What separates the noobs from the elite in
video games is a mastery of the meta. Figuring out the game within the game can
give you a massive advantage over others and let’s you stay ahead of the curve. Minecraft’s meta changes lots year on year
and it’s always worth keeping up to date with the newest tricks, tactics and strategies
to remain on top. The question is; how good do you reckon yours
is? Get ready to take some notes, subscribe if
you like what you see, I’m SimplySarc and I’m about to show you what we call in this
business some ‘Pro Gamer Moves’. We’re gonna begin down in the caves. Now if you’ve been playing Minecraft for
any number of years, you’ve probably heard a ton of conflicting opinions on what the
best way is to find diamonds. Some players swear that strip mining like
this, where you leave a two block gap between tunnels is king. There’s even a more modern version of this
where you use a trap door to start crawling so you can tunnel in a 1x1 footprint; even
more efficient at uncovering diamonds. But the reality is, the best way to find diamonds
is often to just run around in caves because they’re sorta just lying around uncovered. The question is, how do you find caves (legitimately!)? Is it possible to make a ‘Cave Detector’? There’s lots of ways you could approach
this, but my first thought was (and I thought I was so clever for thinking this) the dragon
egg. This block, arguably one of the most useless
in the game has one saving grace; it can teleport around 15 blocks away from itself when you
click it. If there are any empty air pockets around,
IE caves, it’ll warp over to them. So this can find caves, but it can’t tell
you where they are. Dragon eggs leave this little particle trail
when they teleport, which you’d think was an indication of what direction they went
in, but nope it’s just a meaningless lie. Another thought I had (and this one does actually
work) was bells. When you ring them, they highlight raid mobs
and witches interestingly count as raid mobs. So you can see that a witch has been highlighted
which means there’s a cave within 32 blocks. Now this works quite well… if there’s
a witch, but the downside is witches are a pretty uncommon mob so the likelihood of there
being one around is a bit slim. But even still, it’s worth carrying a bell
on the off chance there is! This is a solution, but it’s not MY solution! Admittedly, my one is a bit weird. But once you’ve got it set up, it’s actually
pretty solid. This requires a few things, you’re gonna
need a boat, an enderman sitting in said boat, a bow, some snowballs and a spectral arrow. You might be able to see where I’m going
with this, but allow me to explain: Endermen in boats actually can’t teleport. But they’ll happily try. What you want to do is shoot the guy in the
face and he’ll get the glowing effect. Even though the enderman can’t teleport,
he’ll still locate valid areas (IE caves) and make an attempt. But he’ll instantly be warped back to his
boat. This means we can actually preview where he
tries to go. If we lob a few snowballs at him (which he
can’t be hurt by), he’ll flit between the two locations, uncovering the whereabouts
of any nearby caves he finds. What I really like about this is once you’re
done, you can just hop back in the boat and travel down your tunnel to go and find more
caves in some other area. Next, we’re gonna look at fishing. Fishing is one of the most popular pastimes
in Minecraft. Not because anyone wants fish (in fact getting
fish is considered a massive failure), but because you can get tons of great loot like
enchantments and nautilus shells. Now what if I told you there’s a secret
trick you can use to get more loot in even less time? You might be under the impression that fishing
is random, but this isn’t entirely true. The game doesn’t pick how long you wait
on the fly, instead it’s predetermined the moment you start fishing. Let me give you a quick rundown on how it
works. When you cast a line, the game picks a random
number between 5 and 45, this is how many seconds you wait until a fish bites. This is altered with the ‘Lure’ enchantment,
where every level decreases the wait by a set period. ‘Lure 1’ shaves off 5 seconds, ‘Lure
2’ 10 and ‘Lure 3’, the maximum, reduces the wait by 15. So if the game picks 37 and you have Lure
3, your actual wait time will be 22 seconds. The thing is though, if the game picks between
5 and 15, you actually get an instant hook (because Lure 3’s 15 second reduction will
decrease any of those numbers to 0). In real world terms, this means you have a
25% shot at getting an instant hook. 1 in 4 attempts will result in this on average. So what does this mean for us? Basically, it makes a lot of sense to abandon
any attempt that doesn’t result in a near instantaneous hook. Think of it like this; the game picks 45,
the worst possible draw. This is reduced to 30 with ‘Lure’, but
that’s still a 30 second wait time. In 30 seconds, you get 1 piece of loot. But imagine if you recast the line every 2
