Returning to modes that make things far, far harder, our old friend Fundy was so confident with this next challenge that he pledged to give the person who beat it the fastest before October 31, 2021, $2,000.
In this difficulty, breaking any block with “log” in its name results in silverfish exploding out of the block towards you, and is followed, typically, by your rapid death. It isn’t over when you finally do manage to cut down that tree, either. Every tree leaf that decays spawns a slime and “every slime is incredibly explosive,” Fundy told viewers. He demonstrated by shooting a slime with an arrow, which resulted in a large crater.
The player also must keep a cat named Boots—named after Fundy’s real-life feline—alive and in relatively close proximity, or the player will die. This means that Boots must accompany you to the Ender Dragon.
Days—by far the safest time in Minecraft—also only last for about ten or fifteen seconds. Nights, on the other hand, last for around ten minutes and cause all mobs, aside from skeletons, to turn into Axolotls hellbent on killing you. Skeletons, Fundy demonstrates, spawn normally because they fire arrows at machine gun speeds. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Creepers even ride Axolotls now! You aren’t safe anywhere. This plugin really takes Impossible++ and puts it on unfathomable quantities of steroids.
“I’ve learned something from the previous difficulties. I’ve learned that I always go too easy on you guys and I should stop doing that”, Fundy explains. “If you stand still for [more than] five seconds at any point anywhere…” he starts before being interrupted by a massive explosion that kills his character. In a similar explosive theme, you won’t be making any cakes any time soon: sugarcane blows up when hit.
If you somehow make it to the Nether, every step will set you on fire. If you stand still, you won’t be set on fire, but you’ll still explode. “The only way for you to survive the Nether is if you have leather boots,” explains the mod’s creator, but the catch is that they degrade the longer you wear them.
Finding the End isn’t easy either. The eye of ender recipe is also modified to require an ink sack and Lapis Lazuli. The End has been heavily modified. “Those were just warm-ups. This is where it gets fun,” Fundy tells viewers. End crystals have been encased in glass, which cannot be shot through in Minecraft, meanwhile water kills you, and the Ender Dragon—already a fearsome challenge without modification—has been changed to throw TNT, to which he is immune, when he perches. Should the Ender Dragon take damage, it throws deadly magic at you in revenge. Should you place a bed and attempt to sleep in it while in the End? It spawns yet another Ender Dragon that you must defeat; there is no limit on the number that can spawn.
If, despite all this, you somehow manage to defeat the Ender Dragon(s), he has one more attack up his scaly sleeve: Raining lots of magic and TNT down on you. “I genuinely don’t know how you’re going to do this. I have no idea if this is even possible. I didn’t try it; I’m not going to try this,” Fundy told viewers. In the video description, he stated that he didn’t reveal all of this difficulty’s tricks, either.
Yet, despite the odds, Minecraft players tend to find a way. Fundy was able to confirm to me that the challenge was beaten, and that a “few” players reached out to him with proof of their runs. However, there is some ambiguity surrounding who actually won the challenge as he doesn’t remember definitively. In speaking with Fundy, he stated that “chances are” it was YouTube creator y a t s u, who beat it in approximately one hour, 49 minutes, and 29 seconds. However, y a t s u stated that draconix was the fastest and “House Builder Gang” claimed on Twitter to have won and received the funds.
Y a t s u realized two key things in the rules that helped them to succeed: you are allowed to do this in multiplayer, and you can pick your own seed, provided that it doesn’t have the End portal pre-filled. After many failed attempts, y a t s u came across what they considered to be the perfect seed. Strategic deaths were used to regenerate health and, once they realized that there is a cap on the maximum number of mobs that could spawn in a chunk, they exploited this to run mostly unopposed; y a t s u did this by digging a hole two blocks deep, placing a log, and then breaking it so that the silverfish would be trapped there and consume the allowable mob limit.
Do you think you have what it takes? While the contest period is over, the plugin is still available. I spawned in and my attempt was immediately ended by an arrow machine gun-firing skeleton. On my second attempt, I was able to survive for about ten seconds.
You can get this plugin here.
Minecraft’s community is thriving and there is no denying that its love of entertaining masochistic challenges is strong. A strong community–including mod developers–surrounding games is an important factor to their continued longevity. I am excited to see what creators of all stripes continue to create for Minecraft in the years to come.
Kyle Wilson is a freelance games journalist. You can find his Twitter here.