sealed many years ago because people have improved on spells so much that now the strongest spell years ago is just a basic attack spell) (or something)
Well we, as in our current society, do not have any uber powerful precursors. Like we are far better at the Magic of Technology than all previous civilizations. Its quite conceivable to me that if you can world build it so that there are Uber Powerful Precursors who fought the gods, you could just write your story in that time period rather than after the apocalypse.
Except that's not entirely true, some things are ancient precursors did turned out to be better than how we do them now. The most recent being old concrete and it's mixture with limestone to create essentially self-healing concrete. It's something was was ignored for a very long time until we figured out why it was made the way it was and rediscovered their superior technology. It's just we are not a fantasy world so we get new medicines rediscovered and new concrete instead of space ships and ancient magical lore.
I've got a fun one in my current D&D setting where the ancient reptile people had very powerful magic and pretty cool technology, but the present day people are starting to make scientific breakthroughs that the ancient Hatso never achieved.
The big one is gunpowder. Hatso ranged weapons were pretty advanced springalds, crossbows, and ballistae, but they never got as far as chemical propellant. The Hatso have numbers and magical golems, but their mighty self-replicating Ironbacks aren't as impervious as they used to be in the face of a broadside of 16-pounders. A single Ironback legionary can turn an entire village into neatly stacked corpses, but a couple of Bospan sloops can turn an entire century of legionaries into scrap metal and churned mud.
That's post post apocalyptic, the world ended, some survived, the apocalypse was forgotten but some things remain hinting to a past that's not as it seems
ive always thought thats where the zombies come from. theyre clearly not villagers (zombie villagers have the nose) and wear steve clothes.
which has interesting implications about rotten flesh.
There’s a game theory video (a few, I think) that discuss the Minecraft world being a post-undead-apocalypse setting. Mostly based on what you’ve said about Zombies wearing steve clothes. Skeletons are also steve shaped, as is the Warden, and Endermen.
The current theory is that opening a rift to the nether released a zombie plague, the same one that got the Piglins, which quickly eradicated the “ancient builders”. The survivors hid underground and built the Ancient City, which showcases several attempts at building new portals to escape this world entirely. Eventually they discover a way to access the End, where they live to this day. However, the only source of food in the End is the Chorus Fruit, which grants teleportation to the user. This, combined with the latent weirdness of the End, transformed what few builders remained into the Endermen, who can still build to a limited capacity. The Endermen were then subjugated by the End Dragon. You are called forth by some higher power in order to kill the Dragon and release your ancestors from tyranny.
Or it’s a silly block game with no story, up to you.
The endermen don't eat the chorus fruits, they farm shulkers and feed them the chorus fruits. The shulkers condense the teleportation power of the fruits into pearls which the endermen take and use for transportation after consuming the meat of the shulker.
Shulkers defend themselves by making their attackers float away, which is why the endermen also invented elytra as a safety device to be used when trying to harvest the shulker meat.
They also use the pearls to create portals to help them travel between end islands and to get to and from the overworld while they engage in their favorite hobby of collecting dirt blocks.
Makes sense! Though I would assume both proto-Endermen and Shulkers ate the chorus fruit, as it’s the only food source available.
One thing I’m still trying to square up is how they opened the portal to the End if there weren’t Endermen already in the overworld. We know they used Eyes of Ender, but the only way to get those is via the pearls, which only come from endermen, which builders turned into when they entered the End, which required Eyes of Ender, which required Endermen, which required the End, which required Eyes of Ender, which required….
There’s a lot of holes in the theory tbh, I just like it
Well you need blaze rods to craft a pearl into an eye, so that adds another layer to the mystery.
The dragon can open a portal to the overworld, so an enderman would have to have defeat the dragon and take pearls to the overworld then somehow make a portal to the nether to pick up some blaze rods.
Then they make a portal back to the end using the eyes as the key, but someone had to remove the eyes to close the portal leaving some endermen trapped in the overworld.
To resummon the dragon the endermen would also need ghast tears from the nether and glass from the overworld. The crystals keep the dragon alive and make sure the portal back to the overworld won't open again until someone destroys them all and kills the dragon.
Elytra are made of phantom wings which is an overworld mob but you only find fully crafted elytra in the end. Elytra need repairs and maintenance so they would need to be making trips back and forth to gather materials.
Then what are the boats in the end for if the endermen can teleport and they hate water? Why would they build a boat just to store their elytra when not in use? Were they looking for a better method of travel between worlds since the portal system is so inefficient and requires so many rare materials?
Are the shipwrecks related to the endermen? Did the ones stuck in the overworld continue their boat building trying to make them fly using pearl power, but the inferior wooden crafting materials couldn't handle the stress of the test flights so they end up smashed in half on a beach?
The shipwrecks contain treasure maps which lead to a heart of the sea which is needed to make conduits, maybe the endermen trapped in the overworld were trying to figure out a way to overcome their one weakness, water, by crafting conduits to protect them from drowning and boost their swimming skills?
