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The copper column is back and it holds another crucial piece of Minecraft's lore puzzle. Namely about how they are just cute little organisers, they were designed to protect the ancient builders from their deadliest foe. Hello, Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the show that likes to keep things organised, especially when it comes to Minecraft. You can accumulate so much stuff in this game from lore breaking elytra to just straight up dirt for building. My brother and I would spend hours trying to organise our chests labelled and can make sure we could access everything. But it always ate into our adventure time and neither of us were particularly good at Redstone, so we'd always hoped that there would be an easier way to organise our stuff. And now, in 2025, our prayers have finally been answered in the form of a new mob, the Copper Golem. Well, I say new. This little guy has actually been waiting in the wings for some time now, originally revealed to us back in 2021 during the mob vote as one of the mobs that people could vote for. Sadly though, the LA won and so the Copper Golem was banished to the Shadow Realm like every other vote loser that came before. Until it wasn't, because now Mojang has released an update that is all about copper. It's called the Copper Age Update and it lets us use copper for more than just decoration. We have copper weapons, copper tools, copper armour and a bunch more copper objects. But the Copper Golem is the star of the show. Organising your items from their copper chests into regular ones, meaning you'll never have to waste time organising ever again. But while it's great to introduce a passive mob that actually does something useful and looks super cute while doing it, that isn't actually what I'm most interested in. I want to see whether this Copper Golem can not only organise my inventory, but also the strange and mysterious lore within the game. We've been crafting the ancient lore of Minecraft through abandoned structures, items and most importantly mobs. All of these things hold secrets that give us insight into the overworld that we explore as Steve. And good news theorists, the Copper Golem is no different. This little helper gives us greater insight into the lives of the ancient builder race that once walked the overworld. And spoiler alert, these things are way more important to the ancient builder's survival than their small stature would lead you to believe. Especially against their deadliest foe. So consider me your Copper Golem today theorists, as we continue to organise the hidden lore of Minecraft. Going into this, there's actually very little else surrounding the Copper Golem other than what we've already talked about. It's organising skill. It doesn't spawn naturally anywhere and you can't exactly find it in chests sitting around the map, which means our usual methods of pin pointing the lore are out the window. Because we need to dig a little deeper. Starting with the fact that Mojang added it to an update called the Copper Age, along with a bunch more copper based items like armor and weapons. You see the Copper Age isn't just a fun name, it's a real historical period in our own history that spanned between 6500 BC to roughly 3000 BC. So we're looking pretty far back in terms of timelines. It was called the Copper Age due to the increasing use of smelted copper across the globe. Although it's not really talked about because it's more often seen as a transitional period between the Neolithic Age and the Bronze Age, rather than it being a specifically unique age on its own. And that's kind of because the Bronze Age also relied heavily on copper. Bronze is just copper combined with other metals like tin to make an alloy. However, what's most interesting about the Bronze Age isn't the materials used, but the lack of understanding that we have about its end. See nobody has any real idea why the Bronze Age collapsed. There are theories, history theories, one of them being that there's a group of mysterious sea people that came and attacked Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean, destroying cities and wiping out whole civilizations, leaving their cities completely abandoned. The end of the Bronze Age does sound awfully familiar to the end of our ancient builders story. A large group of people spanning all parts of the map suddenly disappear one day due to a mysterious unknown entity that arrives from seemingly nowhere, causing them to abandon their cities. At first, my mind thought this mysterious force might be the Wither. The being we theorize destroyed their civilization and forced the ancient builders underground. However, I actually think that the description fits the Warden better. The Wither, while it did destroy everything, was a known entity. The ancient builders made it in their search for eternal life. The Warden, on the other hand, was summoned by accident. We theorized, thanks to disc 5 that you could find fragments of in the ancient cities, that once the Wither found the ancient builders underground cities, it decimated them. And those who survived made a last ditch effort to escape the Wither by opening a portal to another world. Except instead of them leaving, something else came through the Warden. It destroyed the Wither, but infected the city with Skulk, causing the ancient builders to leave and head to the end. The Warden is an unknown entity from an unknown world that came in and left these ancient cities abandoned, just like the end of the Bronze Age. So it seems like that is the time period we're dealing with in terms of the Minecraft timeline. Plus, the Copper Age is all about copper, not just copper golems, but tools, weapons, and blocks. And where else have we seen a lot of copper used in Minecraft? The Trial Chambers. The ones that we theorized the ancient builders created to train for the inevitable fight against the Wither. At this point in time, it doesn't seem like copper tools or armor can be found in any loot chests across the many structures of the overworld, except for copper horse armor, which apparently is everywhere. What this tells us is that while copper was an abundant resource, the ancient builders quickly realized it wasn't great for tools, being much less durable than their iron equivalent. A resource which was similarly easy to get their hands on and didn't oxidize over time. And then with the discovery of Diamond and Netherite, copper had no chance. But that doesn't mean that the abundance of copper would go to waste, because a copper block has the same blast radius as a diamond block, which made it the perfect block to build their new Trial Chambers out of, allowing it to withstand battle and explosions as they prepared for their fight with the Wither, and wouldn't cost them a rare and valuable material. And finally, the reason I'm so sure this is tied to the ancient cities and the ancient builders is because of the original mob vote that the copper golem was from. You see, Mojang has been very careful with planning for their updates, especially when it comes to theming. For example, the archaeology brush was originally announced in 2020 as part of the caves and cliffs update. But when there were tech issues delaying it, it didn't just get delayed until the next update. It got delayed until 2023 with the