#a Joe Hills stream with a Doc cameo while working on this

[pineappleoracle]

can i hear more about hybrids n stuff? i love these and i’m keeping all the links to them in a folder so i can come back to them :D

I THOUGHT I ALREADY POSTED THIS I JUST DISCOVERED IT IN MY DRAFT IM SO SORRY ANON

holy crap its been AGES i hope whoever sent that ask still sees this

lets talk about my ideas for hybrids n stuff :D this time with some illustrations!

as i mentioned in those End hcs, "hybrid" refers to two wildly different things: mob hybrids and actual hybrids in the real sense of the word

but first to explain both of those, i'll have to explain how new players even... happen

because sure, there's the way we are used to, two people with compatible reproductive organs love each other very very much, but then since this is still minecraft and the universe still works like a really weird game, there's also the second option: spawning

Spawning: It can happen that players, just like mobs, simply... spawn into existence. It's quite rare in modern times, since there seems to be a "player cap" which means spawning can only happen in areas with very few to no other players. They don't spawn in as newborn babies of course, that'd severely limit survival chances. Spawned players seem to appear at ages between 10 and 20 years on average, but never too young (or too old) to be completely unable to fend for themself. They know how to speak and have at least basic reading skills from the start, along with enough general knowledge of the world to survive. It's pretty much seen as a fact that the ancestors of at least all modern player species were spawned players, created by the universe to fill the suddenly so empty world again. (if the ancient civilizations spawned or somehow evolved from mobs is hotly debated)

Spawned players are the origin of the Mob Hybrids. Their distant ancestors simply spawned into the world with their player code mixed with that of a mob and then evolution took over from there. (Suggesting somebody is a mob hybrid due to having a human and a mob parent is in fact seen as a huge insult, if not worse) What kind of mob traits mob hybrids have can differ by a lot, but more on that later.

"True Hybrids", as they're sometimes called, are on the other hand always the result of two different player species having a child together. The more different the species of the parents are, the less likely they are to have a child who is a hybrid with an equal amount of traits from both. (Basically, if the real world animal counterparts can have hybrid kids, a minecraft hybrid player is almost 100% guaranteed to happen too)

But why are true hybrids so relatively rare? What happens when the child doesn't turn out to be a mix of their parents?

- Depending on the specific species situation, it's very likely the child will simply default to the species of one parent with maybe a few minor traits of the other (these minor traits then only have a very low chance of being passed on further, and the chance decreases even more with every following generation)

- The code gets overwhelmed with all the different species information and corrupts. This gets exponentially more likely the more different species are mixed together, which is why hybrids of more than two species are EXTREMELY rare. Now corrupted species code sounds incredibly serious, but player code as a whole is a very robust thing. In the case of hybrid code corruption? The code still knows the player is supposed to be a hybrid of some sort, but what kind is lost, so it simply... hits the randomizer. The child can physically be any possible species of mob hybrid, completely unrelated to the parents in that regard. (Instincts can still be a bit scrambled, brains are very complex things)

Here now are a few graphs on this stuff:

^Animal species closely related, hybrid child very likely

^Possible results of two very different species having a child

^Example family:The child of two wildly different hybrids with no species in common is basically guaranteed to result in code corruption and a randomized species

Now then, with all of this established, lets talk about some more Hybrid things!

First of all: While yes, player code is very robust, that doesn't mean its extremely resistant to corruption happening in the first place - rather, its really good at fixing any corruption. But fixing doesn't always mean returning things to their previous state. And magic, if used right - or completely wrong - can corrupt player code in really specific ways. If species code corruption happens to a player after birth, this can lead to completely random changes to their appearance (though completely changing species is almost impossible), but whether those changes can be passed on to descendants varies on a case to case basis. This is how curses that full-on alter a player's appearance function! Another thing intentional code corruption through magic can do is force dormant species traits to manifest in hybrids that otherwise wouldn't have, as these corruptions do not follow what's natural at all (which can lead to interesting things like extra limbs/eyes/mouths).

There is a completely natural and much more mild version of “code corruption” too, which occurs so frequently its not even seen as a glitch and is instead called “unlocking”! Magic is an extremely common thing in the world, being basically energy capable of altering the code of reality, but there’s both hotspots and places with almost none. Servers, since they are created with magic, are always hotspots, while the bigger and older a player settlement in the greater minecraft world the more likely it is to be a magic desert - that’s because players, no matter the species, absorb tiny bits of magic over time. If someone from a big city (or anywhere outside the servers and not near a different type of magic hotspot, if they’re young enough) moves to living on a server, it then very commonly happens that they suddenly develop hybrid traits after some time, despite previously appearing to not be a hybrid at all (they don’t have to appear to be human, though that’s most common). Their bodies suddenly have magic to absorb, and that magic ends up being just enough to bring out dormant code, and suddenly they wake up one day with dog ears or sheep legs that they “unlocked” over night. (Compared to forceful code corruption, which is comparable to torture and treated as such, the unlocking process is almost without any discomfort and often happens unnoticed while the player is asleep)

A few more things about code corruption:

