You’d be forgiven for thinking an endless sandbox survival game like Minecraft can’t possibly have any lore. But you’d be wrong. There’s a surprising amount of backstory to every single randomly generated world that players explore, and all of it points to one unfortunate truth — we’re living in a post-a’block’alypse. Geddit… cause, blocks.
All those ruins you can find aren’t just set dressing, and the more that’s added with every major update, the more breadcrumbs Mojang leaves for us to follow. A hugely popular theory — put forward by Game Theory no less — suggests that there was once a race of ‘Ancient Builders’ who were responsible for many of the abandoned structures we find today.
While a monolithic society seems unlikely, the idea of several player-like civilizations once calling the Overworld home isn’t all that far-fetched. Zombies appear to be the same species as Steve (even resembling him), hinting that the world was once overflowing with players rather than the old assumption that zombies were merely a fantasy enemy akin to skeletons and spiders. They were likely responsible for the advanced ocean monuments, mine shafts, desert temples, and even underground strongholds, all of which we find in complete disarray.
It’s believed that zombies spread because of spores, The Last of Us-style.
So, Minecraft is a post-apocalyptic (sorry, post-a’block’alyptic) zombie story. Case closed, article done. We can all move on with our lives. Not quite. Not only is the Overworld flush with undead who tore down their own kingdoms, but the Nether is a haunting vision of our future, and the End… well, we’ll get to that.
The Nether Wasn’t Always A Hellish Dimension
When Mojang overhauled the Nether in 2020, it added a few new biomes, from twisted crimson forests to basalt plains and soul sand valleys. All of which have major implications on what was long assumed to have simply been nothing more than Hell, a dimension of suffering.
While exploring these basalt deltas, the ticking of a Geiger counter can be heard. A new species is also found roaming the wastes of the Nether, the Piglin, and they have strongholds etched into the cliffsides of enormous lava oceans. Beneath the surface, we can also find ancient debris, speculated to be the remnants of the Piglin’s more intelligent ancestors, if not the extinct players of old. There’s a lot to unpack here, but I’m fond of one theory in particular: the Nether was originally an icy, water-filled oasis.
The warped trees would have belonged to lush, boreal forests, not the muddy, barren soil it creeps from today, and the lava oceans would’ve originally been subsurface water oceans. There are a couple of key points that evidence this theory: basalt, which is found in abundance in the Nether, is made using blue ice, and, as per the upcoming 2025 update, Ghasts can dry out in the Nether. You then ‘rehydrate them’ with water and make them happy with snowballs, two things that you can’t find in the Nether, hinting that it once had a more palatable environment for native critters like the Ghast.
Another popular theory is that they’re originally from the Overworld, but there’s nothing to prove this aside from a debatable achievement description.
How exactly the Nether became a hellish inferno is its own debate. My own headcanon is a combination of two popular ideas: we know the Ancient Builders once visited the Nether, evident by the ruined portals we find, so perhaps they overmined and overused the natural resources, causing the dimension to drastically heat up (made worse by its bedrock ceiling). The basalt would have then melted to form an apron of molten lava, eventually coalescing into oceans.
Compounding this already troublesome development, the Ancient Builders perhaps experimented with the Minecraft-equivalent of nuclear fusion, and the entire dimension endured a Chernobyl-like disaster amped up to ten. Only the Nether was transformed into an inhospitable wasteland more akin to Venus (which is thought to have once been like Earth, meaning that a habitable Nether isn’t such a far-fetched idea). This would explain the Geiger counter sound, warped trees, and the mutated pigs who have become intelligent, bipedal Piglins.
Assuming these theories are true, that would mean that the Nether as we know it is the result of playerkind’s hubris, overextending its hand and drying the world of its natural resources until it became a smouldering inferno. Timely, eh?
Is The End Our Future?
There are a lot of theories about the End, especially after Mojang implemented its otherwordly cities in the first major overhaul of its kind. Ideas vary from the Overworld strongholds being built in worship of the Ender Dragon to an order of knights gatekeeping the portals, serving as a shield against the void before they too succumbed to the zombie plague. Others even speculate that the Ancient Builders fled to the End to escape the apocalypse they unleashed, only to be transformed into the Endermen we find today.
My favourite theory is far simpler: the End is the end. As put forward by u/yosherdosher on r/Minecraft, it’s not a different dimension, but the Overworld’s future: “The purple static sky is all of the stars going out”. The Endermen, meanwhile, are our distant descendents, who are now hurling themselves back through time to try and prevent the end of everything, stealing blocks to rebuild the Overworld while fighting to be freed from the Ender Dragon.
Another interesting theory is that the End is an all-consuming void, and the Ender Dragon sends their Endermen to destroy other realities, hence why they steal blocks (as posited by u/InteractionPurple593).
It’s bleak, but a ravaged Nether filled with mutated, post-apocalyptic pig men, and an Overworld where ancient civilizations have been overrun by zombies, aren’t much better. Every dimension in Minecraft is the result of some disastrous horror, which makes those first steps into a new world far more bittersweet. We’re inheriting the collapse of civilisation and making it our own; hopefully, we make it better.