They are probably pretty embarrassed about their failed boating experiments which is why they can't stand it when Steve looks at them. They are jealous of his superior crafting skills and the way he can so easily make boats out of a few planks and a shovel. Probably why they alway grief his bases by stealing blocks in the night.
The best way to build lore is to have none and let the fans come up with it, because this theory is cool as hell and likely not at all what Notch/other developers had in mind. But it’s way better and is now my head canon
Seriously, compared to the ruins left in a default world, most players are a force of nature on their own.
Now I'm curious if there are any mods that add in ancient structures based on common player builds, like automatic farms, mob farms, strip mines, etc. That would be really interesting
the funniest thing about minecraft to me is that there is lore. you've got all the structures which had to be made by someone, the undead creatures which definitely are not villagers, hell enderman noises have been decoded to say actual words and there's the whole thing with the weird music disks.
but i never see anything about it. because while it is there, minecraft at its core is about doing your own thing, building your own structures, making your own story. so the lore takes a backseat
That's also why we don't see the villagers building or fighting. Very few non-player entities are allowed to mess with blocks, and most of them are classic mobs.
Similarly, any mobs that attack villagers don't attack baby villagers, because rating
[the full video it’s from](https://youtu.be/hHPLAItTLiA?si=Bne1k9erU16XvYtv)
[the clip I keep rewatching](https://youtu.be/IaR9U2xrjyk?si=Ev8PMw_QSva65F49)
Oof, I’ve seen some of his more unbelievable theories (Ness) but even that seems a bit far fetched. If Minecraft actually incorporated Islam why would it be a temple and not a mosque?
Probably something about it being drowned for thousands of years and prowled by monstrous fish would make portraying it fully as a mosque a bit distasteful
Old Minecraft theories were about how zombies, skeletons and Creepers were former players. Skeletons got shot to death, creepers exploded and zombies died of various causes. Easy to see why, because zombies especially have the same clothes as Steve.
I guess Endermen were players that got corrupted after too many chorus fruits.
Honestly in newer Minecraft versions it’s not even post-apocalyptic anymore. It’s just the countryside. Like I’d be willing to bet that the village-to-acre ratio is higher than medieval Europe’s.
It's almost insulting. The coma theory stops being interesting the moment you point out that every story was made up in someone's head, saying that it's a character instead of an author just makes it pointlessly complicated, let alone boring.
The Minecraft theory is attempting to connect a bunch of separate pieces and unanswered questions to see what kind of picture is formed, and find ways to fill in the gaps. There is so much to work with and it doesn't take anything away from what we already have, just helps to add to it.
omg and he's also in purgatory
which was all the dream of some guy
who was a brain in a jar in a laboratory
inside a simulation of the earth circa 1999
after the bombs fell and centuries passed
and also it's an alternate history where the nazis won world war 2
and all the villagers are an allegory for the disciples
which was taught to us by aliens at roswell
and it's a prequel to earthbound/mother 2
There’s also the fact that zombies exist, and that not only are zombie *villagers* are considered completely different entities but they have a unique design as well and are the only kind that can be cured. This only gets darker when you account for baby zombies too.
If I may posit a theory, what if we aren’t the last? What if humanity simply migrated to another area gradually and we just happen to he left behind/go back? What if all these ruins that we find are the same as the pyramids and ruins today? What if instead of being the last, we’re just the first? Paving the way and documenting these strange environments and creatures along the way?
i like the idea but can i just say that im starting to hate post apocalypse stories/theories? its like the new dream theory, but instead of explaining plotholes its a story to explain why things are so different from our norms/ideas. like sure both can be done well and while id argue dream stories/theories are worse, post-apoc is becoming an all too common for me to enjoy.
or maybe im just a contrarian who cant stand them idk, just wanted to vent my frustration.
I hate them when there's no reason for it/something else can explain the ruins. In a high fantasy setting with magic and stuff, an old kingdom falling makes sense.
But the whole "Fallout and Elder Scrolls are connected" is really stupid.
For minecraft, it's the only theory that really makes sense. Mojang want to add new structures and ruins to find when exploring, and every time they do that it adds credence to the theory. Especially when the structures have redstone in them, which villagers don't use.
There are only so many ocean and trail ruins you can find before you go "ok, whatever people lived here were widespread".
Why is it specifically the shipwrecks that annoy them? Minecraft has villages, temples, mansions, ruined cities, cities and fortresses from other dimensions, wells, outposts, igloos, underwater monuments, but the boats are the one thing that cause them to question things?
Acting as if other people have bad reading comprehension when in actuality the comment you’re replying to and everyone that upvoted it is just straight up wrong and they themselves even realized lol
Unless you are being annoyingly pedantic about when they addressed these things (not literally a word after the sentence), the post specifically has them touch on temples and fortresses in other worlds. The initial tumblr post specifically calls out the villages as an indication that the villagers were incapable of building something like a boat. As for the mansions and underwater monuments, those were introduced long after minshafts, which is when the tumblr op states they made the initial post.
