Ep # 149: A Cornucopia of History: The Minecraft Goat Horn

0:00Before we jump into today's episode, here's a quick reminder, if you enjoy it, and want to keep the show going, consider joining the community at patreon.com slash realm news. You'll get early access, exclusive bonus content, and it'll be behind the scenes look at everything happening at realm news. Your support helps make every episode possible. patreon.com slash realm news. Now let's get into the show. Hello my friends and welcome back to a new week in a brand new realm news. Go ahead and get comfortable, make yourself right at home. We are in my palace situated on the island of liminos, today surrounded by the Carth Desert. It's beautiful out, and the people are in the market trading their wares. I see you are looking at my trophy wall. Yes, indeed. I have exotic treasures from all around the overworld.

1:03The piece you are looking upon happens to be the topic of today's episode. That is a goat horn, and today I'll be presenting you a poll that I made over the goat horn. Then we will go into the real segment where we'll examine the history of the real life horn. After that, we will move into the segment of the show I dubbed the realm. That's where I give you the history of the Minecraft goat horn and its uses and much more. And before we start this episode, I just want to remind you all to hit that faux bun wherever you're listening to this podcast. Give it five stars and subscribe to the patreon at patreon.com slash realm news. I hope you are already for an exciting look into the history of the horn. That said, let's start the show. Welcome to a brand new poll time, my friends. And this one relates to today's episode. I know I don't do that for most of the polls. A lot of the time they are just really nilly random polls thrown into the subject of the

2:07week. However, this week I asked the Minecraft reddit community this question. The goat horn. Do you use them? And what for? I read they could be heard up to 256 blocks, which is amazing. I have two myself, but I don't use them. They are more decorative. Let me know what you do with them with a comment and take the poll. That's what I asked them. That was the the poll time gauntlet tossed down amongst the Minecraft reddit community. And that is, I voted no. I'm just going to tell you that. I don't use mine. I just want to go ahead and be clear why I voted no. Well, I should said yes. I take that back. I have two of them, but I vote no anyways because I have them on a wall and I don't use them. I just have them there to impress guests in my palace. But that is stopped me from asking the reddit community who came out and drove to vote on

3:10this question. Guess how many people voted on this on this week's poll folks? I received 443 votes in total and it was a very binary question. I provide two options that the participants had to choose from and here they are. Yes, I use goat horns. No, I don't use goat horns. Very simple. Trisompe as the French say. Well, let me give you the results straight to you. The winner this week in the do you use goat horns poll is the no group with a total, a whopping total of 300 and 29 votes out of the 443 total. Oh my gosh, this equals out to be 74.2% of all the votes. That has to insane. Let's round up a smidge and say three quarters, 75% of the Minecraft player base doesn't use goat horns. 75, three quarters of the players don't use goat horns.

4:11This is an outstanding, overwhelming majority of the people. I believe it is because it has no use in single player except for being decor and for your own fun. It has no enchantment capabilities. It doesn't affect any mobs. It really doesn't have any practical use. And trust me people, I don't get joy. I've seen this item not getting any use. I am a proponent of every item should have a purpose in Minecraft ecosystem. I believe the goat horn has a lot of potential and I would like to see expanded on. Perhaps use it to call our wolves or other pets or make it have special effects on particular mobs. Something I mean, come on guys, come on devs. As for the loser of this week's poll, well you guessed it. I mean, we really had one or other option, right? It's the yes group who had a measly 114 votes out of the 443 total. That is only 25.7% or one quarter of the votes.

5:14So if you meet someone who hasn't heard of the goat horn in Minecraft, you know why. Let's listen to some comments left on the polls and see what people actually think of the goat horn. I'd like to start by reading the first time commenter to realm news who calls themselves prize commercial 765. They say quote, I build these redstone doors often that are powered by skulk sims. And if you blow a goat horn, the door opens. Also I like how they sound in quote. Oh my gosh. Epic. Epic my friend. When I read this comment, I was blown away by the creativity that went into this. I would love to have doors that open when a horn was blown. Open sesame with a horn. It would just it would just feel so regal. Kudos to you my friend. You must have one heck of a kingdom and you must be a heck of a good redstone engineer. Thank you for that comment prize commercial 765.

