A Minecraft player figured out a way to beat the game — to make it to The End and defeat the Ender Dragon — without their character taking a single step. The process of beating Minecraft without walking involved complicated movement replacements, such as using a water bucket to push the player’s avatar backward.
Reddit user u/HeightAdvantage posted a two-and-a-half-minute clip to the Minecraft subreddit last night, showcasing edited highlights from their voluntarily immobile journey. At the start of the video, HeightAdvantage displays that their control setting, which have been configured so that they don’t even have the option of moving. HeightAdvantage begins by punching down a tree, using its wood to make a crafting table, and then using that to make a boat. HeightAdvantage places the boat down in front of them and sits in the boat, destroying the boat, and repeating the process to slowly inch forward. HeightAdvantage is eventually able to mine for some iron to make a bucket, which, when filled with water, makes moving a bit quicker.
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Since HeightAdvantage disabled keybound movement of any kind, they couldn’t even use the boat on water or a saddled horse to move forward. Instead, they made their way to a village and then used a carrot on a stick to lead a saddled pig around. This allowed them to more easily gather the materials necessary to make it to The End and defeat the Ender Dragon. You can watch an extended version of the video, from TheHeightAdvantage’s YouTube channel, below.
HeightAdvantage’s feat has earned the video almost 70,000 upvotes on Reddit as of writing. HeightAdvantage said in a reply to a comment on their post that they plan on completing a Minecraft walking-free challenge in Hardcore Mode, as well, noting that it “might even be easier” than this playthrough, now that they know what they’re doing.
The Minecraft community is no stranger to impressive feats of ingenuity. Just last week, someone created a Minecraft Tetris minigame with command blocks. Minecraft will also soon be jumping into the mobile AR market with Minecraft Earth, which will likely bring with it even more examples of players’ strange and brilliant ingenuity.