Game Theory: Minecraft, Do NOT Kill The Ender Dragon!

according to all known laws of aviation there is no way that an ender dragon should be able to fly its wings are too small to get its massive body off the ground the ender dragon of course flies anyway because ender dragons don't care what minecraft builders think is impossible [Music] [Music] hello internet welcome to game theory the show that's closing in on 15 million subscribers by the way did you know that every time you ring the notification bell an ender dragon gets its wings it's true try it oh there's one right now look at him go so majestic you did that you and sure i get that some of you might not want to give an enderdragon anything since it's you know the brutally destructive final boss of minecraft but by the end of today's episode i think you're gonna be changing your mind i think you'll also be wanting to snap up some of the new back to school theory where we just launched yeah it wasn't a great transition but i had to figure out a way to let you know that the new game theory backpack pencil case and keychain supplies are starting to run out so make sure you grab them before they go the way of the ender dragon extinct need something that can fit five honors textbooks and three binders because you're a smart theorist boom this bag can handle the load or maybe you're not in school and you're going on a hike or doing some extracurriculars or just doing some traveling with pockets galore and tons of straps you'll be going strong while on the go with this newest batch of theory wear so make sure you grab it before it's gone now today's theory is a bit overdue in my minecraft lore series considering that my first video started at funnily enough the end end with a capital e that is in that episode i mentioned the ender dragon only briefly speculating that based on the achievement for defeating it titled free the end it seemed that the ender dragon was a tyrant oppressing the society of endermen but after digging into more of the game's secrets i don't think that's the case anymore or at least it's not the full story sure it might be easy to look at the endermen the descendants of an ancient builder civilization transformed by spending generations in the end and some sisting off of a diet of chorus fruit and presume that they must be at the mercy of this powerful dragon that rules over them but if we dig into the evidence it actually tells us something very different so today we're gonna focus on gene and her story oh sorry is that name not ringing any bells for you well it should it's confirmed by minecraft creator notch and other members of the minecraft development team that gene is the official canonical name of the ender dragon apparently minecraft steve got his name the exact same way a random comment by the franchise's creator so as far as i'm concerned these two names are equally official anyway today is all about gene and how we as the player have been ignorant to the fact that for the past decade the game has been begging nearly screaming at us to not kill her that's right we're supposed to spare the ender dragon but to understand why let's start at the beginning of the end so to call gene the ender dragon is a bit misleading sure she's the only dragon found in the end but the important detail we tend to overlook is that it wasn't always that way the end gives us clues that at least at one point in history multiple ender dragons made their home here for evidence of this just look at the end ships found throughout the dimension these things have dragon heads mounted onto their masts clearly the spoils of battles against dragons that once populated this world and this already tells us a lot of different things not only that dragons plural once existed in this realm but also that a dragon hunting civilization existed a hunter civilization that apparently must have been pretty successful judging by the dragon heads found at the mast and if you're asking who these dragon hunters were well i think the answer at this point should be fairly obvious that society of ancient builders that we've been tracking ever since episode 1 of this minecraft lore series whoever constructed these massive flying ships were clearly builders the end ship is just this impressive feat of engineering with floors constructed from the finest obsidian there's also the fact that the ship is protected by shulkers a mob that you might be tempted to write off as just a weird creature shoved into the end to round out the enemies found there but it is so so much more you see if you read the entry for the shulker in my favorite go-to minecraft lore book the mob bestiary which as a reminder is written from the perspective of an in-world adventurer and researcher the shulker's perper blocks might actually be man-made to quote from the book the exterior of the shulker may be a natural adaptation to help conceal it or it may be engineered by the city's architects huh that is a weird thing to call out their book what a huge logical leap to make i don't know about you but it seems to me like it's heavily implying that that is the right answer that the shulkers were actually engineered by builders still whether these shulkers are a feat of bioengineering or just an instance of cleverly domesticating a native end species one thing is clear whoever built the end ships were serious about science so why were the builders hunting dragons were they merely trophy hunting tracking down the biggest and most dangerous game just because they could we've talked in past theories how the civilization demonstrated a lot of hubris convinced that their ability to build gave them the power of gods with power over life and death so could the war against dragons just be another extension of that maybe but i don't think it's just that case in point the eletra capes that enable the player to fly these capes are kind of like the final reward in a traditional game of minecraft you beat the dragon you get access to the end ship and boom you find this unique item that can only be found here and not only are they exclusive to the end ships but they have a texture and use that all but screams that they were made from the remains of defeated dragons we clipped their wings so that we ourselves could obtain the power of flight i don't think it's a coincidence that the one major flying item that we obtain is being done in the one world where the main mob is a giant flying dragon when the builders got to the end they saw something they had yet to conquer the skies and so they were determined to tame those skies just like they had done to the overworld and later the nether fun fact by the way even though eletra seems to be a made up fantasy word for dragon wings the altra wings are actually based on real life biology many insect species especially beetles possess ellatra though in the real world electro wings themselves aren't used for flying but instead as a protective outer coating covering the hind wings that the beetles actually use for flying anyway with that little biology lesson out of the way what i'm really interested in here is the story of the ender dragon or i guess i should say stories because when you actually look at the evidence inside the game it seems to suggest a tale of multiple competing forces on one hand we have the n ships which seem to be pretty clear evidence that there are builders who are into dragon hunting so the builders must have been anti-dragon right that's where the story gets complicated because as anyone who's tried to take down the ender dragon nose there are ender crystals spread across its habitat that are capable of healing it someone or something clearly wanted to