forgotten rsg strats

the weird niche ones are the best

The fundamental issue at hand in routing a Minecraft Random Seed Glitchless speedrun is obtaining enough Eyes of Ender that one can activate an End Portal. Typically—though we will get to the exceptions—this requires obtaining Ender Pearls and Blaze Powder, which can be crafted into Eyes of Ender. So most routes must visit a Nether Fortress to fight blazes—and then there’s more variety in how Ender Pearls are obtained.

I’m not an expert in RSG routing, but there were some funny forgotten alternative strategies that I like looking back on.

Mainstream Strats

Pre-1.9

1.7 Running around a desert

Back in the olden days, when Tarokitchen was dominating the leaderboards, runners used to get Ender Pearls by simply running around a desert and killing Endermen. It was very straightforward. I think 1.7 was preferred mostly just because it had a sprint button or something. Deserts are nice because they’re pretty flat and because rain can’t get rid of all the Endermen.

An important part of getting a good time in this era was the day one Nether—one would hope to get in and out of the Nether with enough time left in the first night that you could still grind enough Ender Pearls to enter the End¹¹ Obviously, getting through the Nether quickly never stopped being important, but for a while it was a sort of difficult time crunch to make the day-night cycles work. Nowadays, of course, if you’re running into that sort of problem, your run sure wasn’t going to sub 20 anyways.. And here, more than in most other routes, it was common to run to the Stronghold hoping that you might possibly get a 2 eye portal, or perhaps be able to find a couple Ender Pearls in the Stronghold.

1.7 Tower

Nowadays, 1.7 runners build this elaborate tower contraption which allows them to quickly unload all the mobs in the desert by dying and respawning high in the air. Then they can unload the mobs, fall down and spawn new ones, stare at all the Endermen, get the Endermen to drop into a hole and die, and repeat. The most rudimentary tower strats looked like they might only be more consistent and not actually faster in the best case scenario, but they’ve been optimized to the point where they’re undoubtedly the best option.

1.8 Trading

Prior to 1.9, villagers used to sell Eyes of Ender rather than mere Ender Pearls. Sometimes 1.7 runners would manage to trade for one or maybe two Eyes of Ender by looting the village’s farms or something, which was usually helpful for saving a couple Endermen kills or for making up for an unlucky grind segment.

Modern 1.8 runs get a single Eye of Ender, run to the Stronghold, tear down the entire Stronghold library, and then trade with a village librarian to get enough emeralds to afford enough Eyes to fill the whole End Portal. The Nether is skipped entirely.

1.14 1.15 Strats

Apparently they started using 1.15 when I wasn’t looking. The relevant changes did not jump out at me upon a glance at the changelogue… oh, apparently it’s the pie chart, sure.

Trading sticks

For a while, the preferred 1.14 strat was to blow up acacia village houses or dark oak trees, break the logs down into sticks, and then trade the sticks to be able to afford Ender Pearls. This still might be a more reliable strategy—I’m not sure.

Trading Gold

But the optimal strategy is to kidnap a village priest in a boat, track down an Ocean Monument, and use the gold to trade for Ender Pearls.

1.16 Strats

When 1.16 snapshots were happening, I was wondering if grinding Endermen in Warped Forest biomes in the Nether could be fast. This is very silly in retrospect—just use a Bastion and barter! But we didn’t have all the fancy Bastion routes back then.

Bespoke niche strats

Global Warming

Minecraft 1.3 added in the Eye of Ender trade. Minecraft 1.4 added some trading nerfs. So trade strats in the very early versions would usually work best in 1.3, if I’m remembering correctly.

You know about the stick trade from 1.14-1.15. But in 1.3, we had the coal trade. Instead of crafting logs into sticks, we smelted them into charcoal.

This was horribly inefficient, but in principle you can use it to skip the Nether in a coöp run where you can chop down and smelt an entire-ass forest biome in parallel.

Climate Change

There was once some variant on Global Warning known as Climate Change. I don’t remember what was different about Climate Change, aside from the fact that we couldn't name dark oak 1.14 strats “Climate Change” because that was already taken. If anyone can figure out what one actually did in Climate Change, please let me know.

Igloo Strats

Mansion Strats

Clay Strats

Literally just mining gold