Tear Jerker / Minecraft

• Hearing an injured wolf whimper can bring any player to shed a tear. It's especially saddening when the owner of said wolf doesn't seem to know or care that you can feed a wolf to replenish its lost health. Fortunately, players can feed wolves tamed by players other than themselves.
  • If you and your wolf fall into a 1x1 hole that's two blocks deep in Adventure mode (breaking blocks is impossible without CanDestroy tags), you have to kill your wolf to place blocks and escape, unless you have ender pearls on hand.
  • If you forget to tell your wolf (or cat for that matter) to sit and wait before heading into a Desert Temple, it's possible for them to teleport onto the pressure plate that activates the TNT trap before you can disarm it. At that point, there's no saving your pet, and the only thing you can do is pillar-hop to save yourself.
• The overall feeling of loneliness in the game (unless you're on Multiplayer or playing with mods that add interactable mobs). Sometimes, playing alone on singleplayer can sometimes be a depressing experience, since there is no one around you to socialize with, as villagers doesn't even speak a single word, and can only be interacted by trading with them. You are all by yourself, in an almost infinite scale world, and it's completely for you to explore alone. No humans nor any kinds of civilization to protect, and no one to keep you safe from the hostile mobs. The only other civilization in the game close to humanlike are the Piglins of the Nether, and even then, they aren't human. Your pets and passive mobs are your only friends. The melancholic soundtrack plays ambiently in the background as you venture the vast world all by yourself.
• 10 years or more later, your pets are still waiting for their owner to come back, and only to find out, they're still there for them. It's unbelievable how patient animals are, regardless of how years come by (Which could mean millennia or even millions of years in-game), just to see you one more time.
• The sound horses make when you kill them will definitely make you stick to cows for harvesting leather instead. It’s bad enough that they’re one of the few animals in the game that can assist you during exploration, meaning you just likely killed your trusty steed’s family member.
• Dying in hardcore mode after spending so much time in your hardcore mode world. Made worse by the game, rather than deleting your world for you, forcing you to hit the "delete world" button. Now with the option to become a spectator after death on a hardcore world, looking back at what you had accomplished (and what you had not) before your demise can make this even worse.
  • Even more so in Phil Watson's case: he survived on his hardcore world for a record 5 years^note Which is roughly over eight thousand six hundred years or nearly 10 thousand years in-game given its 20 minute day cycle, until he unceremoniously suffered a fatal blow in a chance encounter against a baby zombie in full gold, enchanted armor. That, and Phil also made a video of him interpreting about what happened and the internet's reaction to it before concluding with himself doubting he'll ever beat that record again despite promising to make a new hardcore world, although he does hope he will. He would later go on to upload a montage of all his hard work over the years. All of that effort to make those huge builds like the Chaos Caverns and the drained Ocean Monuments, and in Hardcore Survival no less, was his and his alone. The video ends with what will be a permanently "unfinished" hidden witch farm.
• A lot of the tracks on C418's soundtracks are either Sweet Dreams Fuel, Nightmare Fuel, this, or a mix. Take "Sweden" and "Mice on Venus", for example.
• If you're mining in a cavern far away from your home and a sad track starts playing, it can invoke a feeling of homesickness, especially if you've been away from your home base for a long time in-game.
• Any mob you've adopted that gets killed. Pigs, wolves, etc. that dies from environmental dangers or from any hostile mobs. One common reason for this occurrence is that, you have either failed to protect them from getting harmed on some situations, or by being careless for them at most times.
  • This can also be applied when you have failed to save a village from getting overrun by monsters and/or illagers.
• If you're far away from home with your pet and you die, your pet will remain at the spot where you died. If you don't know or can't find where you died, it's likely you'll be separated permanently from your pet, with it presumably in the same chunk you were in when you died, either waiting for you or unaware that you're capable of respawning.
• Occasionally, axolotls spawn within caves. Unlucky ones would swim down an underground waterfall and slide into a lava pool. If you love axolotls, it can be pretty heartbreaking to see them die helplessly this way. Not to mention the sound they make when injured.
• The plight of the Ender dragon ^note  Word of God says her name is "Jean", btw. From what's implied, she's the last of her kind and, if she's slain and the End is freed, you find that she's laid an egg, except that egg can't hatch. So, not only is the last one gone, the species can't even be revived. What really tears it is seeing how the Endermen/their predecessors put so much effort into measures protecting her.