seconds. There’s no penalty for this in durability
and instead of 1 attempt at loot, you get 15. If every 1 in 4 attempts succeed at an instant
hook, that’s almost 4 pieces of loot compared to the single piece you’d have gotten if
you’d waited around for the 30 seconds to pass. This is of course a favorable scenario, but
it really highlights the major downside to AFK fishing. The machines can’t determine when the fish
is coming, all they know is the moment the bobber has a bite. AFK farms are actually really inefficient
in this sense, because in our scenario they’d just wait out the 30 seconds. In the meantime the human, who can see the
particles, can scoop up much more loot in the same time frame because they can adjust
their strategy depending on what they’re seeing. Try it out! It might feel a bit weird cancelling a session
that could be only a few seconds away from getting a hook, but overall the chance at
instant hooks outweighs the risk. How long you want to wait is up to you, 1
second before abandon or maybe even up to 5, it depends on your risk tolerance and where
you reckon the sweet spot lies. You might have heard something about our next
trick, but there’s an application for it you would have to be insane not to use. So foxes are a new mob that have a surprising
amount of little tricks up their sleeves. What we’ll be focusing on is their ability
to pick up items. They like food a lot (and will eventually
eat any they find), but they can actually pick up any regular item. Strangely, many items that have special powers
can in fact be used by the fox, as if they were a player. Totems of undying will protect the fox in
case of death and this also extends to enchanted tools. If a fox is holding an enchanted sword, those
enchantments will likely activate when the fox uses it. I hope you can see what I’m getting at here. The most interesting enchantment here is of
course, ‘Looting’. Any mob the fox defeats will drop their base
loot, but also any surplus the looting effect triggered. This has a big effect on one particular farm;
the automatic chicken cooker. Unlike most animal farms, chicken cookers
can run fully autonomously. Up to this point the looting effect required
a player’s presence, but we can now automate even that. With the simple addition of a looting fox
to your cooker, you can instantly increase your yield by practically 3 times, without
really doing anything at all. This can also be applied to other areas, such
as autonomous fish farms (where foxes will hunt the fish and can even cook them with
a Fire Aspect sword). ‘Trusting’ foxes actually have the capability
of attacking any mob that harms the player, which opens that door even wider. A true Pro Gamer Move if there ever was one! I can guarantee with a special kind of certainty
that you’re going to absolutely love what I’m about to reveal to you. In complete honesty I was legit torn on whether
I should tell you this or just jealously guard it for myself. I would have been happy. But I’m just too nice. Crossbows. [...] Initially, I thought crossbows were
a bit redundant. I mean we already have bows and I couldn’t
really see what they offered that wasn’t already covered. I was wrong, crossbows can do some cool stuff. The first thing (which you might have noticed
yourself) is that crossbows can store charges. Once loaded, they can instantly release an
arrow, something regular bows cannot do. Because of that, it actually makes a lot of
sense to carry multiple crossbows at the same time. Why? Because with enough and if you’re quick
fingered, you can output a massive amount of damage very quickly. A crossbow array can shoot arrows quicker
than a regular bow could ever dream of. To make matters worse, welcome to ‘Piercing’;
this awesome enchant makes every arrow a magnitude more lethal. There are 4 levels and each level essentially
increases how many times the arrow can pierce through a mob. With level 4, you can hurt 5 mobs all with
one shot. Let’s be conservative and say we have 3
crossbows at the ready. Not too many, not too few. With ‘Piercing IV’ we can create 15 damage
events in mere fractions of seconds. Absolute carnage. Compare this with regular bows and they’re
truly left in the dust. But here’s the thing. That’s very cool, but it’s not actually
the main event. Consider it a nice little warm up. What I’m actually gonna show you is so good,
some might argue it’s an exploit. What makes crossbows and Piercing so good
is when you introduce tipped arrows into the mix. So tipped arrows are basically 1/8th as strong
at the potion from whence they came, on a time scale. An 8 minute potion converts to 1 minute in
arrow form. Unusually, because Piercing can get through
5 mobs, this potion effect can also affect 5 mobs. But it’s not diluted. Each mob receives a full dose which means
you get 5 times the length of the original potion. If a brewing stand can make 3 potions in each
batch, that’s 24 minutes on certain potions. This makes 24 arrows, with 120 damage events,