6:16And please keep commenting on the polls. Our next commenter goes by the name Piter underscore gadgets underscore 743 who says quote, goat horns are among the random stuff that may be useless. I probably won't use, but that I really want to discover how to get one for myself because if I did get one, I'd create a museum to display it in quote. They didn't win ahead and provide me with an eight point list of how they would make their museum. I must say it sounds awesome. And today folks, I was on Twitter, which I'll date the show. These are a month out, but it's Saturday the first, but Michael T.B. H posted these amazing columns to what he's going to use as part of his museum. Yeah, he's going to create a museum. I guess that's going house every block in Minecraft. That's going to be amazing. But anyways, thank you so much, Piter underscore gadgets underscore 743 for your comment. Please leave another in the future. Next commenter, rest time underscore underscore underscore end says quote, at least they do a cool sound.

7:23It's the only reason I even use them in quote, many of them do sound very cool. However, I have one that sounds extremely wimpy, not an emit sound, nor something that would provoke haste or worrying to someone. I believe there are eight different sounds or eight different horns each with a unique sound. We'll get into that a little bit later. Thank you for that comment, my friend. On to the next one who goes by tiny worlds, question mark, who says quote, yeah, I have them next to a battle site for lore. I also saw a German streamer use them to quote unquote summon an army of creaking. Basically, you blow the horn, a calibrated skulk sensor detects it. It makes pistons pushing logs on top of creaking hearts, unquote. Oh my gosh, people are so ingenious. I love it. I love it. Can you imagine an army of creaking means summoned by one horn blast? Epic.

8:23I'll keep throwing that word out there. Epic. That is beyond my expertise. I also love how you have it set up the next to a battle site for lore. Sake makes perfect sense. It makes me feel like a viking every time I blow into my get horn, not my wimpy one. I have another one that sounds a little bit more, I don't know, has a little bit more bravado to it. Thank you, Ty world's question mark for that great comment. My next comment comes from the brickyard 83 who says quote, I died tragically far from home. Homies made a gear drop for me to recover my stuff on the way back. I wrecked a pill or tower and reward my friend with the great coat horn I found. Seems neat. I need another one now. In quote, that happens to the best of us, my friend. I remember a year ago or two. I was traveling with my loyal wolf. I traversed hundreds of blocks, numerous biomes, and slight mini enemies. We had made a couple thousand blocks into uncharted territory when an unsuspecting creeper came

9:29out of nowhere as they do and blew me back to my homeland. I lost my wolf hound and never had been able to relocate him. I'm glad you had friends who got your back and you were able to decimate a pill or tower my friend. I think a goat horn is a fair gift for having your back like that. Thanks for that comment, bud. I hope you leave another in the future. But that said, I would like to leave pull time there for the day folks, but just as a recap, 25.7% of players say they use goat horns. That's only one quarter, one out four people. 74.2% do not use them. So they are rather forgotten in the game or players just don't care for them much unless they are gifting them or making museums. With that said, I would like to now move on to the next segment of Realm News. The real segment. This is the part where I connect the real world with the game of Minecraft.

10:32And today it involves an old biblical horn and biking horns. Let's go check it out. Well, first after this commercial break. There you are. Walking home after a long day of mining. You open the door. You sit down and then… Boom! Was your house insured? Mmmmmmm? Of course it wasn't. Introducing Creeper Insurance by Omd Industries For just three in-roll to month you can protect your hope from creepers, gas, accidental TNT deduations that one idiot friend who always says, trust me, I know what I'm doing. Creeper Insurance because when disaster strikes you don't want to be standing in a crater wondering

11:36what happened. And speaking of things you should know about, there's a lot happening in Minecraft staying informed with round news. Oh for the love of... Welcome back to the show folks. We're all familiar with the horn, the object that one blows into and it produces a loud and bellowing sound that carries for distance. It's in all sorts of music. They're impossible to escape from. They're on boats, fans, blare horns at sporting events all the time for their team and against the rival teams. The military uses them as warnings and for all sorts of other communique. Those are just a couple examples have a long long list of of horns I could make a whole podcast over horns. Passinfonia.org has a good article that sums up the history of it. Humans first began making horns out of horns, animal horns to be precise,

