Creatures big and small, friendly and dangerous, and combinations of them scattered throughout the world of Minecraft. Knowing what you are facing is very important to stay alive.
We’ve explored the biomes and structures of Minecraft, now it’s time to turn our attention to the mobs that populate the world. While Minecraft can feel empty at times, there’s rarely anywhere on the map where you can’t find any creatures. Even when you’re in the middle of a seemingly barren desert, a few swipes of your pickaxe will usually reveal caves under sand filled with creatures.
Minecraft mobs provide you with the ability to interact (like with villagers and tame animals), eat (like with passive food-testing mobs), and fight (you’ll find more than a few creatures, big and small). it’s pretty unfriendly).
In the Minecraft language, these creatures belong to «mobs» and can be divided into passive, neutral, aggressive, and aggressive mobs.
If during the course of the game you have a distinct feeling that the balance of friendly and hostile creatures is heavily dependent on hostile creatures, you have no idea. The spawning rate for aggressive mobs is measured in fractions of a second, while the spawning cycle for passive mobs (such as animals) lasts almost half a minute.
Every 1/20 second of the game it asks «Should I spawn an aggressive mob near the player?» while it asks «Should I spawn a passive mob near the player?» Only once every 20 seconds (and only when daylight is on). surface). These chances mean that you will encounter much more aggressive mobs than passive ones.
Passive mobs
Passive mobs consist of creatures that never, under any circumstances, attack the player. Some passive mobs can be bred to create more of them, for example pigs can be bred to farm them efficiently. Aside from bats, passive mobs always spawn at the highest lit level available for the chunk they spawn on.
This means that even in a well-lit cave under the plains biome, there will never be a random cow spawn, as the cow will always spawn on the surface of the pasture from above.
Pigs
Pigs tend to be found in small herds of 3-4 and spawn in grassy/wooded areas. When killed, they drop 1-3 raw pork chops (but if killed by fire, they drop cooked pork chops).
In addition to hunting them for food, players can also breed them (by feeding them carrots) to get more pigs, and can put a saddle on them to ride them like a small and slow horse. A small and slow horse to bring with a carrot and a stick if you want to get anywhere, that is.
Sheep
Sheep spawn in groups of 2-8 in grassy/wooded areas and provide the player with wool (useful for crafting items such as a bed). Killing a sheep will give one piece of wool, shearing a sheep will leave the sheep alive and will give 1-3 blocks of wool.
While wool is handy, it can be annoying if the biome you’re in is very sheepish (since it doesn’t produce anything the player can eat).
Sheep can be raised by feeding them wheat. Approximately 80 percent of all naturally spawned sheep in the game are white, but sheep can appear as black, brown, gray, light gray, and, very rarely, pink.
In addition to the primary colors, you can dye sheep other colors such as yellow, blue, and green, and the dyed sheep will stay in that color (producing as much colored wool as you would like to shear from them).
chickens
Chickens give more than one type of drops. When you kill a chicken, it drops 0-2 feathers and one serving of raw chicken (cooked chicken if killed by fire). Once alive, they will drop a chicken egg every 5-10 minutes. Eggs can be harvested to raise more chickens or used in recipes.
Spawning chickens is quite fun: you throw the collected eggs like baseballs, and each broken egg has a chance to hatch chickens.
Chickens can be bred using seeds (such as wheat, melon or pumpkin seeds). Chicks spawn in grassy/wooded areas.
cows
Like other farm-type animals, cows spawn in grassy/woodland areas in groups of 2-8. Like chickens, cows are a fairly versatile creature as they provide both food (1-3 raw beef when killed, steaks if fire killed) and milk if milked using a bucket and 0-2 leather units after death.
They can be bred using wheat and will happily follow you as long as you keep the wheat in your hands. Walk slowly enough and you can easily get the whole herd to follow you.
Mooshrooms
Mushrooms are similar to mutant cows, they use the same body model as a cow, but only spawn in herds of 2-8 mushrooms, in a rare mushroom biome. Like cows, they produce leather and beef if killed (steak if killed by fire) and can be milked with a bucket.
However, in addition to the standard cow-like teardrop items, mushrooms can also be sheared (they will drop five red mushrooms) if they can be «milked» with a bowl and they will produce a mushroom stew. Thanks to the wide variety of drops available in mushrooms, this is the most versatile creature in the game. Mushrooms can be bred with wheat.
Horses
Horses (and rarely donkeys) spawn in the plains/savannas. If killed, they drop 0-2 leather units, and on rare occasions if they have any additional equipment, a saddle, horse armor or chest Given that most horses only yield a small amount of leather, it’s more practical to tame and saddle them to use as transport.
To tame a wild horse, simply click on it to ride it. The horse will throw you away. Repeat the process until the horse remains calm. In addition, you can instantly tame a horse with a saddle. Regardless of how you tame a horse, a saddle is required to control its movement.
Horses can be bred with golden apples or carrots; a horse raised on a donkey produces a mule, which, like a donkey, can be equipped with a chest for transporting materials. Considering the relative costs of creating golden apples and carrots (they are essentially gold-plated basic fruits/vegetables), you have to be really into horse breeding to get into this, but hey, no one said the ranch would be run. cheap.
ocelots
Ocelots are wild cats found in the Jungle biome. In the wild, all ocelots look the same — brown in color with brown spots.