so you create 120 minutes worth of potion time vs 24 minutes in potion form. But there’s another thing… You can actually get infinite potion time. If you shoot yourself with a piercing crossbow
with a tipped arrow something odd happens. The game creates a damage event, gives you
the potion effect… then drops on the floor… and can be picked up, because it’s still
got 4 hits left in the tank. This can then be infinitely re-used, in 1
minute intervals. As mentioned this is exploit territory, so
don’t be surprised if it gets patched. That said, there’s one more thing you should
know about it that’s a little less likely to get patched. If you use that previous trick and hit 5 creepers
with one arrow, you can actually leech the effect from them. Ignite them with flint and steel and on explosion,
they’ll release an area of effect cloud that you can soak up for yourself. If you don’t want to be the creeper dragonborn
right now though, you can just store the remaining vessels in the nether for devouring at a later
date. So I’ve seen a lot of Minecraft tier lists
lately, in fact I even saw a Minecraft food list ranking the best and worst foods in the
game. This got me thinking, what is the best food? Now if I asked you, you might say steak…
or rabbit stew or if you’re a particular boffin, maybe even golden carrots. But it’s actually something quite unexpected;
watermelon. Ok, it’s not watermelon, it’s actually
chorus fruit. Perhaps you’re thinking, “what no it’s
not why would you like to me like this?”, but it’s true and it’s not for some gimmicky
reason like, “oh it can teleport you so that makes it the best”. Chorus fruit can do something that nearly
no other food can; because it has a special teleport ability, you need to be able to eat
it at all times. Unlike other foods chorus fruit can be eaten
even if your hunger bar is full. And this makes a big difference. Minecraft has 2 hunger bars, the one you can
see with the shanks and a secret one called ‘saturation’. They both have a max capacity of 20 and saturation
controls when the main bar starts to decline and how quickly you naturally regen health. The thing is though, depending on how you
play, you’ll often never actually have a full saturation bar. This is because you need to eat multiple items
to get to the max of 20. Golden carrots, with the highest saturation
of around 14, require you to be down to 6.5 shanks to be able to eat 2, steak with a saturation
of around 12 requires you to be down to 5.5 shanks. If you’re any higher than those numbers,
you can only eat 1 and you’ll be unable to get back up to 20. Generally it’s a bad idea to drop below
8.5 shanks as this is when you stop regenerating health naturally. Of course with chorus fruit this isn’t a
problem, you can shovel as many as you want in your gob. Now chorus fruit only offers a bit of a weak
2.4 saturation which means you’d need to eat 8 to get up to 20, so the best strategy
would be to eat 1 steak, followed by 3 chorus fruits. Maybe you’re sitting there thinking this
isn’t worth the effort, it doesn’t really matter. So let me demonstrate in real terms why it’s
big benefit to maintain a high saturation level. Here we are much higher than is normally advisable. If I jump, this is gonna take me down to a
mere half heart. I’m gonna show you the difference in recovery
time between no saturation, incomplete saturation and full saturation. Let’s try full health, full hunger, but
zero saturation. This takes us down to half a heart, but all
in all we only regened to a measly 1.5 hearts. Awful. Now let’s try the same except we’ll eat
some steak taking us up to around 12 saturation. This is better and in the end we got back
up to 6 hearts. After chowing down on some chorus, we’re
now at the full 20 saturation. This one was wonderful and brought us all
the way back up to 8.5 hearts, 2.5 hearts more than had we just eaten the steak. You might find it a little annoying how chorus
fruit teleports you, but there is a way to cancel this out. Chorus won’t warp you into bodies of water,
so if you just hang out in a pond, river, ocean or pool you can eat the chorus without
moving anywhere. So what should you take from this? Should you toss out all your food supplies
and invest your life savings in chorus farms? No, you don’t need to change much at all. You can still eat the foods you want to eat,
but it’s definitely worthwhile keeping some chorus fruit on you. If you’re about to head into a fight or
a dangerous situation, chow down a few chorus fruits before you jump in. It might just be the difference between coming
out alive or getting a game over screen. If you didn’t already, you’ve now been
armed with a bunch of new tactics to get ahead of your peers, from finding hidden caves to
getting infinite status effects. If you want to let them in on it too, send
em’ this way so they can improve their meta as well. I certainly hope you found these useful, lemme
know if you knew any of them or if you learnt something new. But that’s it for now, thank you very much
for watching, I’ve been SimplySarc and I’ll catch you in the next one.