12:36such as from oxen or ram horns. The word horn is German in itself but its original roots could be found in French as in corne and Italian as corno. These remnants can still be found in the prefix to the word corne copia, which literally means a full horn or horn aplenty. As time progressed so did the evolution of the horn. It may have started as a simple animal horn but people added to it. It evolved. By the mid 1600s the French made the horn circular in shape and made out metal in order to communicate better on a hunt. This became very popular amongst other nations at the time because they were easy to use and easy to carry while on horseback. This description of the circular metal horn kept evolving. During the 1800s a new style of horn was produced called the bald horn meaning forest horn. Vald in German literally means forest.

13:42The bald horn had something called crooks in it allowing a greater variation of pitch. And the person playing it altered the pitch by pulling their hand inside the horn. This went on to evolve further in the 1900s when something called the valve was installed into the horn which allowed greater control over the pitch and notes. But this didn't become popular for several decades. People enjoyed the sound quality of the natural horn better until the valved horn became popular and widely adopted in the 20th century. After that the double horn was invented and this gave complete range over the horn. As I mentioned a moment ago the very first horns came from hallowed out animal horns where the person would blow into one end and produce a blasting sound. They were used primarily in religious ceremonies. As you know realm news enjoys reporting on the history of old things. And the shofar is a good example of an early example of a ceremonial religious horn. It is one of the most prolific examples of an ancient horn.

14:49Type in ancient horn and the shofar is what will populate in your search engine. So we shall dive into that first. A fascinating read titled the origins of the shofar found at myjewishlearning.com and read by Rabbi Dr. Ruvan Hammer states that the shofar was not an advent to Judaism. But in fact stems from paganism. It is thought by scholars that pagans use the shofar or a goat horn to ward off demons during the new year. This would ensure that the new year would be a happy one. Also according to the Ta'amu, the sound of the shofar would confuse the accuser which suggests that the shofar has the power to destroy Satan. Shabbat.org goes further to explain that the shofar is used in the Judaism religion on Rosh Hashanah or Day of the blast or the shofar blast. This ceremony lasts for two days. Now I'm not religious by means but I found this all to be

15:52utterly fascinating. That's why I'm reporting on it. The shofar is by far one of the earliest uses of a horn in record human history. Now I'd like to dive into another famous culture in history that enjoyed horns very much and I'm referring to the Vikings. The Vikings love their horns. However, despite how Hollywood portrays the Viking, they did not wear those on their helmets. That's all Hollywood myth. When I grew up I thought the same thing folks. But Vikings love to drink from horns and to use them in war. Talesofahala.com describes the drinking horn in Old Norse as called the Old Horn which translates to Alhorn. Vikings love to drink alcohol. They drank for social occasion status and for ritual. The horns came from domestic cattle or from now they now extinct but once prized Orok. The Orok was once wild cattle which would have been interesting

16:58to see. The type of quality and rarity of the all horn reflected the status of the beholder. And if you are interested in learning how to make a drinking horn, here's the process in a summary. Here's the horn preparation. The inner bone core was removed leaving the hollow carrot and sheep. The horn cleaning is the horn was clean scraped and sanded create a smooth surface and then you polished it often with beeswax to give it a lustrous sheen. Eywala, you're ready to drink with the Norse gods in Vahala. But what about the horn? My dark lord, what about it? Yes, let's talk about this instrument. The horn or lura as is called in Old Norse, not the drinking horn but the lura, the one that you blew through. According to Google, the lura was primarily means a hollowed out tree trunk, wooden trow or box specifically a flower bin or frame used for a millstone

18:06which historically extended to mean a wooden vessel slash arc, a cradle or coffin or a wind instrument slash war trumpet. The construction of blowing of a blowing horn is a bit different from how I described making a drinking horn. These ancient instruments were crafted from cattle horns or other animal horns taking advantage of their natural conical shape to amplify sound. To play them, the tip of the horn was cut off, smooth and shaped into a simple mouthpiece, allowing the player to buzz their lips into it. The musician controlled the pitch entirely with their embouchure or mouth and breath pressure since these horns didn't have finger holes to change notes. The article lays out three important uses for the Viking blowing horn. One, something for legal assembly used to call Freeman to something called the thing literally. It was called the thing. The local or regional legal assembly was called the thing. Isn't that crazy?

