A streamer spent 200 hours beating an absurd, ultra-difficult variant of Minecraft’s most popular challenge, only to have the crowning achievement rendered meaningless by an update that landed a week after completing it all.
That challenge is Minecraft Skyblock. It’s a mod that puts you on a small island floating in a vast, endless void, equipped with only two items needed to start farming a few essential types of blocks. Skyblock requires you to have a very intensive knowledge of Minecraft’s most intricate systems. With no land to walk on and no land to mine, you have to build complex systems of item farms, carefully build areas to spread the necessary hordes, and mostly subsist with a network of rural trades.
Streamer SmallAnt decided to take the Skyblock challenge to the next level by trying to get every single achievement – or, in proper Minecraft parlance, every progression – in the game. Some advancements in SkyBlock are literally impossible to obtain, but most are obtainable, and so SmallAnt sets to work collecting them.
That effort turned in just under 200 hours of playtime, which SmallEnt helpfully summarized in a 35-minute video published last week. With some fun anecdotes about him accidentally destroying the powder snow he spent 20 hours growing, or some fun scenes about how he managed to raise a turtle by finding a beach biome in an unmodded version of his world seed and then putting some sand in it and at those coordinates in the skyblock world. water
One of the biggest hurdles of all was building the lava farm, which required access to the pointed dripstone. Usually, you’ll get them from the Dripstone Caves, which apparently don’t exist in the Skyblock world. The only way to pick up a pointed dripstone is to spawn wandering traders. This meant building a farm that required over 10,000 building blocks, a portal, and said turtle. Even after the farm was built, merchants would only spawn every five hours, and even then, each only had a 10% chance of carrying a Dripstone.
SmallAnt had one final challenge in mind: collecting a friend. In this case, that means the blue axolotl — an uber-rare type of aquatic herd that has a 1 in 1,200 chance of the creatures breeding. Naturally, this meant building another farm, and this one would be a definite doozy.
“Almost everything I did at Skyblock in those few months was for a purpose,” Smallent explains in the video. “Every day I streamed, every structure I built, and every block I mined was building up to him. That adorable amphibian boy: a blue axolotl.”
The problem with axolotl farms is that they require clay, which in Skyblock you can only get from mason villagers under the effect of the ‘Village Hero’ buff – which, in turn, you can only get by completing raids. Built during the challenge “using the combined resources of everything”, SmallAnt “built a raid farm, ran some raids, and stood in the middle of a summoning circle as long-nosed masons threw mud all over my body.”
Then, finally – after building an axolotl farm, making a hundred dolls, and waiting for 1 in 1,200 spawns – the blue axolotl arrived, and the challenge was complete. This was originally done in mid-2022, a week before the launch of Minecraft 1.19, which allows you to get clay by pouring some clay on top of a dripstone.
As SmallEnt puts it at the end of its video: “Oh my god this whole playthrough was for nothing.”
Also SmallAnt Beat the crap Pokemon challenge last year after 1,786 attempts,