Herobrine

"Only God can help you now."

- Herobrine

Herobrine Persson is an urban legend originating from the survival sandbox video game Minecraft, popularly portrayed as a virus-like ghost haunting the game and terrorizing players both in-game and in real life.

History
His story originated in 2010 on the website 4chan, where a user posted about a strange occurrence where they found an NPC in their Minecraft game that appeared identical to the player character, but with all-white eyes. While it received little attention at first, it was popularized when YouTuber "Copeland" streamed Minecraft and changed an item texture to Herobrine, raising awareness of the legend. Fellow YouTuber Patimoose expanded the legend with another stream, faking a game crash and pulling up a .gif image of Herobrine, but with hyper-realistic eyes and a coded caption.

A Creepypasta was officially created that same year, claiming that the entity was the ghost of Minecraft creator Notch's deceased brother Herobrine, and that the ghost possessed his brother's creation to extract revenge. The Creepypasta featured Herobrine stalking players in their worlds with creepy behavior, scaring them and forcing them to delete the game data.

Since the streams, there has been a huge increase in his popularity, propelling Herobrine to meme status, and making him an icon of the community. There are several mods, animations, pieces of artwork and constructions of Herobrine that have been created. The legend grew so popular that Notch replied to the meme confirming he did not have a brother. Mojang, however, would include the message "removed Herobrine" in patch notes, hide Herobrine in promotional and marketing material, and include a message in the console versions of the game that they "believe 4J Studios has removed Herobrine, but we aren't sure".

Herobrine shows many characteristics of being a form of the virus, such as manipulating game worlds, deleting threads and sending messages through the Minecraft Forums, perhaps also hacking into Notch's email and Twitter to reply on his own existence. All users the user talked to, including Notch's email reply, could simply be the creation of the player's mind. This would also explain Notch's rejection of the canon, as showing the story is all in the user's head.

From the original Creepypasta, Herobrine creates random constructions, such as sand pyramids in oceans and long 2×2 tunnels. He also cuts off all the leaves from trees. Herobrine is able to build and destroy in Minecraft. The original image states the player found long 2x2 tunnels, small pyramids in the middle of the ocean and trees with no leaves. The full extent of Herobrine's building capacity is unknown, but the given examples indicate Herobrine has awareness of shape and can differentiate materials from each other.

Herobrine seems to solely target human players. He did not seem to interact with any other mobs nearby in the Brocraft stream, some of which were spiders and zombies. His canonical relation to further mobs added since he appeared is a complete mystery. His interactions with other mobs are not mentioned in the original image. While there is a chicken present in the image, Herobrine does not seem interested in it at all and is solely focused on the player.

Herobrine has, on occasion, interacted with other mobs. He is sometimes able to take control of passive animals, and revive/spawn undead mobs. Herobrine seems able to drastically change his environments with no viable source of resources to do so. Most expansions to his abilities involve cobblestone placing, dungeon building, using Redstone torches and setting traps. He exhibits all the abilities of a player in the game's Creative mode.

Powers and Abilities
Herobrine is popularly described as a vastly powerful and competent entity, which make him, by far, the worst threat that a player can encounter. Herobrine seems to be totally unbeatable, as he cannot take physical wounds nor cannot be cleared with commands (even with the /kill cheat-code, which can kill any entity in an instant), and often rely on brainwashed vessels instead of engaging in a direct fight. Which is strange, considering that he has an enormous strength. As an invulnerable human, he seems to have access to all abilities from the game's Creative mode, such as flying, running, crafting, invisibility, access to every block from the game, able to set up traps to trick players, and so on. He also seems to move in directions without physically moving, like a ghost, which makes him the first noncorporeal mob from the game.

Herobrine has many other unusual powers, such as being able to teleport anywhere in an instant, crafting nearly anything instantly, the capacity of destroying vast areas in seconds, electrokinesis, and pyrokenesis. He can also possess other in-game entities or control entire communities of mobs.

In many versions of the story, Herobrine can be summoned or resurrected into an in-game world through use of a Herobrine Shrine or Totem, which the player builds of their own free will.