19:11That's where they did all their legal stuff. Number two, the horn was used at the battlefield for communication, employed to signal maneuvers, commands and retreat stream battles. And then number three, communication and coordination used by Viking longship fleets for communication and coordination at sea. However, the most famous Viking horn mythology can be found in Hamedel and Yellowhorn, or Yowlerhorn, sorry, my old Norse isn't that good. Hamedel and Yowlerhorn, that is a little myth here. Hamedel was a great guardian who guarded the bitfros bridge that connected the human world to ask God. Hamedel is said to have supernatural powers, giving him the ability to hear grass grow and the wool on sheep growing just to give you an idea of how supernatural this dude was. Now Hamedel's chief duty was to sound the Yowlerhorn at the onset of Ragnarok or

20:19the twilight of the gods. The blast from this horn was so powerful that it could be heard across old nine worlds. This would alert all the heroes and gods that the final battle has begun. The horn has taken on the symbols for vigilance and preparedness and the call to action in the face of great events. I cannot now wait to name my horn in Minecraft. Yowlerhorn, what a story. And what amazing symbolism this mythological horn carries from the Shrefar to Viking horn use. The horn has an extensive history. Heck, perhaps you play horn in real life. If you do, right in, let me know what kind you play. I would love to hear all about it. That said, my friends, I'd like to leave it there today for on the horn. And well, the real life horn, I should say, we're still in the horn and move into the realm portion of the show where we're going to investigate and take a gander

21:19at the Minecraft horn. My friends, welcome to the realm of Amridae, my realm where we will be exploring the Minecraft horn. As we covered in pull time, one quarter or 25 percent of old players actually use the goat horn in Minecraft, which is a shockingly large portion of players. And the main argument for this is that people do not see much use for them. And many aren't even aware exists. So today, where I'm just going to change that up by bringing light to the Minecraft goat horn. But first, let's start with their history. On October 21, 2021, all-raft, a game developer on Minecraft stated that goat horns are not included in Java 1.18. However, the proof of this no longer exists on Twitch, where the source is supposedly found. I clicked the link on the Wiki and it takes you to nothing. Just one, let you all know that because I like to give you the

22:21best sources. Now, moving on, a month later on November 17, 2021, goat horns were initially announced to be added after the wild update. And that can be found in the November 17th article Caves and Cliffs update part two is coming found on Minecraft.net, rim by Sophia Dankus, saying they won't be included in this past update. Quote, they have not been canceled. We just had to put them on the back burner for now. While they won't be in the wild update, they are going to come to Minecraft in the future when we're able to add them in the best possible way. Until then, you have a bunch of mountains to climb and Caves dive into. In quote, I'm sure the community was bummed about that during the time. However, several months later, Mojang finally delivered on the goat horn. According to Minecraft Outweekie on April 27, 2022, in Java snapshot 22, W17A, the goat horn was added and has been in the game ever since.

23:24Now that we know the history of these horns, let's figure out how you can acquire one or perhaps two or maybe a dozen or as many as your little heart desires. Let's talk acquisition here. If you want to get a goat horn, then you will have to get a goat tarama block of wood or another saw block such as stone, coal ore, copper ore, iron ore, emerald ore, like I said, or packed ice. Or you said log, I don't know, I have that in there twice or packed ice. Any other block, the goat will not ram. It's just not how the game set up. The game of cancels out there. So good luck on that. Another person who left it come in today's poll who goes by the handle, funk it cheese suggests quote, best method is to have them in an enclosed space. You stand in front of a block that you can jump onto when they eventually ram at you. So instead of hitting you, they hit the block, getting them to ram is just waiting near them. I'm sure there are a few