The original poster only mentions shipwrecks as causing them to think this, never any other structures. Is everyone misreading this post? They mention villages but specifically as structures that don’t make them question this because they’re different and built by villagers
There are multiple possible former "people" around, even bound to dimensions. Piglin, Endermen and Villagers arent on the level of the player, but they are SOMETHING. Maybe the species got corrupted somehow, the Endermen definitely arent up to build end cities but I doubt the frikking Shulkers did it.
'nuclear' post apocalypse specifically, yeah that one is a little over done. I'm starting to get a little tired of the climate changes apocalypses as well just because of how many seem to be coming up, partially because it always breaks my immersion whenever I come across one.
Though outside of those specifically, I do enjoy a lot of post-post apocalyptic settings where it's been so long since the fall of the last civilization that the current one doesn't even know what happened to them. If they answer what caused the end of the world, I do hope they are more creative with it.
Hot take: I wish Mojang didn't basically make this whole apocalypse thing canon. It seems like originally the plan was to keep things mysterious, but after game theory did more Minecraft theories they were like "oh shit we should add more explicit lore" and that kinda ruined it.
Adding literally any form of structure to the game that isn't actively inhabited by living beings canonizes the apocalypse / end of a civilization. It's an effectively unavoidable problem.
*\*sees any kid-friendly world with monsters and magic\** "is this a post-apocalypse?"
this theory is kind of fun when its canon like in adventure time but im hearing it so often now its becoming the new "what if the main character is just hallucinating"
As long as it's done well and there is legitimate evidence behind it, I do love a good post-post apocalypse setting. It really helps to add history to the world, and it doesn't even have to be one massive civilization that fell, it could have been several smaller ones over thousands of years.
All of Legend of Zelda is basically a post-post-post-post-etc. apocalyptic society where the civilizations have fallen and risen back up again so many times that you can't even tell which fallen civilization built what anymore, and I love it.
Though I see what you mean with theories getting out of hand. If I wasn't so obsessed with games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Outer Wilds where this is handled really well, I might already be over it.
I think when it is canon and well-established it's pretty good, like Adventure Time does handle it well, it hints at it creatively at first and once it's canonically confirmed it puts a lot of stuff into perpective. At the same time, some people try to say "the world is so weird because of nuclear fallout", when that's canonically not true. the Adventure Time world already had magic and aliens before the mushroom war.
Similarly there's theories about Spongebob Squarepants being set below Bikini Atoll and the characters all being mutated from radiation from Operation Crossroads. Theories about Regular Show being from the perspective of characters tripping on Acid. The "Rugrats is just Angelica's imagination" theory.
Basically my problem with those theories is that people seem to use it because they find it hard to fully suspend their disbelief for kids media. They need a happy fantastical story to have a basis in a grim reality instead of just accepting that it's about fantastical stuff like magic, monsters and anthropomorphic animals.
Idk if it’s post apocalyptic from the present because all the technology is old. Also I really like the new excavations, I wish they gave more than pots, but I love the speculative archeology of it all
I like the post-apocalyptic interpretation, but I've always found "it was a BOMB the whole time" theories to be kind of trite, no matter what it's used for. I mean, we're living in a post apocalypse irl - dozens, hundreds of civilizations have collapsed to get us where we are now, and none of them perished at the hands of something so simple and tidy as a bomb. The human spirit is in the habit of reinventing itself, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly. The world of minecraft shows no signs of the poisons and strains of the modern politic, no ruined tenements or skyscrapers - its simply a world that used to be one way, and is now another, no broader context for either. You can't really wrap it all up with a bow like that. Explaining it all away with a bomb makes it feel further away from reality and humanity, rather than closer to it.
my incredibly hot take is that adding villagers to minecraft was a mistake and steve? (or alex?, as the case may be) should be utterly, completely alone
I think there should've been another intelligent species added, just a non-hominid one. Maybe bipedal cetaceans or something? Anything to clearly denote that they don't have human lineage.
I do agree that villagers as they exist are kind of stupid. Like they clearly have most of the abilities that the player has, but with some weird exceptions, and they're just kind of uncanny.
Most of that is the fact that Mojang don't like adding things that change the world without the player's input. So Villagers don't expand unless you do it for them.
Matpat has a (relatively sound) breakdown of the timeline, if anyone actually wants the answers to the environmental questions posed by in game auto-gen.
My theory for the Piglins is that they're former humans that tried to settle the Nether. There was no food though, so they brought the pigs along, as the pigs eat nearly anything. The pigs ate the Nether fungi, the humans ate the pigs. Over time, both began to mutate: as a result of consuming the fungus, pigs turned into Hoglins, while humans, having eaten fungus contaminated porcine flesh, had their mutation influenced by its DNA and thus mutated into Piglins.
