Minecraft/Headscratchers

• What I'd like to know is why the hell people keep stealing all of my sugar cane. JUST LEAVE THE BOTTOM PIECE!
• Redstone performs the same function as copper wire, and copper ore is something you'd really find underground. So why use a fictional substance for electrical stuff instead of copper?
  • There's a mod for that.
  • Copper can't spontaneously generate current?
    • That was my thought as well. It's a way to have all "electrical" systems simplified to use one common element instead of having to have different collected components for wires, power sources, lights, etc. Instead, if its interactive, its redstone.
  • Rule of Cool. It glows red. It's also magical.
• Why are Ghasts programmed to aim at the camera, anyway? It just makes it so that they can't hit you if your in third person mode.
  • The wiki said this was a glitch, and this is probably fixed now.
  • Because they aren't trying to kill Steve?. They're trying to kill YOU.
    • Mother of god..... Such a perfect mixture of Nightmare Fuel and Fridge Horror...
  • A much better explanation is that you're just not supposed to play the game in third person mode, it's a dev thing.
  • It's probably much easier to make the game reference the camera rather than the player.
  • This has since been changed because of abuse of the third-person camera.
• Gunpowder and trinitrotoluene are completely different substances, so why is A used to make B? If anything, gunpowder should be used to make more conventional "bombs", and TNT should be made of itself.
  • Because 'TNT' or 'Dynamite' is better sounding than the exceedingly bland 'Explosive' or 'Bomb' that would be more clinically accurate, and because it lets us get off with fewer objects in the game. See the redstone example above, it's a simple catch-all for having to get copper for wires, zinc for batteries... Having just one thing that everyone knows goes boom (Gunpowder) Lets us use that for any in-game item that should go boom.
  • Blame it on Looney Toons for embedding the idea that TNT is made of gunpowder.
  • As with redstone, it's for the sake of fun. There's zero need to simulate every aspect of circuits and explosives when the end goal is to simply allow players to create fun things.
  • Because it was stupid when he temporarily named it 'Sulphur' in Beta 1.2.
• The list of features in update 1.6 lists "Removed Herobrine. So...he was in the game after all?!
  • that was a joke by Notch. He actually removed a spawnable human mob from the game and nicknamed it Herobrine.
• How do skeletons drown in water and suffocate in sand/gravel if they don’t have lungs?
  • Water is pure and hurts them if they are totally in it, but not if they are standing up. Sand/gravel actively crushes their bones.
    • If that's the case, wouldn't they get hurt just by being in water similar to the Endermen?
    • Well, they have lungs, don't they?
    • Simple. Endermen are pure evil. Zombies/skeletons are nasty, but they aren't completely evil. They still have a Steve?-like form.
  • Zombies are dead. They still drown.
    • Same thing with zombies. Water is pure. Plus, it cannot be good for their insides if too much water gets in.
    • Zombies are undead humans, and humans are animals. Animal cells swell and burst in water if it's not expelled fast enough. Since zombie cells and organs are dead and probably unable to perform such functions, they burst, and the zombie "dies".
• One headscratcher which has been completely explained away but still makes no logical sense is, why do zombies drop feathers? Initially, this was due to the fact that Notch had made the feathers, and something had to drop them. By now though, we actually have bones and other drops more suitable for the zombies, who still drop feathers.
  • because zombies are dead players enslaved by skeletons to make their arrows. Everytime you die, another zombie spawns. Everytime you die holding a bow, zombies make you a skeleton.
  • If zombies and skeletons drop bones, you can just avoid skeletons and fight zombies, and there's nothing unique to themselves for them to drop. Until Notch has added something different for zombies to drop, they drop feathers. Maybe they'll drop rotting meat or something.
    • Whaddya Know?