Shapeshifting is a result of species code being permanently glitched. (Is it a bug or a feature? Yes.) There are many different types of shapeshifters, some being independent species capable of passing their abilities on to their children and others the rare glitch resulting from hybrid parents. (Or mad scientists or evil corporations attempting to recreate the shapeshifting ability artificially to use for their own gain.) As a general rule, the stronger the shapeshifting ability, the more unhealthy it is, as it raises the risk of corrupting the player code further (like a rubber band, it can’t be stretched indefinitely and will eventually snap)

Void Walkers are the prime example of the rare case where hybridization somehow results in a separate, “stable” species. (Void Walkers started as hybrids of End Avians, Endermen and Shulker Hybrids.) This does not happen often and for some reason seems most common with End-related species, possibly due to how weirdly the Void affects code. Due to this origin, Void Walker hybrids are very rare, since they still somewhat count as hybrids as well. (And its the origin of their shapeshifting abilities!) This rule applies to all other species of hybrid origin too of course (for example, all other shapeshifter species).

While there’s many horror stories about laboratories full of terrible experiments attempting to find a reliable and controlled way of code corruption, The Watchers are the only ones besides powerful gods said to be capable of intentionally altering a player’s code to their whims. It’s said this is how they forcefully keep their dying kind alive, kidnapping players and making them one of their own.

And now, back to more general hybrid things!

Having the instincts of their mob counterpart(s) is usually the case for a hybrid, but unless in high stress situations, those instincts are easy enough to control or completely ignore.

Hybrid discrimination can occasionally happen in some places, but overall doesn’t, because hybrids are just so common its extremely rare for a place to just not have many. Getting kidnapped by someone wanting to do weird experiments however is more common, but is usually not because someone is a hybrid in general but because of what kind of hybrid they are. Shapeshifters living outside of servers especially have to worry about that sort of thing, since they’re such an unusual rarity.

When it comes to a specific classification, hybrids as a whole kind of count as one big species (like how “avian” is a blanket term for all the different avian species), but at the same time the different types of hybrids are usually identified by what mob(s) they’re hybrids of, since that of course leads to drastic differences in their biology. A dog hybrid and a creeper hybrid are both under the “hybrid” umbrella, but physically so different that considering them the same because of that would be silly.

Speaking of creeper hybrids, they’re a good example of Centaurism, called that because the origin of the word was simply calling horse and cow hybrids that had the four-legged lower body of the respective mobs “Centaurs”. Inspired by that, more and more words were invented for other passive mob hybrids with the same four-legged body shape, like deer hybrid centaurs being called cervitaurs, and so on. At some point “centaur” became an umbrella term for hybrids with the four-legged lower body of a mob because all those individual names were too many and too unintuitive over time. And some more time after that, scientists researching hybrids with unusually many limbs decided that “centaurism” should be the term to refer to a hybrid that has either four (or more) legs or four (or more) arms due to their mob side. (The unofficial term for the very rare hybrids with a code mutation that gives them both extra arms and extra legs, doubling the amount they should have is “octotaurs” (spider hybrids with four arms and four legs don’t count for example, as that still adds up to the amount of limbs that’s normal for them to have)). Creeper hybrids are often used as the main example for centaurism, as either variant of it is likely to happen for them, be it because creepers are facultative bipeds (quadrupeds that can also walk on only two legs and use their forelimbs like arms and hands when foraging) or because they are classified as a result of glitched code.

^An example illustration of the three most common body types for creeper hybrids (excluding the rare octotaurs): One with four limbs (two arms, two legs), one with six limbs (two arms, four legs) and another with six limbs (four arms, two legs).

And finally: In some cases it gets very hard to tell what’s a hybrid and what’s an independent species, especially in the case of Avians vs. bird hybrids. Some researchers even say there are no real bird hybrids because they all mixed with End Avians when some of those first came to the Overworld a long long time ago, while others argue that according to the rules of player spawning, there logically must be bird hybrids just like with every other mob. Similar heated debates are happening about merfolk and fish hybrids. Minecraft taxodermy taxonomy is an absolute mess.

#minecraft #mc #pine's minecraft headcanons #so i got this paper to write right now and all that science talk has infected my brain as you can see here #creeper post coming soon im putting way too much thought into their biology #shapeshifter post too probably i got a ton for those as well by now #i dont want to go too much into discrimination based on species especially not for hybrids who i see as super common because this is #a fantasy world but /evil science experiments/ on the other hand are a must because i know the people love their Angst #is there a reason why i default to creepers (and dogs) towards the end besides the creeper post? yes and its totally that i was listening to #a Joe Hills stream with a Doc cameo while working on this #dont think i should tag this as a specific fandom tho despite all the obvious references #this is general minecraft worldbuilding! i just happen to have my inspirations #these tags are brought to you at 2am #the centaur example pictures are not that's why this isn't actually posted at 2am(CEST) #(update from when im actually posting this: hey its 1am actually so at least in some way im still early-) #(once again im so sorry i opened my drafts and was very shocked to find this still in there) #(the only explanation i can offer is that i have started university)