I'm a huge fan of Post-post-apocalyptic settings. When so much time has passed since the last civilization ended that no even knows what happened to them, just that they were here but they aren't anymore. I especially love games where you slowly piece together what happened and what that means for the present. Horizon Zero Dawn and Outer Wilds are two of my favorite games like that, and Breath of the Wild has similar vibes even though the fall of civilization was much more recent and less destructive than other examples.
Tumblr users dropping that bombshell of storytelling, world building and existentialism, followed by "or something like that, I'm very tired" is why I love that site.
When you kill the dragon the achievement is called "Free the End" couple that with the whole dimension lacking blocks + the endermen carrying blocks you can guess they likely go to other dimensions in order to feed the dragon so it won't destroy their dimension.
I think they cheer when you kill her as well, so really the End Dragon enslaved their whole civilization, It's not abandoned they are the inhabitants from there.
And then there's the Warden, was he sent to murder the ancient city or was he a golem they built to protect themselves? And the Pigmen, why are there so many zombies of them? What relationship do they have with the fortress and the wither? Who built the underwater temples and what were the guardians guarding? They look like rock, are they golems too?
A lot of games can be considered a post apocalyptic future. Bombs go boom, world dies. Years pass, life begins again, it forms whatever universe you like.
It's like the dream theory in a different outfit.
Yeah. I've hear so many Post-Apocalypse "theories" like that when I was younger that, when I decided to finally watch Adventure Time this past year, I thought all the talk of it being post-apocalyptic was *also* all "in theory" You can imagine my surprise when it was very directly shown to not, in fact, be just a theory.
Marceline Is it just you and me in the wreckage of the world?
That must be so confusing for a little girl. And I know you're gonna need me here with you...
What everyone pictures the first coupe times someone offhandedly mentions "the mushroom war" in *Adventure Time*. https://i.imgur.com/7bdEduf.png
hell, the first shot in the intro has broken TVs and an unexploded nuke
Funny thing was it was all subtly implied in the beginning where it actually had theories about it. Then they were like "Theories, guys here's a mutagenic nuclear bomb have fun".
I honestly think Adventure Time got the apocalypse train theory era rolling, since it was one of the most blatant examples. It also started off really subtle (not sure if it was even pinned down as a thing in the early seasons) until it became fully canon later on.
Splatoon is confirmed to be post-apocalyptic, but the apocalypse was actually climate change and the earth flooding from the polar ice caps melting, presumably.
No, it was an apocalypse caused by a nuclear war melting the ice caps, not climate change
So....... Climate change caused artificially
Basically climate change any% (world record)
I'd be more alarmed if it *wasn't* a world record
It's pretty much mandatory for any fantasy setting with lore
Just once I want a fantasy setting WITHOUT an all-powerful precursor race/civilisation, show us a story about people figuring shit out for the first time Hell, even sci fi is the same most of the time
It's tough to have absolutely 0 precursors, because then your setting will probably be stone age. Since a stone age civilization will probably either precurse any bronze or later age civilization. And while there's some stuff you can do in a stone age civilization, you're not going to have much cool buildings, weapons, transportation technology, etc. that makes a setting fun. And people "figuring shit out for the first time" will be happening on the scale of millennia, which is a pretty damn long time. Not that it'd be totally impossible to work around all that. Just not easy.
Just having previous civilisations is fine, but the fact that they always seem better at everything compared to present civilisation is kinda overdone. Especially when magic is involved; it seems like magic somehow evolves backwards in most settings. I want to see a setting where magic existed in the past, but it’s stronger today, and you can see how the “technology” evolved and got stronger over time. Usually it’s just “the ancients had the best magic ever, but then they all died, and now magic study is mostly applied archaeology”
Mother of Learning is a web novel that's great for that. There's a bit of "lost magic", but it's very much a setting where magic 99% of the time has evolved like a science and modern wizards are nearly objectively superior to their predecessors.
For another webnovel recommendation, [The Practical Guide to Evil](https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/) has a civilization that acts as a kind of "precursor" to the modern one, but it's literally just the Romans. They had amazing engineering and architecture, but that's about it. They act as a backdrop to the lore, due to having colonized the protagonist's country a really long time ago, but don't really play any relevant role as a precursor civilization (although, just like the Romans, they erased a lot of local culture and history). Magic is the best it has ever been and we see a lot of modern scientific developments (...after a while. I won't give the whole spiel on the *why*, but there are some areas that are technologically stunted, for certain reasons. Warfare's doing fine, though).
Thank Tolkien for the prevalence of precursors races.
in "Frieren" current day magic is way stronger than it was before, it's a plot point in the beginning of the manga (a character defeats a demon that has been sealed many years ago because people have improved on spells so much that now the strongest spell years ago is just a basic attack spell) (or something)
Oh yeah Frieren is peak and the magic system is a big part of it
Well we, as in our current society, do not have any uber powerful precursors. Like we are far better at the Magic of Technology than all previous civilizations. Its quite conceivable to me that if you can world build it so that there are Uber Powerful Precursors who fought the gods, you could just write your story in that time period rather than after the apocalypse.
