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One streamer spent 200 hours beating an absurd, hyper-difficult variant of Minecraft's most popular challenge, only to have the crowning achievement rendered meaningless by an update that landed just a week after it was all done.
That challenge is Minecraft Skyblock. This is a mod that puts you on a tiny island floating in a vast, endless void, armed with only a couple of items necessary to start farming a few essential types of blocks. Skyblock requires you to have pretty intense knowledge of Minecraft's most intricate systems. With no ground to walk on and no earth to mine, you have to build intricate systems of item farms, carefully construct areas for essential mobs to spawn, and subsist mostly with a network of villager trading.
Streamer SmallAnt decided to take the Skyblock challenge to the next level by attempting to get every single achievement in the game - or, more in the proper Minecraft parlance, every advancement. A few advancements are literally impossible to get in Skyblock, but most are gettable, and so SmallAnt set to work collecting them.
That effort took place in just under 200 hours of in-game time, which SmallAnt helpfully condensed into a 35-minute video published last week. It makes for some delightful viewing, with some fun anecdotes about accidentally destroying the powdered snow he'd farmed 20 hours for, or how he managed to spawn turtles by locating the beach biome in an unmodded version of his world seed and then placing some sand and water at those coordinates in the Skyblock world.
One of the biggest roadblocks to all this was building a lava farm, which requires access to pointed dripstone. Normally, you'd mine that from dripstone caves, which obviously do not exist in a Skyblock world. The only way to pick up pointed dripstone is by spawning wandering traders. This meant building a farm that required over 10,000 building blocks, a portal, and those aforementioned turtles. Even with the farm built, traders would only spawn every five hours, and even then, each one only had a 10% chance of carrying the dripstone.
SmallAnt had one final challenge in mind: collecting a friend. In this case, that meant a blue axolotl - an uber-rare variant of the aquatic mob that has a 1 in 1,200 chance of spawning when the creatures breed. Naturally, this meant building another farm, and this one would be a particular doozy.
"Almost everything I had done in Skyblock over those several months was for one purpose," SmallAnt explains in the video. "Every day that I streamed, every structure I created, and every block I mined was building up to him. That adorable amphibious boy: a blue axolotl."
The problem with axolotl farms is that they require clay, which in Skyblock you can only obtain from mason villagers while under the effect of the 'hero of the village' buff - which, in turn, you can only get by completing a raid. "Using the combined resources of everything" built over the course of the challenge, SmallAnt "built a raid farm, did some raids, and stood in the center of a summoning circle as the long-nosed masons threw clay all over my body."
Then, finally - after building the axolotl farm, making several hundred buckets, and waiting for the 1 in 1,200 spawn - the blue axolotl arrived, and the challenge was complete. This was originally done back in mid-2022, just a week before the launch of Minecraft 1.19, which lets you get clay by simply putting some mud above a bit of dripstone.
As SmallAnt puts it at the end of his video: "Oh my god this whole playthrough was for nothing."
SmallAnt also beat an absurd Pokemon challenge after 1,786 attempts last year,
