#minecraft strider

Ok. In my personal head cannon of Minecraft I think most life did not originate in the nether. I say most for now cause I haven't made my mind up about blazes or magma cubes yet. But I really like this idea from @/brainrotranch.

So you get some pigs wandering through and those that survive evolved into either piglins or hoglins over time.

Striders? They were chickens once. I took inspiration from jacanas, a type of bird with very long toes that they use to spread their weight out on floating vegetation like lily pads so they can walk across the surface of the water.

There's obviously no lily pads built for lava so they just evolved to create their own. Striders are cold to the touch, at least relative to the nether around them. This means when they approach lava a thin layer of it on top will solidify enough for them to walk on it and it will then quickly remelt behind them due to the heat of the nether.

This is also why they get cold anywhere but on the lava itself. They are built for extremely high temperatures. The babies though, need time to grow and get cold enough to solidify the lava so they have to ride on their parents backs until they are big enough. They lay their eggs on magma and guard them, but don't actually sit on them because they would make the eggs too cold. The nether is hot enough to incubate them on its own. Once they hatch its on to their parents backs and back out into the lava oceans where its safer for them.

The fungal flora (is it still called flora with fungi? I'm running with it for now.) are evolved from red mushrooms. Brown mushrooms just never got as good of a foothold but they are present in small numbers. The warped variant is from a disease that infects regular crimson mushrooms. The disease is something that originates from the overworld undead that crimson mushrooms lost their resistance too when they adapted to survival in the nether. This is also the same disease that zombifies the piglins. This essentially makes the warped fungus undead.

Also the reason you can still find regular red and brown mushrooms in the nether wastes is because their spores are often tracked in and they are usually capable of surviving the trip though the portal while other seeds struggle without extra help, if they can grow there at all. In the crimson and warped forests they just get out competed by the local flora.

The orange dots on both the warped and crimson mushrooms are what become the shroomlights when they get big. When they are small they are extremely bitter so nether residents either develop a taste for them or they go through the painstaking process of carving out each one first.

When fully grown as shroomlights though they taste much better and are regarded as a delicacy. But it's not eaten a ton since it's also a useful and important light source. The glow fades quickly once they're cut into.

The mushrooms themselves kind of do the opposite. Easily edible when small, but once grown they are tough and fibrous. The bark can be stripped and pressed as a way to get precious rare water for things like potion making and the dried bark can then be ground up to use for other things. I'm undecided on exactly what for yet, possibly as a spice or a flour or something. And also this is only ever done with crimson stem. Warped is too dangerous to handle let alone ingest anything from.

As for the other lifeforms of the nether. Ghasts and endermen will get their own posts one day. Especially because right now they'd be light spoilers for a couple of fics I still have in the WIP pile. And the skeletons and wither skeletons are undead and work pretty much the same as the overworld ones. I don't have much to elaborate on about them at this time.