Except that's not entirely true, some things are ancient precursors did turned out to be better than how we do them now. The most recent being old concrete and it's mixture with limestone to create essentially self-healing concrete. It's something was was ignored for a very long time until we figured out why it was made the way it was and rediscovered their superior technology. It's just we are not a fantasy world so we get new medicines rediscovered and new concrete instead of space ships and ancient magical lore.
Except you're wrong. Roman concrete is vastly over hyped on Reddit.
I've got a fun one in my current D&D setting where the ancient reptile people had very powerful magic and pretty cool technology, but the present day people are starting to make scientific breakthroughs that the ancient Hatso never achieved. The big one is gunpowder. Hatso ranged weapons were pretty advanced springalds, crossbows, and ballistae, but they never got as far as chemical propellant. The Hatso have numbers and magical golems, but their mighty self-replicating Ironbacks aren't as impervious as they used to be in the face of a broadside of 16-pounders. A single Ironback legionary can turn an entire village into neatly stacked corpses, but a couple of Bospan sloops can turn an entire century of legionaries into scrap metal and churned mud.
Witcher.
I want a sci fi story told basically in the precursor race’s view and then a sequel series showing humanity discovering the ancient alien race.
That's essentially LOTR depending on how far back you go. I like how it's a precursor to the modern day and not the other way around.
Other than the first one, all the good Fallout games are post post apocalypse
That's post post apocalyptic, the world ended, some survived, the apocalypse was forgotten but some things remain hinting to a past that's not as it seems
ive always thought thats where the zombies come from. theyre clearly not villagers (zombie villagers have the nose) and wear steve clothes. which has interesting implications about rotten flesh.
There’s a game theory video (a few, I think) that discuss the Minecraft world being a post-undead-apocalypse setting. Mostly based on what you’ve said about Zombies wearing steve clothes. Skeletons are also steve shaped, as is the Warden, and Endermen. The current theory is that opening a rift to the nether released a zombie plague, the same one that got the Piglins, which quickly eradicated the “ancient builders”. The survivors hid underground and built the Ancient City, which showcases several attempts at building new portals to escape this world entirely. Eventually they discover a way to access the End, where they live to this day. However, the only source of food in the End is the Chorus Fruit, which grants teleportation to the user. This, combined with the latent weirdness of the End, transformed what few builders remained into the Endermen, who can still build to a limited capacity. The Endermen were then subjugated by the End Dragon. You are called forth by some higher power in order to kill the Dragon and release your ancestors from tyranny. Or it’s a silly block game with no story, up to you.
The endermen don't eat the chorus fruits, they farm shulkers and feed them the chorus fruits. The shulkers condense the teleportation power of the fruits into pearls which the endermen take and use for transportation after consuming the meat of the shulker. Shulkers defend themselves by making their attackers float away, which is why the endermen also invented elytra as a safety device to be used when trying to harvest the shulker meat. They also use the pearls to create portals to help them travel between end islands and to get to and from the overworld while they engage in their favorite hobby of collecting dirt blocks.
Makes sense! Though I would assume both proto-Endermen and Shulkers ate the chorus fruit, as it’s the only food source available. One thing I’m still trying to square up is how they opened the portal to the End if there weren’t Endermen already in the overworld. We know they used Eyes of Ender, but the only way to get those is via the pearls, which only come from endermen, which builders turned into when they entered the End, which required Eyes of Ender, which required Endermen, which required the End, which required Eyes of Ender, which required…. There’s a lot of holes in the theory tbh, I just like it
Well you need blaze rods to craft a pearl into an eye, so that adds another layer to the mystery. The dragon can open a portal to the overworld, so an enderman would have to have defeat the dragon and take pearls to the overworld then somehow make a portal to the nether to pick up some blaze rods. Then they make a portal back to the end using the eyes as the key, but someone had to remove the eyes to close the portal leaving some endermen trapped in the overworld. To resummon the dragon the endermen would also need ghast tears from the nether and glass from the overworld. The crystals keep the dragon alive and make sure the portal back to the overworld won't open again until someone destroys them all and kills the dragon. Elytra are made of phantom wings which is an overworld mob but you only find fully crafted elytra in the end. Elytra need repairs and maintenance so they would need to be making trips back and forth to gather materials. Then what are the boats in the end for if the endermen can teleport and they hate water? Why would they build a boat just to store their elytra when not in use? Were they looking for a better method of travel between worlds since the portal system is so inefficient and requires so many rare materials? Are the shipwrecks related to the endermen? Did the ones stuck in the overworld continue their boat building trying to make them fly using pearl power, but the inferior wooden crafting materials couldn't handle the stress of the test flights so they end up smashed in half on a beach? The shipwrecks contain treasure maps which lead to a heart of the sea which is needed to make conduits, maybe the endermen trapped in the overworld were trying to figure out a way to overcome their one weakness, water, by crafting conduits to protect them from drowning and boost their swimming skills? They are probably pretty embarrassed about their failed boating experiments which is why they can't stand it when Steve looks at them. They are jealous of his superior crafting skills and the way he can so easily make boats out of a few planks and a shovel. Probably why they alway grief his bases by stealing blocks in the night.