keep this creature alive and not only that but the end crystals themselves are not naturally forming they're objects that are constructed artificially by combining an eye a vendor and a gas tear and then encasing it all in glass but what's especially telling about the end crystals is where you find them on top of obsidian pillars and inside of protective cages in short it looks like someone has gone through a lot of steps to make this ender dragon harder to kill not only by creating the end crystals but by putting them on top of pillars that would be a challenge to reach and then encasing them in a further protective barrier and something tells me that gene lacks the opposable thumbs capable of forging glass something else is going on here someone some series of builders really wanted this dragon to stay alive and so they built an elaborate security system to make sure that that dragon stayed alive and so we have evidence that suggests two conflicting stories a ship that seems like the product of builders who are into slaying dragons and a dragon protection defense grid that seems to be built for the opposite purpose so what is going on here was there like a civil war did the builders who came to the end split into two factions one side taking the role of dragon slayer and the other taking the role of dragon worshiper if that was the case why would anyone in their right mind side with the dragons after all the ender dragon is a hostile mob why would someone take it upon themselves to defend the dragons well it seems to suggest that the hunters were too successful to the point that they nearly hunted the ender dragon species to extinction in real world ecological studies there's something called k selection theory that basically aims to explain how various animal species ensure that their offspring survive k-selection theory is founded on this constant trade-off between quality of offspring and quantity of offspring on the quantity side of things you have insects who can produce hundreds thousands even millions of tiny little babies in a lifetime needless to say that when you're laying that many eggs each individual ant baby is not going to be getting a whole heck of a lot of tender love and care on the complete opposite end of the spectrum you got whales with some species of whale like the sperm whale having a single baby every five to seven years this means that each individual whale baby is going to get a lot more parental investment its whale parents are going to spoil that thing like an only child i bring this biological detour up because it brings up an interesting point about the animal kingdom the larger an animal species is the more likely it is to favor quality of offspring over quantity of offspring smaller animals like insects rabbits and birds can afford to have a lot of babies at once while larger species like whales elephants and rhinos are much slower to reproduce the ender dragon seems to fit with that latter category it is massive and it only leaves behind a single egg but what this reproductive strategy also means is that megafauna the big animals while being attractive targets for hunters are also the species that are most at risk of being hunted to extinction because of how slowly they reproduce during the 1800s for instance the eastern pacific gray whale was hunted for their blubber nearly reaching the point of extinction and mind you these were not high-tech humans these were guys in wooden ships powered by sails and armed with harpoons still even with rudimentary tools those guys were capable of making some substantial damage more recently the african elephant population has fallen from an estimated 12 million near the start of the 20th century to a mere 396 000 in the span of a hundred years with the main culprit being human hunters poaching them for their ivory tusks heck even as far back as the ice age many scientists believe that while yes the changing climate wasn't doing the woolly mammoth any favors a major contributing factor to its extinction were humans at a time when they were just literally cave people thrown around pointed sticks and when you put it that way what the end ship represents looks far less heroic seems a lot less like valiant heroes to find the odds to defeat an insurmountable foe and it starts to look a lot more like humans doing what humans sadly do best find a large attractive target hunt it down and don't know when to stop in fact it's quite possible that there was no civil war between one faction of dragon hunting builders and another faction of dragon worshiping builders honestly it could just be a simple case of a single civilization hunting the ender dragons to the point of extinction and then realizing whoopsie we're on the verge of wiping this thing out time to reverse course in fact not only are we gonna stop hunting these things we're gonna do everything in our power to preserve the only one that we've got left and hence we have the still remaining defense mechanisms put in place to protect gene the last ender dragon and believe it or not but this lines up perfectly with behavior that we see coming from our endermen the evolved versions of our ancient builders the endermen peacefully coexist with gene neither attacking the other but true to their roots the endermen are still capable of dragon hunting if forced to if they're hit by splash damage from one of the ender dragon's attacks while you're fighting it the truce is off they retaliate and begin fighting for their lives that old dragon hunting spirit dies hard unfortunately any hopes that the enderman might have for restoring the ender dragon population are meaningless sure they may have decided to stop hunting but they were too late while the ender dragon does leave behind an egg that dragon egg is inanimate there was just a female dragon gene to lay the egg but due to the lack of a male dragon her egg isn't fertilized it's incapable of hatching nothing more than a trophy for whatever hunter might arrive to slay the last of the ender dragons once and for all this is also why i suspect that the player is unable to craft eletro wings canonically we lack the materials gene's body can't be plundered and harvested for enough materials and there are no other dragons that we can get the proper resources from therefore we're left with the only eletro wings that exist in the world in the end ship players of minecraft myself included have long speculated that the act of freeing the end means liberating the endermen and the rest of the end's inhabitants from the tyranny of the enderdragon but it could be that the one who truly becomes free in that moment is the ender dragon herself left as the last of her species by a race of builders that hunted them to near extinction and then preserved forever by those same builders who will never really be able to atone for what they did or reverse the consequences of those actions an ender dragon forever alone forever sad at the loss of a race so on one hand we absolutely shouldn't kill the last of this species but on the other hand it might just be freeing her from her quite literal eternal torment but hey speaking of eternal torment school is back in session so whether you're 15 or 50 consider this your last call for our theory backpacking keychain the backpack especially was built with storage and security in mind so it can hold a lot of your stuff and keep it safe no matter what it is so you have plenty of room to fit your diamonds and books and laptops in there while keeping them safe links for that backpack and all the other new theory where items are right below this video and as always remember it's just a theory a game theory thanks for watching you