24:27YouTube tutorials that can explain it better than me, in quote, no cheese, you did a great job with your explanation. Thank you so much for submitting that and we all appreciate it. We really do. Thank you, cheese. I believe many newcomers in Minecraft will get great use of your comment. Please keep leaving them. Also, those blocks I listed actually have the snaps underscore goat underscore horn tag associated with it. So it can be modified for data packs. Just want to slip that in there. If you manage to get a goat to ram one of those said blocks, then it has a possibility of dropping two horns, but only if the horn, but only sorry, but only one horn if the goat spawned with only one horn, which I had no idea was a thing until doing the research over this. I thought that was really cool. I love Minecraft so much worse game mechanics such as these like who would have thought about coming across a one horned goat in the game. I haven't yet.

25:28So I just think that's just a neat little thing. Now, if you recall from earlier in the show, I mentioned that there are eight different horns. Each one of those plays a unique pitch. Well, those eight are divided into two groups. And here they are. One, regular goats, two, screaming goats. The regular goats will drop these type of horns. They name them. This is the name of their pitch that they deliver. Ponder, sing, seek, and feel. Those are the horns for the regular goats. Now the screaming goats will drop these type of horns. Admire, call, yearn, and dream. Those are their horns. And if the goat drops two horns, they are the same kind of horn. Meaning, for example, they would both be ponder if one horn is ponder, the other ones ponder. If you do not know where some goats are located or you do not feel like getting a goat to ram a

26:30block, well, there's another way to obtain a goat horn. That is by Pilgeen, well, a Pilger outpost. Yes, the Pilger outposts both on Java and Bedrock have a 50% chance of spawning there. Or the horns have a 50% chance of being found in one of those chests. However, on the right, I think there's only one chest and that's at the very top floor. So you have to annihilate them, the Pilgers or the Ilgers and get it. It's easy. You'll figure it out. But if you're a new player, it can be a little daunting, but it may be worth your time because you can get a goat horn. However, on regular goat variant horns can be, wait, in those only regular goat variant horns can be found as well. I wanted to say, you won't find this screaming goat horns, which include if you remember, admire, call, urine and dream. You're just out of luck. Those will not be at the Pilger outposts. You're going to have to find a screaming goat, which I don't think I've seen a screaming goat yet in Minecraft. And so I need to find a one horn goat now,

27:33and I need to find a screaming goat. So keep that mine collectors. So now that we have one or all eight of these horns, what the heck can we do with them? Well, that seems to be the dilemma, folks. They truly do only have a couple of uses. Their primary purpose is to make sound, either for aesthetic value or for practical use. The static is because you just enjoy the atmosphere of the sound. You just like the way the sound it produces. Practically speaking, well, we heard some of those ideas and uses in today's comments, such as redstone powered doors and skulkers being used to or assembled in such a way that they will open or respond to a horns blast. They also cast the sound up to 256 blocks away, which makes it ideal for PVP, flavors, player, I mean type scenarios or on survival multiplayer servers. This can be used for coordinate attacks or alerting teammates of oncoming attacks from a great distance, because

28:34256 blocks is a pretty good good distance, honestly. You should know that there is a seventh second cool down between the horn blast. You cannot bypass this function by switching to another horn. Besides playing the horn to create a sound, there's only one other true use for this. And that is to use as decor in an item frame or on an armor stand, which this function is native to bedrock only, because the armor stand in Java literally doesn't have arms to hold anything. So playing the sound from the horn and decor are your only two real functions of Minecraft, Goorn has folks. And this is probably why it only has 25% of all players using it. But did you know that we almost had a variant to the Goorn? Yes, and it was craftable, and it was called the Copper Horn. Folks, we almost had a Copper Horn in Minecraft. I honestly forgot all about this until it was brought to my attention by a friend, Neon Gaming. I am glad I