The best way to build lore is to have none and let the fans come up with it, because this theory is cool as hell and likely not at all what Notch/other developers had in mind. But it’s way better and is now my head canon
renaminf rotten flesh to rotten long pork
Like *most* of minecraft’s structures are abandoned ruins
All of them except witch huts and villages, right?
Woodland mansions and pillager outposts. Piglin bastions too
Bastions are ruins, the achievement is "Those were the days".
But they are not abandoned
They aren’t abandoned, but they are absolutely ruins Heck, their official name is Bastion _Remnant_
[Game theory on this exact thing](https://youtu.be/ysQ-dMA_qkk?si=LwR4qOxbng866N0-)
came here to say this!
Im more curious what future villager archeologists will make of the times of the current player, like all these automated farms and megastructures
usually put together by one timeless entity walking around in the sand, placing stones to pass the time
Seriously, compared to the ruins left in a default world, most players are a force of nature on their own. Now I'm curious if there are any mods that add in ancient structures based on common player builds, like automatic farms, mob farms, strip mines, etc. That would be really interesting
Of anyone finds such a mod, could they maybe also inform me? I'd love that too.
the funniest thing about minecraft to me is that there is lore. you've got all the structures which had to be made by someone, the undead creatures which definitely are not villagers, hell enderman noises have been decoded to say actual words and there's the whole thing with the weird music disks. but i never see anything about it. because while it is there, minecraft at its core is about doing your own thing, building your own structures, making your own story. so the lore takes a backseat
That's also why we don't see the villagers building or fighting. Very few non-player entities are allowed to mess with blocks, and most of them are classic mobs. Similarly, any mobs that attack villagers don't attack baby villagers, because rating
Don't zombies attack baby villagers though?
They do? I though baby zombie villagers could only spawn, not be turned
those tumblrites would love the Last Days texture pack and its extensive apocalypse lore
Game theory made multiple videos along these lines.
I still rewatch the clip of him connecting Ocean Monuments to the Islamic Faith on a regular basis
Dang I must have missed that specific part, I’ll have to rewatch.
[the full video it’s from](https://youtu.be/hHPLAItTLiA?si=Bne1k9erU16XvYtv) [the clip I keep rewatching](https://youtu.be/IaR9U2xrjyk?si=Ev8PMw_QSva65F49)
Oof, I’ve seen some of his more unbelievable theories (Ness) but even that seems a bit far fetched. If Minecraft actually incorporated Islam why would it be a temple and not a mosque?
Probably something about it being drowned for thousands of years and prowled by monstrous fish would make portraying it fully as a mosque a bit distasteful
Oh, okay thats a very reasonable answer I hadn’t considered. Thank you!
Honestly even if it’s far fetched, it’s for fun and I personally think exposing his viewers to different faiths and cultures is a good thing
Old Minecraft theories were about how zombies, skeletons and Creepers were former players. Skeletons got shot to death, creepers exploded and zombies died of various causes. Easy to see why, because zombies especially have the same clothes as Steve. I guess Endermen were players that got corrupted after too many chorus fruits.
Honestly in newer Minecraft versions it’s not even post-apocalyptic anymore. It’s just the countryside. Like I’d be willing to bet that the village-to-acre ratio is higher than medieval Europe’s.
Hey guys lemme tell you my cool theory Ash is actually in a coma
Hey, the Minecraft theory is actually fine while every “actually in a coma” theory is garbage. I dislike the implication they’re equivalent.
It's almost insulting. The coma theory stops being interesting the moment you point out that every story was made up in someone's head, saying that it's a character instead of an author just makes it pointlessly complicated, let alone boring. The Minecraft theory is attempting to connect a bunch of separate pieces and unanswered questions to see what kind of picture is formed, and find ways to fill in the gaps. There is so much to work with and it doesn't take anything away from what we already have, just helps to add to it.
NEW THEORY, NeonNKnightrider is in a coma and we’re all a metaphor!
Mabel-Syrup is in a metaphor and we’re all in a coma
Damn, makes you think. What would be weirder, realizing you’re in a coma or realizing you’re the only one NOT in a coma?
SANS IS STEVEN UNIVERSE/NESS
HIS NAM E IS STEVEN AFTER NOT SURVIVING
omg and he's also in purgatory which was all the dream of some guy who was a brain in a jar in a laboratory inside a simulation of the earth circa 1999 after the bombs fell and centuries passed and also it's an alternate history where the nazis won world war 2 and all the villagers are an allegory for the disciples which was taught to us by aliens at roswell and it's a prequel to earthbound/mother 2
CHILDHOOD = SOUL MURDERED
There’s also the fact that zombies exist, and that not only are zombie *villagers* are considered completely different entities but they have a unique design as well and are the only kind that can be cured. This only gets darker when you account for baby zombies too.