• The physical issues of where he would put it all notwithstanding, the player is theoretically capable of holding 44,518,667 kilograms of material, assuming that they are wearing gold armor and every slot in the inventory is filled completely with gold blocks, as all blocks are one cubic meter, and out of all the various materials in the game, gold is the densest - and thus heaviest - one in real life. For those who are unfamiliar with metric or too lazy to do the conversions, this means that the player is capable of carrying just shy of 50,000 tons - all with no apparent strain or fatigue. So why in the world does he need tools at all, with that kinda strength? Couldn't he just punch everything, not just trees?
  • Maybe Steve? is that strong - but he still takes several seconds to cut down trees, because Minecraft trees are a whole lot tougher than real trees. Everything else just scales up in strength.
  • Adding encumberance rules would make the game tedious, and allowing you to punch everything down with your bare hands would remove a lot of the "crafting" part of the game.
    • As it says on the trivia page, finesse. Destroy certain blocks with your hands and they are destroyed; use a tool and they are collected.
    • i always assumed that minecraft had very little gravity and thats why you could carry so much, and why there were floating blocks, etc...
  • My question is why the heck Steve? can't carry more than 4.6kg worth of feathers if he technically can hold over 44,000,000kg worth. ^[1]
  • Because, just because he could lift that much doesn't mean his backpack (or whatever he uses) could hold that much.
  • Just because he can carry 50,000 tons of material doesn't make him immune to any damage or pain caused by kinetic impacts (a.k.a punching rocks and getting shot with arrows).
• Who put all these monster spawners around?
  • A race of mages who thought that using the power that reanimates corpses (Zombies/Skeletons) and runs like blood in Endermen could be used to guard their pointless treasures. Due to this, they got killed when the monsters created by the spawners and now their treasures are jealously guarded by monsters.
    • Save it for WMG buddy.
  • Notch. Or, to give an answer less likely to make people come after me with Torches and Pickaxes, they're another variety of mushroom, and the mossy cobblestone is their mycelium. They spawn zombies, skeletons, or spiders to kill anything that wanders by so it becomes compost for them.
  • According to the ending poem after clearing The End, Steve? did.
• How does any life survive in the Nether if there's no water (water instantly evaporates when placed)? Where do the Zombie Pigmen obtain gold? How do they make Netherbricks? What are Ghast Tears made of? What are Ghasts made of? Resource-related Fridge Logic actually makes my head hurt a bit.
  • The Nether is basically Hell, so it doesn't have to make much sense. The Ghasts are likely The Legions of Hell, so don't require any food or water, and the pigmen are zombies. Basically, everything in The Nether can be explained as thus: Hell magic.
• Will potions ever be stackable? The current arrangement for how you carry them puts them in Awesome but Impractical territory.
• How come you don't see endermen chasing after villagers?
  • They weren't looking at them
• Why is the 360 version of Minecraft like that of Beta 1.6 (no hunger, Endermen, not even the new map generation mechanics, meaning the "Glacier" seed still works)? Is it for more casual gamer's on XBLA? Or is the .XNA or .XLA limiting the Java scripting?
  • This was only done to get the game out of the door faster. The XBLA version was originally listed as coming out in June 2012, but it suddenly got bumped up to May. 4J Studios have already stated that the Xbox version will recieve all the updates the PC version has in due time.
  • A more specific reason is that 1.6 is when they started working on the Xbox version. Due to the code differences between PC and Xbox it needed a lot of changes, and they wanted to focus on getting the game done.
• So Jeb had decided to remove emerald ore from survival mode in response to people complaining about how crazy rare the ore already was. Wouldn't that only make people complain more?
• Since it seems the new buildings in the game were added to make the Adventure Update more fufilling, how exactly are you supposed to use Pyramids? You have to break a block to get in, and then place blocks to get out. Neither of these things can be done in adventure.
  • Adventure mode is still a work in progress; this issue will probably be tackled in a future update as adventure mode is gradually smoothed out.

1. ↑ One feather is about 4g, and filling your entire inventory with them would add up to 4.6kg, according to the Minecraft Wiki.