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 3,494,767

Rating: 4.9432263 out of 5

Keywords: minecraft, minecraft ender dragon, ender dragon, how to get to the ender dragon, how to hatch an ender dragon, how to make an ender portal, ender portal, minecraft history, minecraft lost history, minecraft ender, minecraft update, minecraft theory, minecraft science, minecraft crafting, minecraft tips, minecraft 100 days, 100 days in minecraft, minecraft 1.7, among us minecraft, enderman, nether, creeper, piglins, game theory, game theorists, matpat, game theory minecraft

Id: VDhxbN7Dg1U

Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 21 2021

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[u/Raghavnarain]

Matpat you are right Jean is the last one but u can bring her back to life with 4 end crystals and u can do that endlessly so if we players can do that the builders also has figured how to make end crystals so can't we just resurrect the dragons back. What I think the knew this that they can resurrect the dragon and if u see u will always find Jean in one floating island what if its like her home and she will resurrect every time there. Imagine if there other homes and we can't make the place we're the dragon rest because it is made of bedrock but the accent builders can and they chose one dragon so they can farm her for elytra. Think about it

[u/Rob_mc_1]

So why does killing the ender dragon activate the portal to go home? Is it that they were hunting for sport or is it a case where they were trying to get home only to change motives over time?

[u/careater]

Here are my thoughts on this theroy: What about the ancient civilization putting the hard to kill ender dragon to protect the entrance. Think about it, they create the wither and flee their dimension but had no way of closing the portal once they were on the other side. The portal only goes to this one location, so they set up the most powerful mob they could find with the ability to heal as a guardian of their new dimension. That way if the wither followed them through it would have to get past the ever healing dragon before it could move on to decimate the end dimension.

So maybe what the games means by "free the end" is by killing this guardian you are signaling to the ancient builders that the threat of the wither is gone, and they are free to return to the over world.

[u/Spacetronaut711]

There are two problems with this theory: PHANTOM MEMBRANES are used to repair the elytra, and ender crystals can be used to hatch the dragon's egg. The ancient builders could have learned how to hunt the phantoms and craft the elytra with the membranes. The builders probably even made the elytra specifically to fight the ender dragon to remove the advantage the dragon had by being able to fly. This most likely means that they had some unknown way of returning the the Overworld somehow to accomplish this. The reason the player cannot craft elytra is most likely due to the knowledge being lost to time. As for the crystals, the endermen most likely originate from the End and in the past they could have been similar to the ancient builders. They could have somehow discovered how to craft the ender crystals for some unknown reason and the dragon, or dragons, could have learned to draw upon the powers of the crystals. This could lead to the dragons to become arrogant and manipulate the crystals for their own purposes, leading to war with the enderman. Towards the end of the war the last dragon, or dragons, used the power of the crystals to either decrease the endermen's intelligence, or cause the enderman to devolve into what they are now. Leaving the dragons to rule the End. The reason there is only one ender dragon left could be that after the builders discovered the End they battled with the dragons until there was only one left. The ancient enderman and builders could have even worked together at some point to fight the dragons.