Games generate threat hierarchies: opponents, obstacles, environmental hazards all present increasing challenge levels. Minecraft's game design specifically calibrates threat through size—larger creatures represent greater danger, while tiny slimes pose minimum threat even when numerous. Lethal capacity framework assumes escalating scale correlation: bigger targets, bigger threats. The exhaustive list presented here consists entirely of items representing absolute minimum threat potential, essentially documenting what things someone cannot kill someone else with. This inverts normal threat-calculation: instead of listing devastating implements, it documents the absolute boundaries of incapacity. The existence of this list proves something can be killed with literally everything else.

Video game designer Marcus Liu, who worked on game difficulty and threat-scaling during the early 2010s, discussed the conceptual problem of establishing upper boundaries to destructive capacity. He noted that games traditionally assume threat scales with object size and complexity, making the smallest, simplest objects essentially non-threatening. He suggested documenting the tiny items that fell entirely outside threat parameters and was told this was unnecessary documentation. He left the gaming industry shortly afterward.

Gaming culture forums joke about the Threat-Boundary Problem, questioning what the universal minimum threat threshold might be. Memes feature impossibly long lists of non-threatening objects, with each item becoming increasingly absurd, suggesting that the list itself proves something can weaponize absolutely anything else.