If you've ever wanted to live in an infinite field of nothing, with the gray pallor of death as far as the eye can see, you should consider playing Minecraft. YouTuber Banclam has come up with a demented challenge that will surely satisfy your need for sadness.
"I'm going to attempt surviving in a 100% bedrock world, which is impossible," Banclam declares in a recent video, since nothing in Minecraft can spawn on the indestructible substance bedrock. "Surviving on nothing but bedrock is impossible – but could I survive with just the Bonus Chest?" The Minecraft masochist decided to find out.
Bonus Chests are kits with a semi-random assortment of survival gear, like shiny apples for food, or a wooden pickaxe for mining. Banclam's Bonus Chest ends up being lackluster – it's mostly salmon, oak planks, and some sticks – but the YouTuber decides, "I think we can work with this."
Hey, that's the spirit. And so he starts to toil, building a spawning platform by hand, getting attacked by mucousy slime while trying to steal their slime blocks, and defeating zombies to eat their rotten flesh. He's not living, he's limping past each sunset to sunrise.
Eventually, Banclam gets to rest his tired arms and stand back and notice, "Much has changed about my world over the last couple 100 days [in Minecraft]. That wasn't about to stop anytime soon." Here, he's channeling Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who once wrote, "Stand firm like a rock, against which though the waves batter, yet it stands unmoved, and they fall to rest at last."
"ive never seen a minecraft challenge so bad it made someone resort to stoic philosophy," says one YouTube comment with over 1,000 likes.
"Sadly, there will never be grass in this world," Banclam says in monotone, indifferent to the tragedy of the desert surrounding him. He later manages to build the most hostile-looking mob farm in existence, and it's quickly overrun by more slime and skeletons.
"Only time will tell if this was all worth it," he concludes, unimpressed.