If I may posit a theory, what if we aren’t the last? What if humanity simply migrated to another area gradually and we just happen to he left behind/go back? What if all these ruins that we find are the same as the pyramids and ruins today? What if instead of being the last, we’re just the first? Paving the way and documenting these strange environments and creatures along the way?
We only just got to the deep dark, presumably there's still more to find.
I just wish they had actual villager ships/aquatic villages. I want to stumble upon fucking Venice or Rum Row in a minecraft world
With Minecraft’s sometimes whacky world gen, you would find one in the middle of a gods forsaken desert.
Or maybe it was just the villagers. Or the pillagers. Or the piglins. Or the endermen.
The new Archeology stuff added pot shards that have player-like sprites on them rather than villager-like
i like the idea but can i just say that im starting to hate post apocalypse stories/theories? its like the new dream theory, but instead of explaining plotholes its a story to explain why things are so different from our norms/ideas. like sure both can be done well and while id argue dream stories/theories are worse, post-apoc is becoming an all too common for me to enjoy. or maybe im just a contrarian who cant stand them idk, just wanted to vent my frustration.
I hate them when there's no reason for it/something else can explain the ruins. In a high fantasy setting with magic and stuff, an old kingdom falling makes sense. But the whole "Fallout and Elder Scrolls are connected" is really stupid. For minecraft, it's the only theory that really makes sense. Mojang want to add new structures and ruins to find when exploring, and every time they do that it adds credence to the theory. Especially when the structures have redstone in them, which villagers don't use. There are only so many ocean and trail ruins you can find before you go "ok, whatever people lived here were widespread".
Why is it specifically the shipwrecks that annoy them? Minecraft has villages, temples, mansions, ruined cities, cities and fortresses from other dimensions, wells, outposts, igloos, underwater monuments, but the boats are the one thing that cause them to question things?
they actually talked about that approximately a word after that sentence. hope this helps!
I think we should piss on the poor.
Acting as if other people have bad reading comprehension when in actuality the comment you’re replying to and everyone that upvoted it is just straight up wrong and they themselves even realized lol
...Did they?
correction it was the same sentence, just after a comma
The user with the boat-opinion never used a comma I think you're mixing up the people in the post?
oh my god i pissed on the poor
No they literally didn’t?
Unless you are being annoyingly pedantic about when they addressed these things (not literally a word after the sentence), the post specifically has them touch on temples and fortresses in other worlds. The initial tumblr post specifically calls out the villages as an indication that the villagers were incapable of building something like a boat. As for the mansions and underwater monuments, those were introduced long after minshafts, which is when the tumblr op states they made the initial post.
OOP (bee-cowboy) never mentions temples, fortresses, etc halfaqueen does, bee-cowboy literally only mentions ships and villages
You are totally right.
The original poster only mentions shipwrecks as causing them to think this, never any other structures. Is everyone misreading this post? They mention villages but specifically as structures that don’t make them question this because they’re different and built by villagers
correction it was the same sentence, just after a comma
I’m so confused this is straight up not true? The original poster only mentions shipwrecks
I will say villages and mansions are actively being lived in.
me when i was 13
There are multiple possible former "people" around, even bound to dimensions. Piglin, Endermen and Villagers arent on the level of the player, but they are SOMETHING. Maybe the species got corrupted somehow, the Endermen definitely arent up to build end cities but I doubt the frikking Shulkers did it.
"it's a nuclear post apocalypse" is as irritating a trope as "it was all a dream" at this point. stop it.
'nuclear' post apocalypse specifically, yeah that one is a little over done. I'm starting to get a little tired of the climate changes apocalypses as well just because of how many seem to be coming up, partially because it always breaks my immersion whenever I come across one. Though outside of those specifically, I do enjoy a lot of post-post apocalyptic settings where it's been so long since the fall of the last civilization that the current one doesn't even know what happened to them. If they answer what caused the end of the world, I do hope they are more creative with it.
It’s no coincidence that all the zombies that literally fill the world look like you.
Game Theory has entered the chat
This is literally matpat's series on minecraft
Hot take: I wish Mojang didn't basically make this whole apocalypse thing canon. It seems like originally the plan was to keep things mysterious, but after game theory did more Minecraft theories they were like "oh shit we should add more explicit lore" and that kinda ruined it.
Adding literally any form of structure to the game that isn't actively inhabited by living beings canonizes the apocalypse / end of a civilization. It's an effectively unavoidable problem.
Matpats Minecraft series is unironically one of the best things game theory has ever put out
No endermen just built them to troll the player, it’s like dinosaurs
*\*sees any kid-friendly world with monsters and magic\** "is this a post-apocalypse?" this theory is kind of fun when its canon like in adventure time but im hearing it so often now its becoming the new "what if the main character is just hallucinating"
As long as it's done well and there is legitimate evidence behind it, I do love a good post-post apocalypse setting. It really helps to add history to the world, and it doesn't even have to be one massive civilization that fell, it could have been several smaller ones over thousands of years. All of Legend of Zelda is basically a post-post-post-post-etc. apocalyptic society where the civilizations have fallen and risen back up again so many times that you can't even tell which fallen civilization built what anymore, and I love it. Though I see what you mean with theories getting out of hand. If I wasn't so obsessed with games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Outer Wilds where this is handled really well, I might already be over it.
