This player beat Minecraft without ever taking a single step

Minecraft
(Image credit: TheHeightAdvantage on YouTube)

It's awesome when players take on ridiculous, self-imposed challenges, like the time someone beat Skyrim while only using a torch or when another player beat Fallout: New Vegas on max difficulty without dying or killing anyone.

The latest entry in the category I'll call 'There Should Really An Annual Awards Show For This Kind Of Accomplishment' is this Minecraft player who beat the game without ever walking. No walking! At all. With the exception of standing or hopping straight up, this player never used his legs.

Technically, you don't really beat Minecraft because it's an endless game, but you can "beat" it by visiting The End and defeating the Ender Dragon. And that's what YouTuber TheHeightAdvantage did, amazingly, without ever taking a single step. You can watch a fascinating and well-edited video of his accomplishment below:

So, how do you beat Minecraft without actually walking? With a lot of patience and creativity. He created a Minecraft world and then immediately unbound the walking keys. Standing in place, he began doing the usual Minecraft things: chopping trees, collecting resources, and crafting items. He just did it all without walking around.

Of course, you do need to actually move in Minecraft, so TheHeightAdvantage crafted a boat. The boat is on land, one block away, but mounting the boat moves him over to it. Collect the boat, place it one block away, and mount it again: it's slow, but it does get you around.

Best of Minecraft

Minecraf 1.18 key art

(Image credit: Mojang)

Minecraft update: What's new?
Minecraft skins: New looks
Minecraft mods:  Beyond vanilla
Minecraft shaders: Spotlight
Minecraft seeds: Fresh new worlds
Minecraft texture packs: Pixelated
Minecraft servers: Online worlds
Minecraft commands: All cheats

Eventually he finds a water source, and can start scooping it up and dumping it with a bucket to use the boat like an actual boat. More boats are later used to created long, mountable pathways over land. And then, after much boat-mounting, he saddles a pig named "Little Timmy" and rides him around.

In a message on Reddit, TheHeightAdvange tells me it took him around 30 hours to complete the no-walking playthrough, but he eventually rode Little Timmy into The End (leading him with a carrot on a stick) and defeated the Ender Dragon. The brave pig, sadly, didn't survive.

I asked how he came up with the idea for such a challenging run. "I originally thought of the idea when I found a seed where you spawn in a mineshaft right next to a mine cart and wanted to do an entire playthrough without leaving the mine cart," he said. "I had a few failed attempts and then came up with the boat idea to make things easier on myself, plus it would then be possible on any seed."

At the end of the video, the stats are shown, which do show some distance traveled by normal movement—though he explains that colliding with mobs or entities that bump you around is registered by the stats page as walking. But as far as true leg locomotion goes, the player never took a step. As for Little Timmy, he carried his master over 45km. That'll do, pig.

You can check out TheHeightAdvantage's other videos here, and follow him on Twitch where he's currently doing a hardcore Minecraft run.

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.