Does Minecraft Actually Have Lore? - CBR

Minecraft's undeniable legacy is in part thanks to its creative approach to the survival game genre. With very few clear-cut goals in the game, players are instead encouraged to use their creativity to build, adventure and explore. Villages, strongholds, dungeons and caves add a sense of adventure to the wide world of Minecraft. The open-ended nature of the game has also inspired fans to come up with their own explanations, and this might have led to the discovery of the game's hidden lore.

The Ancient Builders theory was popularized by the YouTube channel Game Theory. The channel originally proposed this theory as an explanation for why players can discover so many ruined structures around the game's world. Since then, Game Theory and the channel's fans have found a ton of connections hidden within the game that seem to actually point to this Ancient Builders theory being the true "lore" of Minecraft.

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The Ancient Builders at the core of this theory are speculated to be a civilization of architects that lived in the world of Minecraft long before the events of the game. The player character is meant to be a descendent of this civilization, though this part of the theory isn't particularly important. What is important is that the various ruins and structures that players can find scattered across the world were all built by the Ancient Builders.

Fans expanded upon this lore further by exploring the question of what exactly happened to the Builders. Game Theory suggests that, due to the existence of End Portals in Strongholds, they fled to the End to escape some sort of disaster. The exact nature of that disaster depends on the theory, with the main two ideas being that it was either a flood or the Wither. The flood theory points to the existence of Ocean Monuments as evidence, though the Wither theory is by far the more compelling.

The Wither theory has its roots in the hellish Nether and the many dangers that await players within. The texture for the Nether-native soul sand block appears to have small faces, or souls, embedded in it. Soul sand also happens to be a core part of summoning the Wither, which is done by placing three Wither Skeleton heads on a body made of soul sand. As the theory goes, the Ancient Builders had attempted to utilize the souls within soul sand to create life. Something went wrong with the process and instead, the Builders created the Wither.

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The Wither began to rampage through the world, destroying many of the structures that the Ancient Builders had created. The Ancient Builders were forced to flee from the Overworld and the Nether to the mysterious End. While they were technically safe from their own creation, the End had a curious effect on them. Fans theorize that the Chorus Fruit that can be found in the End slowly transformed the Builders into the Endermen who call the dimension home.

The theory mentions Chorus Fruit because the food item causes players to mimic the Endermen's teleportation ability upon consumption. Fans suggest that the fruit, combined with prolonged exposure to the End, warped the Ancient Builders into something that could better survive the dimension. There's a decent amount of evidence backing this up, too -- for example, the Endermen's passive voice lines seem to be highly distorted and reversed human speech, saying things like "Hi," "What's up," and "Look for the eye."

The fact that Endermen pick up blocks and place them around seems to suggest that they have some faint memory of building structures. Another bit of evidence can be found in the official book, Minecraft: Mobestiary, which includes detailed diagrams of the anatomy of Minecraft's mobs. The diagram of the Endermen shows that they have a very human-like brain, which seems to imply that they're similar in some way to the game's player character.

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The story of Minecraft, according to this fan theory, appears to depict a descendent of a long-gone civilization of master builders avenging their ancestors by freeing them from the End and carrying on their legacy in the Overworld. It's a backstory that, if true, really does fit well with what Minecraft is all about. It's subtle enough so that it doesn't specifically guide players toward defeating the Ender Dragon or Wither, but it still gives the player's actions a bit more context in the larger world.

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Game Theory's Builder story isn't the first time someone's tried to decipher the lore of Minecraft. Reddit user theatakhan detailed their theory a few years before Game Theory's first Minecraft lore video. They also suggest that a single civilization of ancient architects existed in the world before players, but these architects actually created many of the hostile mobs that roam the world. The theory also says that this ancient civilization was able to utilize Command Blocks at their peak.

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However, theatakhan's theory gets a bit wilder than Game Theory's. The End, in this interpretation, is actually named as such because it symbolizes the real-world theory for the end of civilization. The End is meant to be a stand-in for the Singularity, where technology and humanity become indistinguishable. Minecraft's Ancient Builders supposedly were able to transcend the game's code itself and escape Minecraft into the real world.

While this theory certainly explores some fascinating concepts, it's hard to deny that Game Theory's take on Minecraft's lore has a lot more in-game evidence supporting it. Even if it wasn't intended as canon by Mojang, it still stands as a fairly solid interpretation of what Minecraft's story could be. The story of a game that's all about freedom and creativity is whatever players want it to be, which is really what makes Minecraft such a timeless experience.