Strip a forest without replanting and you’ll soon face a wood shortage. Over-harvest sheep or neglect the wheat fields, and food production stalls. These gameplay mechanics aren’t arbitrary, but simulate ecosystem feedback and opportunity costs, where players constantly make trade-offs due to limited time, tools and resources, and each decision costs the value of the next best alternative forgone. For instance, choosing to spend a day mining non-renewable resources like diamonds underground means sacrificing opportunities to farm, trade, build or explore new biomes and resources. This mirrors classic production possibility frontier (PPF) trade-offs, where devoting resources to produce more of one good or activity inherently reduces the capacity to generate another.

With each update, these embedded economic dynamics grow more nuanced. Bees, introduced in the Buzzy Bees update, enhance agricultural productivity by pollinating nearby crops. The only condition is for players to actively preserve the surrounding flower habitats. This mechanism simulates how human intervention can create ecosystem externalities, both positive and negative, a typical example of market failure. Destroying flower fields or bee nests reduces pollination success not only for the player responsible but also for others in the area. This example of a negative externality often occurs when decision-makers, players and firms alike, do not always have the "right" information to be aware of the real costs or benefits of their activities to the environment. According to Coase Theorem, externalities arise from missing markets that internalise the full costs and benefits to society. As a result, we have real-life examples of deforestation or excessive fertiliser use that lead to unintended consequences like reduced rainfall, soil degradation and nitrogen runoff into waterways.

‍

Accordingly, it was finally in the COVID-19 Anthropause that the impact of deforestation and nitrogen pollution on atmospheric balance was properly documented. Shifts in nutrient loading, air quality and even snowmelt timing that were previously obscured by background variation became measurable and often strikingly positive. The world witnessed reduced emissions, improved air and water quality, and expanded wildlife ranges. Isolating the effects of reduced Anthropogenic pressures reveal how quickly some ecological functions can rebound, but also how fragile and uneven that recovery is.

We can piece together a similar story when looking closely at Minecraft’s game mechanics and development. The world players inherit is scattered with remnants of lost civilisations: desert temples, ruined portals and abandoned mineshafts. These hints suggest that once, “ancient builders” flourished here, only to disappear and leave behind degraded lands and fractured ecosystems. Over time, biomes have evolved with new mobs (typically real endangered animals, like pandas and, of course, bees!), plant life and terrain variants that respond to player activity. The absence of the ancient builders had allowed the world to slowly restore itself, with its continued recovery now shaped, for better or worse, by the decisions of players today.

The latest update adds a bittersweet layer to this story: the (re)introduction of Happy Ghasts twists on the traditionally large, weeping creatures that haunt the infernal chaos of the Nether with their mournful cries. This new variant begin as dried out “baby” ghasts that grow up peacefully when brought into the Overworld and offered hydration. Fans speculate that ghasts may not belong to the Nether at all, but were once gentle Overworld natives, brought and abandoned by the ancient builders into the uninhabitable Nether where they grew hostile and grief-stricken. Just as Minecraft asks players to undo the mistakes of ancient builders, the real-world challenges us to confront the environmental legacies that we've inherited. The cumulative impacts of long-term human activity continue to alter the structure and function of ecosystems, and in many cases, have resulted in making them less resilient to future shocks.

A lack of conservation funding due to scarce tourism revenue during pandemic controls left many endangered ecosystems exposed. With ranger patrols reduced and oversight weakened, vulnerable species like elephants, rhinos, and pangolins became easier targets for illegal poaching. At the same time, as large predators shifted their ranges in response to reduced human presence, cascading ecological effects began to unfold. In fragile ecosystems, altered patterns of nutrient deposition and disrupted food-web dynamics could ripple for years, undermining decades of conservation progress and threatening the recovery of endangered species just beginning to rebound. This phenomenon fits within the disturbance ecology framework: the Anthropause acted as a “pulse disturbance,” or a sudden shock, that temporarily suspended the ongoing “press disturbances” embedded within interconnected human-ecological systems. It underscores how many species are not inherently at odds with human development, but displaced, misunderstood or driven into unsustainable behaviours due to our past decisions.

‍

Both the Anthropause and Minecraft created a space where the impact of human activity (and its absence) can be observed. Both highlight the tension between use and overuse, care and neglect, presence and absence. While the Anthropause gave scientists a rare opportunity to observe how ecosystems respond when left undisturbed, Minecraft pushes to propel real-world conservation efforts through storytelling and offers players the agency to shape these outcomes in real life. In 2022, Minecraft’s parent company, Mojang, collaborated with Xbox and the Nature Conservancy to launch Rooted Together: The Mangrove Restoration Project. This hybrid campaign combined live-action footage of Kenyan mangroves with in-game recreations to raise awareness and money for mangrove ecosystems. Players planted virtual mangroves in Minecraft and, in participating, unlocked over US$227,000 in donations for sapling restoration worldwide – a rare achievement within conservation campaigning.

These in-game systems and real-world efforts teach us that the window for recovery is still open. When players alter behaviour in Minecraft, forests regrow, bees return, and villages flourish. The same is true for real life, and both the Anthropause and Minecraft suggest that environmental resilience is not just about letting nature “heal” but about choosing to act as caretakers.