Beating Minecraft is an accomplishment for any player—slaying the Ender Dragon is just the final step in a long journey of mining, crafting, searching, surviving, and extremely perilous trips to The Nether and The End. Getting those Minecraft credits to roll when the dragon falls is a real achievement.
But some Minecraft players didn't simply stop there. They add to the difficulty of beating Minecraft with their own challenges. Ridiculous challenges. Like a track star who got tired of jumping boring old hurdles and decided instead to jump flaming alligator pits while running blindfolded—on their hands—these players made beating Minecraft just about as hard on themselves as they could.
And we salute them for it. Here are the nine most ridiculous ways players have beaten Minecraft.
Without mining
Yes, it's called Minecraft, but let's just completely disregard the first half of the title. A player named Hedgey beat the game with no mining whatsoever. It required raiding villages and shipwrecks for supplies and using creepers as walking bombs to turn trees into more useful wood blocks. Throw in the lucky placement of an Ender Portal and some skilled use of a water bucket to prevent fall damage, and Minecraft was beaten without ever digging up a block.
Without crafting
And there goes the second half of the title. There's no using a crafting table in this run by ibxtoycat, not only means no crafting a crafting table but no using a crafting table found in the world. Again, it took a lot of village raids to find tools and killing monsters with dropped TNT to acquire real weapons. At one point he has to punch through several obsidian blocks using just his fists. It takes a while. A long while. But it's worth it.
Without walking
This initially seems impossible. You've gotta at least walk a little, right? Nope. TheHeightAdvantage disables his movement keys and gets around either by the clever use of boats (even on land) and by riding a loyal saddled pig. There's a bit of hopping straight up at times, but no walking around at all.
Without textures
My personal favorite is this no texture run by GameNight, because it's such an odd thing to do. Imagine playing the beautifully blocky Minecraft where blocks are simply white, labeled in plain black text with their names. Grass. Dirt. Stone. Oak Leaves.
Even the zombies are labeled Zombie. (I'm surprised the sun doesn't say Sun on it.) It's like a generic, store-brand version of Minecraft your Mom would buy because it's a couple dollars cheaper and "It's just as good as the real thing."
Without a keyboard
I'm not talking about using a gamepad—Skip The Tutorial unplugged the keyboard and only used the mouse to control Minecraft's Steve. Even with some clever macros and remapping, this present challenges with everything from viewing the debug screen for map coordinates (accessed by F3) to dodging attacks while in combat—having to turn all the way around instead of simply backpedaling is a major hassle.
In a 372 x 217 window
It's GameNight again with this eye-straining challenge, playing Minecraft in a window five times smaller than his actual monitor. The reduction in real estates makes it hard to see more than 20 blocks away. Thankfully, the video zooms in at several points, giving us a better view of what's happening than GameNight ever had.
On hard mode with permadeath using a steering wheel
It took over nine hours—plus all the editing time to turn it into a 21 minute video, but Technoblade did it: beating Minecraft on hard mode with permadeath using only a steering wheel (and pedals). In addition to the overall awkwardness of the steering wheel there's the intense peril of knowing that death means starting over in a completely new world.
In five minutes
Speed runners have been racing through Minecraft for ages, whittling down each others best times from spawn to credits. The current world record, held by scoagogo, is just a shade over five minutes (5:05:07) which is about how much time it would take me to craft my first torch.
Deep Fried
Please take the headphone warning very seriously when you watch this video. This warning is not kidding around. This is another one of GameNight's runs, brilliant in its obnoxiousness. Most of the textures aren't that badly fried but the sounds definitely are. Why would you do this? How would you even think of this? It's one of the most annoying and yet wonderful videos I've ever seen—though I understand if you can't sit through the whole thing.
