What is the ULTIMATE Minecraft Flex?

Anyone who has played survival Minecraft for more than a year has probably realised that, once you know the ropes of the game, the survival aspect rather quickly diminishes. Once you're at the top of the tech tree, sporting maximally enchanted Netherite armour, Netherite sword, a God bow, and entire chests of totems and potions that you'll never use, beacons for fences, and a Mending Elytra on your back with a creeper farm to provide infinite rockets, you realise... there is nothing left to do. There are a bunch of side quests, sure, but none of them will kill you. You're indestructible to all except the End Void.

Now what? What now?

It's flexing time, boys and girls and everything in-between.

Do you start punching iron golems to death just because you can, and you want SOMETHING to fight that won't go down almost instantly? Do you jump off a tall building just to burn a totem because you just have THAT MANY of them? Do you start grinding for infinite Diamonds with your Fortune III pickaxe to make a huge diamond mansion? Or do you go for the biggun: a full Netherite beacon?

What actually IS the ultimate Minecraft flex?

For the purpose of this rant, I am defining a Minecraft flex as something you do simply because you can. You have gained enough conquest of the land and spent enough time in your world that you can do something no new starter could even imagine. Often, these flexes have no benefit to survival, but they look super impressive. Typically, they require endless hours of grinding.

Picking Fights? Lots of Expensive Items?

Punching an iron golem to death without barely a hit could be seen as your gateway to the Minecraft flexing world. You have become strong enough to dominate a mob that could've one-shot you in the beginning. But all you need to do this is a decent set of armour and a good sword.

Gaining a lot of totems, specifically, a double chest full of them, could be seen as quite a flex. It means you have beaten WAY more raids than you needed to. But again, Raids aren't THAT difficult once you have gained decent gear. Nothing is, really. It's surely a good flex to have a lot of totems, but not the ultimate. 

What about a double chest full of more rare items than totems? A double chest full of Mending books? A double chest full of Pigstep disks? A double chest full of Diamonds? A double chest full of Diamond BLOCKS? A double chest full of NETHERITE BLOCKS???

Firstly, that last one is absurd. It would take years and years to obtain that amount of Netherite to fill a double chest. That would mean finding 124,416 ancient debris. Flexes have to... you know... be doable within reason, and not take 20 years. Maybe in 20 years this could be the ultimate flex. But also, a good flex often implies something that other people would see. A chest filled with an item would be a flex, sure, but not necessarily a very impressive one.

A build made of expensive blocks is far more impressive than simply seeing them in a chest. This is your Netherite Beacon, your Diamond Mansion. And sure, these ARE amazing flexes. One YouTuber mined Netherite for FIFTY HOURS STRAIGHT just to get the OUTER COATING of his beacon to be Netherite. Now THAT is dedication. Going off of this, it would probably take over 100 hours of mining to obtain a FULLY Netherite beacon. So yeah, a fully Netherite beacon is definitely one of the biggest and best flexes in Minecraft.

Similarly, building an entire base out of Diamond Blocks could be a mark of immense dedication, depending on the size of your base. There could be a decent-sized house built out of Diamond Blocks, and then there is a literal entire BASE built out of them. Depending on the size of the build, the Diamond Block build could rank higher or moderately on the flex chart. But having a Diamond Block build of ANY size could be seen as quite a flex.

With a sandbox game like Minecraft, it's almost impossible to find a true answer for an ultimate flex, since the game is open-ended. There is in theory no limit to the size of the build you could make with Diamond blocks, so long as you kept finding more diamond. Technically, you will only have reached the limit of the diamond block build size once you have literally mined EVERY DIAMOND IN YOUR MINECRAFT WORLD. But again, that would probably take longer than the average human lifespan to do. Heck, just reaching the border of your world takes months and months of non-stop walking.

Therefore, whereas Netherite Beacons and Diamond Houses, and chests full of rare loot, are definitely flexes, they are not necessarily capped by the limits of the game, and therefore are not the ULTIMATE flex.

"I Played Minecraft BEFORE It Was Cool!"

One thing humans LOVE is the pioneer feeling. "I was here first". "I did this first". "I did it before it was a trend". Heck, even I still love to brag that I played Candy Crush long before it was cool. A lot of people who played Minecraft back in the day... like... REALLY back in the day... always love to let people know this. They were one of the 2009-ers. They remember the Classic days of Minecraft. They remember Indev and Infdev, then the game reaching Alpha. They were there, they saw it all. And they remember how much BETTER the game was back then.

The only trouble is, there isn't much way to PROVE that you played Minecraft in 2009. You can spout stories, but you can't really SHOW it. The earliest visible sign of how long you've been around is if you happen to have the MineCon 2011 cape.

Having ANY cape in Minecraft is a big flex, for sure. But having an OLD cape? You went to an event 10 years ago that only a few thousand attended, and you're STILL PLAYING NOW, in 2021?? The MineCon 2011 cape is surely an extremely rare artefact nowadys. It was only available once, 10 years ago, and will never be available again. People can sell their MineCon 2011 cape accounts for THOUSANDS of real-life dollars. If you have this extremely rare item of Minecraft clothing, consider yourself very proud.

Having the MineCon 2021 cape is, in my eyes, one of Minecraft's biggest flexes. Even better if you combine it with an Elytra. 

But in my mind, it's still not the ULTIMATE flex. 

But I have come to a conclusion on what I think the ultimate flex is. And it doesn't involve endlessly grinding expensive items within the game itself, or having attended an event a decade ago.

It involves grinding attempts.

The ULTIMATE Flex Is...

Speedrunners know Minecraft inside out. They know Minecraft's mechanics down to the millisecond. Right down to the pixel. Speedrunners go through attempt after attempt after attempt. Many, MANY thousands of attempts. Just to eke out the quickest possible time to beat Minecraft's Ender Dragon. Speedrunners spend literally hours and hours a day going through the same routine over and over again. Attempt after attempt. Reset after reset. We watch their streams as they throw attempts away in the THOUSANDS. Hundreds, if not thousands of hours, spent just playing the same section of Minecraft over and over again, hundreds, thousands, maybe even TENS OF THOUSANDS of times. Just to get onto that leaderboard of the quickest time to defeat the Ender Dragon.

When you get a good time, or even an almost best time, your name appears on one of the most coveted leaderboards in the speedrunning community. It is something people will see. A lot of people will see. And if your name happens to be number 1 on that list, you are something of a damned celebrity.

If you have a Minecraft speedrunning world record, VERY few people can say they have earned this. It's something TONNES of people will see. It's something you did because you can, not because you had to. It's something that required IMMENSE dedication. And you'll find even the biggest content creators are bowing down to YOU. Trying to beat YOUR record. Your name will appear in all sorts of gaming magazines and news articles. It will be YOU everyone in the vast Minecraft speedrunning community has their eye on. It will be YOU that everyone wants to have beat. Your name will be said by Dream.

Now that's a pretty mahoosive flex if you ask me.

And this brings us to what I consider to be Minecraft's absolute ultimate flex: Having the world record of Minecraft's hardest speedrunning category. Glitchless, seedless, any%, vanilla. 

This is where your world is totally random. No set seed. No knowledge of where the good loot will be. This is essentially the default Minecraft speedrun category. The stiffest competition, as well as the most random and RNG-based. If you have the number one spot here, congratulations. Until you're beat, many will consider you to be the best player of Minecraft there is. Or... at least... the most dedicated.

Final Word

Of course, being a Minecraft developer is also a huge flex, but only in your coding knowledge and ability to get hired to work on the biggest game of all time. More of a flex of life than Minecraft itself.