Trails and Tales update, which was an archaeology based update. It's all about making sure that the pieces fit whatever the story is going to be. This is actually one of the reasons why they've decided to do smaller updates going forward, for having every new feature feel like it has to fit with that big update. But back in 2021, as I've said, that wasn't the case. And so the winner of the 2021 mob vote was going to be added into that upcoming update, the Wild Update, the update which introduced us to the Deep Dark, the Warden and the ancient cities. All of those potential winners had to be able to fit within that update and its lore. And so connecting the copper golem, even now, back to the ancient cities and the Trial Chambers doesn't feel like that much of a stretch. Although it's all well and good connecting the copper golems to the ancient cities, but what were they actually for? Well, with the copper golems not spawning naturally, as well as requiring a specific arrangement of blocks to spawn them, it tells us that they aren't natural mobs, but man-made ones. Which makes sense when you consider the origins of golems as a whole. There are many stories of golems, but they originally come from Jewish mythology, and they tended to focus around the golems being man-made creatures. Just trying to mimic how God made Adam. Although they were always kind of limited due to their human creators, rather than having a divine origin. Sounds kind of familiar. The idea that the ancient builders can create golems is well established. In Minecraft Legends, the hosts, who are essentially the gods of the overworld, task you with defending the overworld from the piglins. To do so, they give you the flames of creation, which gave the ancient builders the ability to make golems using raw materials and lapis lazuli. Only for the ancient builders to later take this idea of creation and make their own mobs like the wither, which massively backfire it. But the point is, ancient builders have been shown to create golems and continue experimenting with the ability to give life in the future. In fact, concept art for the plank and cobblestone golem in Legends show pumpkins being placed on the raw material, just like the iron and copper golems. Maybe there's a chance that this was something the ancient builders tried to do once the flames of creation were taken away from them. Now these pumpkins are able to give life is probably a theory for another day, but if the copper golems are tied to the ancient cities and made by the ancient builders, then they have to serve a purpose. And thankfully, those purposes become clear when we once again take into account the origins of golems in the real world and combine that with their in-game abilities. You see, copper golems have a really interesting history with another Minecraft resource, redstone. Originally when they were part of the mob vote, they were going to interact with copper buttons and while a button in and of itself isn't technically redstone, it is a common item used to activate redstone circuitry. Now that isn't the case, but instead the copper golems give off a redstone signal themselves. Yep, when they oxidize, they turn into copper statues and if you pose them, they give off different amounts of redstone signal. Perfect for a secret door or a combination lock. And that's our big clue here. In mythology, one of the big reasons for creating golems was to protect its creators or their people, like the Golem of Prague for example. Now these golems may be small in stature, but their special redstone powers tells me that they were designed to protect the ancient builders in a different way. We know the ancient builders had a knack with redstone. We see a bunch of their different experiments underneath the ancient cities, experiments that all focus on redstone signal strength. So why not create a creature that when it ages, becomes a method of locking or opening your super secret underground hideout, like a protector of your base that you can customize using different signal strengths. Or, and what I think is probably more likely, these could have been used as tying activators for those experiments underneath the city. We've theorized in the past that those experiments were leading to the activation of the giant portal found in the middle of the city, the one that the warden comes from. But it could be risky to be that close to something so untested. So why not have the copper golems be your literal activation? Put them in place, block off their movements, let them age, turn them into statues, give off a redstone signal and bam! Your portal is activated and the golems have protected you from anything that might have happened if you were too close by. Obviously, this isn't how things went down in the end. Before they even had a chance to put this planet in motion, the wither found them. And if they wanted to activate the portal, they had to do it themselves, without any protection. There wasn't time to set a copper golem and let it age, but then the warden came out of the portal, which presented a different problem for the builders. If the warden hears so much as a footstep, it attacks whoever is responsible. Suddenly the ancient city, their fortress, is unsafe. No one can move. They even try putting carpets down to silence their steps, but that isn't a full solution. And the ancient builders have no way of getting around, getting to their resources and their food supplies. But this is where the copper golems come in once again. The second and most common reason golems were built in mythology was for servitude, to help those who made them. And that is why I think the copper golem has gone from a redstone button pusher to an item organizer. It was proving too dangerous for the builders to walk around the ancient cities to gather supplies or even collect their stuff after the carnage. But the copper golems could do exactly that. They could go from room to room collecting items to bring back to the chests in the ancient builders hiding places, once again protecting them from the wrath of an all-powerful being. But sadly, that didn't go as planned either. Just the mere act of opening a chest would summon the warden. And as the copper golem continued to walk around, the warden would find it and destroy it with a single hit. To begin with, this wouldn't be the end of the world. It's what they were being built for and better than one of your builder buddies. But their abundant supplies of copper would eventually dry up. Without being able to go and collect more, the numbers of golems began to dwindle. And so once again, they were left desperate without food or supplies. Another one of their creations had failed them. Granted, this one didn't try to kill them. But what good is it if it can't help you against the real threats? And so the ancient builders left the ancient city forever, creating strongholds and eventually leaving for the end. Any copper golems that remained would eventually be picked off by the warden, leaving no trace of them in these underground cities. The golems we now build are here as a reminder for us. Just like the golems in the original myths, the idea that power without wisdom leads to absolute destruction. A lesson that the ancient builders continually seem to be learning the hard way. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching.
