When people think about Minecraft, they don't tend to think of high octane action or overall violence. As one of the best video games to induce mindfulness in players, just losing out to the likes of Skyrim and Tetris, the sprawling world that Mojang created is often one filled with peace and creativity, with the odd moment of peril when players go mining or exploring at night. However, to complete the game, it is necessary to kill certain creatures to progress. But this person has managed to do so without racking up any kills.
In a video uploaded a couple of days ago, YouTuber SwitchBackMongo has shown that it is actually possible to get to the end credits of Minecraft without technically killing any mobs. There were a couple of caveats to the playthrough, which includes not physically killing an enemy themselves or "direct triggering of a death," such as dropping lava or using a flint and steel to light mobs on fire. Essentially, the end goal was to see whether it was possible to complete the game without the statistics showing that a single mob had been killed by the player.
This was a lot more difficult than originally conceived, especially given that there are two enemies that need to be defeated in order to finish the main quest. The first is the blaze, which is found in the Nether and is used to gather blaze rods. The second is Minecraft's final boss the Ender Dragon. To combat the first, SwitchBackMongo used a pack of wolves to kill a series of blazes, which the game does not register as a direct player kill, so it's not added to the statistics. The way to defeat the Ender Dragon, without the popular exploding beds tactic, was to place TNT on top of a redstone block and allow the dragon to explode them itself, causing damage.
While the video doesn't show the complete run end-to-end, the YouTuber does show segments of it, such as being able to get food without killing animals, and after the final moment, they open the statistics page to prove that the game did indeed register 0 kills. There are a lot of interesting challenges in Minecraft to inject some new ways to play, and what SwitchBackMongo has achieved is pretty impressive, especially given the workaround for defeating the only two enemies that need to be killed.
As a video game with near infinite replay value, there are so many things that can be done, and fans are clearly showing there are numerous things still left to discover. It also shows that the community is full of dedicated people who, after ten years, are still loving the open world sandbox title.
Minecraft is available now for Mobile, PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.