I think when it is canon and well-established it's pretty good, like Adventure Time does handle it well, it hints at it creatively at first and once it's canonically confirmed it puts a lot of stuff into perpective. At the same time, some people try to say "the world is so weird because of nuclear fallout", when that's canonically not true. the Adventure Time world already had magic and aliens before the mushroom war. Similarly there's theories about Spongebob Squarepants being set below Bikini Atoll and the characters all being mutated from radiation from Operation Crossroads. Theories about Regular Show being from the perspective of characters tripping on Acid. The "Rugrats is just Angelica's imagination" theory. Basically my problem with those theories is that people seem to use it because they find it hard to fully suspend their disbelief for kids media. They need a happy fantastical story to have a basis in a grim reality instead of just accepting that it's about fantastical stuff like magic, monsters and anthropomorphic animals.
One day everything you built will look to them the same as the other forgotten kingdoms relics of a time and people who no longer are.
Soft fantasy
Idk if it’s post apocalyptic from the present because all the technology is old. Also I really like the new excavations, I wish they gave more than pots, but I love the speculative archeology of it all
The radiation from the nuke was so intense it blasted the world’s resolution into squares
I like the post-apocalyptic interpretation, but I've always found "it was a BOMB the whole time" theories to be kind of trite, no matter what it's used for. I mean, we're living in a post apocalypse irl - dozens, hundreds of civilizations have collapsed to get us where we are now, and none of them perished at the hands of something so simple and tidy as a bomb. The human spirit is in the habit of reinventing itself, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly. The world of minecraft shows no signs of the poisons and strains of the modern politic, no ruined tenements or skyscrapers - its simply a world that used to be one way, and is now another, no broader context for either. You can't really wrap it all up with a bow like that. Explaining it all away with a bomb makes it feel further away from reality and humanity, rather than closer to it.
my incredibly hot take is that adding villagers to minecraft was a mistake and steve? (or alex?, as the case may be) should be utterly, completely alone
That certainly is a hot take
I think there should've been another intelligent species added, just a non-hominid one. Maybe bipedal cetaceans or something? Anything to clearly denote that they don't have human lineage. I do agree that villagers as they exist are kind of stupid. Like they clearly have most of the abilities that the player has, but with some weird exceptions, and they're just kind of uncanny.
Most of that is the fact that Mojang don't like adding things that change the world without the player's input. So Villagers don't expand unless you do it for them.
Hottest take of like 2012
Matpat has a (relatively sound) breakdown of the timeline, if anyone actually wants the answers to the environmental questions posed by in game auto-gen.
I mean I think MatPat has been saying this exact thing for years.
My theory for the Piglins is that they're former humans that tried to settle the Nether. There was no food though, so they brought the pigs along, as the pigs eat nearly anything. The pigs ate the Nether fungi, the humans ate the pigs. Over time, both began to mutate: as a result of consuming the fungus, pigs turned into Hoglins, while humans, having eaten fungus contaminated porcine flesh, had their mutation influenced by its DNA and thus mutated into Piglins.
These people haven't seen the Game Theory vids
Getting all tomorrows vibes from this
I'm a huge fan of Post-post-apocalyptic settings. When so much time has passed since the last civilization ended that no even knows what happened to them, just that they were here but they aren't anymore. I especially love games where you slowly piece together what happened and what that means for the present. Horizon Zero Dawn and Outer Wilds are two of my favorite games like that, and Breath of the Wild has similar vibes even though the fall of civilization was much more recent and less destructive than other examples.
This muthafucka do more good thoughts tired than me when not.
I always thought humanity disappeared when they mined too deep and uncovered monsters.
The first post in the screenshot is literally just the lore of Adventure Time. Like beat-for-beat
minecraft is just a postapocalyptic isekai
This is what I liked the most in alpha, the game felt... Lonely, but in a comforting way.
Tumblr users dropping that bombshell of storytelling, world building and existentialism, followed by "or something like that, I'm very tired" is why I love that site.
When you kill the dragon the achievement is called "Free the End" couple that with the whole dimension lacking blocks + the endermen carrying blocks you can guess they likely go to other dimensions in order to feed the dragon so it won't destroy their dimension. I think they cheer when you kill her as well, so really the End Dragon enslaved their whole civilization, It's not abandoned they are the inhabitants from there. And then there's the Warden, was he sent to murder the ancient city or was he a golem they built to protect themselves? And the Pigmen, why are there so many zombies of them? What relationship do they have with the fortress and the wither? Who built the underwater temples and what were the guardians guarding? They look like rock, are they golems too?
i mean, the mutated monsters thing is part-canon. creepers were pigs. you get the point