#also i’m kinda torn on whether it’s cooler for sculk to be entirely from another dimension or be a science experiment gone horribly wrong

[mumblesplash]

Alright, I'm gonna ask it. O Great Skulk Lord, what wisdom hath been released unto this world by way of the latest update of Mined Craft?

hehehe WELL first of all, since a not-insignificant part of my thesis here is "ha called it" i'm gonna go ahead and link to the two sculkposts i can find from back in december, here and here, bc even though they don't go into detail about echo shards i HAD already formed this theory at the time and you can sorta tell

so in the new update, which i just found out about today via an upload by mr. mumbo killsalot jumbo himself, players now have the ability to combine amethyst and sculk sensors to create *calibrated* sculk sensors capable of singling out and relaying redstone signals only in response to *specific* vibrations, as well as wirelessly relay those specific vibrations over long distances using amethyst blocks, which has probably a lot of cool implications for redstone that i cannot begin to understand.

in the context of the in-game lore, this strongly supports my already stated theory that sculk uses the impressions of souls it's consumed to calibrate itself, likely because sentient creatures (players) are the only things either dangerous enough or nutritious enough to actually be worth the energy to hunt.

but an extension of this theory which i didn't go into on here is that since naturally generated sculk as an organism is capable of tracking the sound a specific soul makes, and more importantly storing impressions of dead ones for comparison, it makes complete sense that it would be a key componenent in crafting the recovery compass, hence the echo shards.

the only problem is, you can't pick up sculk to use as a crafting ingredient without 'killing' it. even silk-touch harvested sculk is damaged; harvested shriekers or even shriekers generated by feeding a harvested catalyst can't summon the warden (they look different too, the souls inside are dimmer and spin the other way). my theory is and was that echo shards are a fusion of sculk and something to amplify/preserve its ability to 'remember' what souls sound like. amethyst shards seemed like the obvious choice, both because of the name and because minecraft amethyst is sorta the designated Sound Mineral, plus all the amethyst shards in ancient city loot chests.

on a morbid but relevant note, i think the shriekers sound like that for an in-universe reason, and it's the reason the recovery compass points not just to other players but specifically to your most recent death: sculk probably 'records' only the information it finds important about the things it eats and it doesn't eat the living, so the impressions it has stored of previous souls were recorded at the moment they died. the shriekers are just playing back audio. or possibly forcing the souls trapped inside to relive their deaths over and over. depends on how much of a soul it keeps around after it's done eating it

basically what i think, and i think the update strongly supports this, is that disconnecting sculk from its Sculk Colony messes with its ability to record and relay specific signals. amethyst, due to way it interacts with sound, can partially compensate for this, and this is likely a key mechanism behind how echo shards work. sculk sensors, which are simpler and more durable than the other sculk blocks, are also the easiest to work with, which is why calibrated sensors are possible to craft but echo shards (which have properties of both shriekers and catalysts) are not