How I Discovered A New Dropper Speedrunning Strategy

 The Dropper by Bigre may be one of the most famous Minecraft Maps of all time. The relatively simple concept of falling down and avoiding obstacles in order to survive getting to the bottom has spawned a huge genre of popular Minecraft maps over the past 8 years.

When you start the game or look at the download page, it only gives you a few simple instructions. "The Goal - Survive and Finish the Game", and "The Rule - Don't Break Blocks". The game gives you a few other basic rules and tips such as to play on version 1.5, but that is the gist of it. Now with these rules there is something that was left out, one important rule that most people wouldn't do because it would normally seem like cheating, but isn't. This one change could completely change the way that people are able to play the map. Although this method of playing the game is much slower than playing the game normally, it can make levels much easier, so easy in fact that on most levels with hard to do parkour jumps, you can be almost guaranteed to make them.

This one missing rule is that there is nothing that stops you from placing blocks. You may be thinking, "How do you place blocks if you can't break blocks to get them in the first place?". There are a few different ways to get things that you can place. The most obvious time that you are given blocks that you might be able to use are beds that you can find in a chest. Other than that, you can get blocks that drop from entities. While you think that this might be included in the rule saying that you can't break blocks, it isn't because blocks and entities are different. Of course the natural assumption is that you can't break entities for blocks, but if the rules don't prohibit it, it's allowed. So, how do you get blocks from entities in the Dropper? There are two ways. One is by crashing the boats on the toilet level so that they break and drop planks as well as sticks, the other is from sheep that can spawn in the game. The easiest way to get blocks is to get them from broken boats, and you only need a few in order to make your jumps easier.

By collecting planks of wood, you can bridge across the 3-block jumps in order to make them significantly easier, and allowing some of the hardest parkour jumps to be done with almost 100% accuracy. The reason why 3-block jumps are so hard in this version is because in version 1.5, you are unable to sprint.

Now is a video of my attempting the Dropper using this strategy, and although I don't do very well, and die quite a few times, I do quite well without any practice, finishing all 17 levels in less than 13 minutes.

You can  download the map for yourself at the following link: https://www.planetminecraft.com/project/advpuzz-the-dropper-2-new-levels