Players can tame wild ocelots using raw fish. After feeding raw fish to a wild ocelot, it will transform into a domestic cat and adopt one of the three color patterns reserved for cats. Ocelots/Cats are immune to fall damage and are excellent defense against Creepers (aggressive mob creature that we will meet soon).
If not ordered to sit (by right-clicking on them), cats will roam around and follow the player. Minecraft cats, just like real cats, love to jump on beds, chests and other elevated surfaces.
The bats
Bats spawn naturally in caves and other large enclosed dark spaces. Despite your first reaction to hit them, unlike most video games, bats are completely harmless. Not only that, but they are relatively useless as they don’t have drops, can’t be tamed, and don’t grant experience when killed.
However, they are useful as they tend to be quite noisy and are a good indicator of a nearby cave. When digging shafts, it pays to obey the squeak of bats, as this usually indicates a nearby cave system. Bats are the only flying passive mob.
cephalopods
Squids are found in any biome that has water. Despite the name, the body model of a squid is actually closer to the shape of an octopus.
Squids are completely passive and will drop 1-3 ink sacs when killed. These pouches can be collected to be used as dyes and to create more advanced items such as a book and a quill.
Villagers
Villagers are the only human (or maybe we should say human) characters in the game that spawn in villages. Each villager has a profession (indicated by the color of their robe/apron); villagers in brown clothes are farmers, people in white clothes are librarians, villagers in purple clothes are priests, villagers in black aprons are blacksmiths, and people in white clothes are butchers.
You can right click on villagers to trade with them; their profession greatly influences what they will trade with you. Villagers always trade items for emeralds or emeralds for items, for example they want twenty raw chickens for five emeralds.
Although trade often greatly favors a villager, we still recommend checking trades when you are near a village, as it is possible to collect higher level/hard-to-find items quite easily using the trade system. We often run into farmers who will gladly trade emeralds in exchange for stacks of wheat (we assume they are independently wealthy and just want more farmers since we always sell them wheat straight from their own fields).
Although villagers breed if a village’s population decreases (you’ll occasionally see baby-sized miniature villagers running around), they are gender-neutral and, except for the color of their clothing, all look the same.
At night, the villagers go out of the house trying to avoid aggressive mobs, but their artificial intelligence (AI) mechanism is absolutely terrible. Zombies are drawn to villagers and will approach villages in large numbers after sunset, but you can’t rely on villagers to avoid them (and they don’t have a mechanism to attack zombies).
If you want to support a village in order to trade with the villagers, you need to do one of two things. First, you need to avoid the village at night; stay at least 128 blocks away to spawn mobs in the village. Secondly, if you want to live in a village, you must fortify the village with walls and many torches. If you fully illuminate the interior of the village, no hostile mobs will spawn there.
Killing a villager does not grant any drops and is highly recommended against. Not only is killing defenseless and villagers bad, they are very slow to repopulate their villages, so you will deprive yourself of valuable trading partners if you kill everyone in the city.
Service mobs
Speaking of villages and villagers, let’s take a look at the smallest mob category with two meager entries: utility mobs. Monster utilities are so named because, as the name suggests, they provide a sort of utility function for the player.
iron golems
Iron golems are found naturally, though infrequently, in the wild. Naturally, they appear in large villages with at least 10 inhabitants and 21 «houses». We are quoting houses because according to the Minecraft Village algorithm, a house is not a complete structure, as I imagine it is, but a door attached to a structure. So the butcher’s houses found in some villages (which have two doors) actually count as two houses.
Players can also build Iron Golems by stacking four iron blocks on the ground and placing a pumpkin on top. In the screenshot above, we have used the crafting table to conveniently arrange the blocks for reference, but the real golem must be built on the ground. Don’t worry, we will soon start creating tables, blocks and structures.
Iron golems protect villages and attack anyone (player or mob) that attacks a villager.
Snow golems
Snow golems do not occur naturally in the world of Minecraft and are the only mob in the Meet the Monsters lesson that you will only find if you create it yourself.
If you find a snow biome, you can collect snow, stack it, throw a pumpkin on top, and make yourself a little snowman. He will wander aimlessly around the place he created and throw snowballs at hostile mobs (you can also collect snow from the trail he leaves).
Again, don’t worry, we’ll move on to the topic of crafting items and where to find pumpkins on short notice.
Neutral mobs
While passive mobs will never attack you under any circumstances (you can hit cows and villagers all day without worrying about counterattacks), neutral mobs remain indifferent to you until you provoke them. What constitutes a provocation depends on the type of crowd.
Wolves
Found in forest and taiga biomes and their variants, wolves spawn in packs of 1-8. By default, wolves are completely neutral towards the player, and you can approach them. They will only attack if you hit them in any way. Keep in mind that attacking one wolf will cause all the wolves in the pack to attack you.
If you give wolves a bone, they can be tamed. They transform into dogs and wear a red collar (just like ocelots transform from wild cats to domestic cats). You can click on a dog with a dye (such as a bag of squid ink) and the collar will change to match the color of the spent dye unit.
Tamed dogs will follow the player and attack anything the player attacks or attacks the player. Large packs of tame dogs can be a hassle, but they will fight to protect you.
