Hi, my name is James and welcome to Code/Switch. Today, I want to take a look at the protagonist of the Minecraft series, Steve, and see if we can figure out what, if any value, he would add to a party in Pathfinder. That’s right, just like every channel on Youtube this is now a Minecraft channel! I know 2e is all the rage, but all my calculations will be done using 1e math and methods.
Let’s look at Steve (aka Alex), our default character in Minecraft, Steve is fast. We’re going to do some math I converted to feet per second from meters per second, but the times shown are per second, and per 6 seconds, 6 seconds being a turn in Pathfinder. Steve walks at a speed of 14.16 feet per second, or about 85 feet per 6 seconds, more than twice as fast as most pathfinder characters. Runs at 18.4 feet per second, or 110.5 feet per 6 seconds, a feat only matched by most pathfinder characters when undertaking the run action. Normal person walks at 3.2 ft/second, or 19.2 feet per 6 seconds.
My to-scale replication of Fort Rannick from Rise of the Runelords after we added Steve.
Steve is also incredibly strong and he obviously has a demiplane as a bag of holding that is in integrated part of his being. Steve has 35 inventory slots that can hold items in stacks of 64. This 64 number is regardless of the weight or dimensions of the objects. These items can be everything from dirt, to paper, to 1 meter cubes of iron. A 1 meter cube of iron would weight 17,357 pounds, or over 8.5 tons, and Steve can carry 2,240 of these iron blocks in his inventory for a grand total of 38,879,680 pounds (19,440 tons!) without any encumbrance penalties! I spent hours trying to figure out Steves strength score from this number, but I learned that your carry capacity increases exponentially up to 29 strength, after that it only increases by factor of 4 for every 10 strength. So yeah, we’re gonna have to find Steves strength in a different way.
This graph shows that carry capacity is gained exponentially, unlike the money you make from streaming Minecraft.
If we can’t use his carry capacity to figure out his strength, we can use his speed at breaking blocks to figure out a rough strength score. It takes 7.5 seconds for Steve to break an unworked stone cube that’s 1 meter on each side. We’re going to use the hardness and HP figures for stone and hewn stone in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook to stat out our Minecraft cube. Using those figures our hewn stone cube has a hardness of 8, 590 HP, and a break DC of 50! Steve does 4 attacks per second for a total of 24 hits in a 6 second turn. If hardness is taken into account, Steve does a total of 782 damage, roughly 33 damage per hit! I believe Steve encounters hardness, as expected of punching, because farming the same stone with the right tool takes only 1.15 seconds using the cheapest pickaxe. A medium creature does 1D3 + strength mod damage with unarmed strikes, assuming Steve isn’t a monk (despite his flurry of attacks) to do 33 damage a hit he’d need to have a 74 strength!
In summation, Steve is a beast, don’t add him to your games because I’m sure he can hit the break DC of deities. If you enjoyed this, come join our Discord server where you can find me and the rest of the KD crew.