29:41was reminded about these because Minecraft seriously dropped the ball by not adding them into the game. Instead, the Copper Horn only made it into bedrock experimental, and that was in preview 1.18.30.27 March 16th, 2022. They were removed a few weeks later on April 14th, that same year in preview 1.19.0.25. And would you like to hear Mojang's reasoning for why they removed the Copper Horn? Well, here it is, found at feedback.minecraft.net, and the link will be left in the episode description, so you can all check it out. I'll go ahead and quote this folks. Quote, remove Copper Horn. Although community feedback was mostly positive, the Copper Horn was a fun experiment that didn't quite live up to our design goals, so we decide to remove it. We understand people might be sad, but to be able to try out new and interesting things, we need to be able to remove experimental features

30:41sometimes. This leads space for even better features in the future. So this is a very weird and unusual case where Mojang just directly ignored the metrics and said, quote, that didn't quite live up to our game design goals. In quote, what like making money from popular demand? Sorry folks, but that is a very lame excuse. I don't understand why Mojang would not put in a popular item. I guess they've done this before with some mob votes and other things, but this just seems absurd to me. Anyways, if it was in the game, this is how they would be crafted. One goat horn and three copper nuggets put those together on the crafting table that will give you one copper goat horn and you can see that the three copper nuggets are represented on the horn in the form of three copper bands wrapped around it, giving the horn a more rustic yet more

31:42luring design in my opinion. And unlike their sans copper counterparts, Copper Horn had only has only a four second cooldown as opposed to the seven second cooldown. A regular goat horn provides and each horn could be could play three different sounds based on the position you were holding the copper horn, which I thought was revolutionary. Here they are. You could either crouch, which would make a bass tune. You could look up at a 45 degree angle and the harmony tune was played or, whilst in a neutral position, the melody tune was played. So you had you had a bass tune, harmony tune, melody tune, crouch, bass tune, looking up, harmony tune, neutral position, melody tune. Cool. So on all there were 10 different copper horns and each could play three unique sounds. This yielded 30 total sounds that the collection as a whole can muster. Talk about a

32:46symphony of horns, a cornucopia of horns. Why Mojang threw this into the scrap pile, I will never understand. It's completely ludicrous in my opinion. I shall leave it there though. Like I'll leave my opinion there. Before I wrap this up, I shall let you know that if the copper horn had been added into the game, then you would have a 25% chance of finding them in a piltier outpost. I think that would have been fun to find. I hope you all enjoyed this week's episode over the Minecraft horn and the real life horn. I had a blast making it for you. That wraps up all I have on the subject for today folks. Horns. They have been a staple instrument for humanity for thousands of years. They were mentioned in the holy book of the Ta'moud as the Shofar. They HIVkings used them for social status, commemoration, ceremonies, communicate with each other,

33:49warring, warring each other, and for many other uses. We humans still use horns from many things, such as that celebration, sport events, wars, and so on. However, after today's episode, we now know that the vast majority of Minecraft players do not use the horn. No, they in fact opt away from it. They don't see any value in the horn or they do not know of its existence. Personally, I think the horn is a fun instrument and just fun to have in Minecraft. I have a couple of them and they are on display in my palaces. I need to put them on armor stands. Now that I know that, my only complaint is that Mojang refused to put copper horns of Inilla, despite the world's favoring them. This makes no sense and I'm hoping that one day the copper horn will come back into existence. Until then, I'll be keeping a lookout. I'll be the first report on their rival. Here at Realm News, with that said, my friends, that wraps up this week's

34:53show. I wish you all a great rest of your day and week. Until next time, keep putting the real realm in happy crafting. The Dark Lord. Signing out. Hey, Realm News fans, it's your host. The Dark Lord. The one who puts the real realm in expands your mind when blocked at a time. I am here to tell you that your sport means everything. Spread the word by telling friends, liking and commenting on spotifier good pods. Find me on x, blue sky, Reddit or via email bio.link slash realm news. For more content, join my Patreon at the copper tier for early episodes, bonus content and newsletters. Find out more at bio.link slash realm news. No pressure though, just keep listening, liking

35:57and sharing. That's more than enough. Happy crafting and see you at the next Realm News.