Most players will spend their time in Minecraft seeking out rare treasures like diamond or netherite, but for the veteran plays who have done all that countless times, there are yet rarer treasures to seek. A death message is the little descriptor of your death that appears.
You’ll often see things like “[Player] was slain a zombie” or “[Player] fell to their death”, but there are plenty of stranger ones that only appear in obscure scenarios. We’re going to run through some of the rarest death messages in Minecraft and how you can get them.
[Player] was killed by Intentional Game Design
This is a relatively well-known easter egg now, but sometimes new players still get caught off-guard by it.
If you’ve ever tried to sleep in a bed in the Nether or End dimensions, you’ll know that it’s impossible, and the bed will simply explode – in fact, using exploding beds is one of the quickest ways to kill the Ender Dragon.
In 2017, one new player submitted this to the Minecraft bug report forum, thinking that it was a bug. So, as a little nod to let players know it wasn’t a bug, they added the death message “[Player] was killed by Intentional Game Design” when you die to an exploding bed.
[Player] was obliterated by a sonically-charged shriek
This one isn’t very hard to get, but it’s still relatively new, so you may not have seen it yet. The 1.19 update added the near-invincible Warden mob, which will emerge from the ground and destroy you if you make too much noise in a Sculk cave biome.
If you die to a Warden via its melee attacks, then you won’t get this message. Instead, you need to get out of range of the Warden and it will use its ranged sonic boom attack. Dying to that will get you this message.
[Player] went off with a bang
Fireworks are fun, but they can be quite dangerous too. Stand too close to a firework when it goes off and you’ll take quite heavy damage. Have one kill you and you’ll get the death message that you “went off with a bang”.
[Mob] died from dehydration
It’s not just players that can get death messages. If you use an Anvil to create a custom nametag and apply it to a mob, that mob will get its own death message. Most of these will be the same as the ones a player can get, but water mobs like dolphins and axolotls have something unique.
Leave them out of water for too long and they will start to die, let them die this way (you monster) and you’ll get a message that they “died from dehydration”.
[Player] didn’t want to live in the same world as [Player]
Death messages don’t just track the method of death, they also track who inflicted it.
Normally, if you glitch your way below the world’s bedrock layer and fall into the void, it will simply say that you “fell out of the world”. However, if another hits you first, causing you to fall into the void, your death message will claim that you “didn’t want to live in the same world” as that player.
[Player] left the confines of this world
This is a brand new death message added in Minecraft 1.20 and it requires a lot of legwork. To do this, you have to get outside of the world border, which in Minecraft Java Edition, sits 30 million blocks away from spawn.
It’s a ridiculously long journey, but if you get there you can use an Ender Pearl to glitch outside. You’ll immediately die and you death message will show that you “left the confines of this world”.
You can make this even more convoluted though. This death message can be combined with almost any mob, as long as it hits you just before you die. So, for example, if you were to use a very difficult glitch to get the Ender Dragon into the overworld, you could engineer the following death message:
“[Player] left the confines of this world whilst fighting Ender Dragon”
You might think there couldn’t possibly be a harder message than that to get, but you’d be wrong.
[Player] was fireballed by a Llama
Now this may seem impossible, as llamas can’t spit fireballs. However, their spit attack is not just an animation, it’s a proper projectile and entity while it is in the air.
So, if another entity was to collide with that spit projectile, it would destroy it, which is where our friend the Ghast comes in.
It would take incredible timing, but if a Ghast’s fireball hits the spit from a llama and then hits and kills the player, the death message would read “[Player] was fireballed by a Llama”.
This method was discovered by Reddit user AgentX24, who used the slightly easier Shulker to show how it works.
Written by Ryan Woodrow on behalf of GLHF.
