The Minecraft Monster Palette
The overland monsters of Minecraft are a memorable bunch. They blend familiar and unfamiliar and behave in interesting emergent ways. Be warned, if you’re a Minecraft fan, this is hardly comprehensive.
Background
Minecraft has pretty limited controls, so varied modes of interaction really push the boundaries of the game. Players can move, jump, swim, look, listen, dig, build, and attack (melee or ranged). Fire, sun, water, and so on all work roughly as expected. Monsters take falling damage, need air to breathe, can catch fire. Water puts out fire. So on. Mobs can be aggressive (attacking on sight), neutral (attacking if attacked first), or passive (never attacking).
Zombie n Skeleton By LucianoRomanJr, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0, via DeviantArt.
Mobs
Overland & Caves
These monsters spawn anywhere with sufficient darkness, be that night time on the surface or underground without torches.
Giant Spider
Spiders are man-width and waist-high and climb walls and trees. In the dark, their eyes glow red and they are aggressive, but in daylight they are neutral.
Zombie
Undead men. Slow, aggressive, groaning, attack with melee. As undead, they ignite in sunlight.
Skeleton
Skeletal men. Fast, aggressive, clanking, attack with bow and arrow.1 As undead, they ignite in sunlight.
Creeper
Green frowning beast, roughly man-shaped but with four short legs. Moves silently, aggressively, and explodes after playing a short “fuse” sound effect, destroying all the blocks around it. Because Minecraft is a game about building, this has made the creeper one of the most iconic and feared enemies.
Enderman
Taller than a man, eerie and dark, endermen seem to imitate the players by picking up blocks and putting them down. They’re neutral unless a player looks directly at them, in which case they become hostile and teleport in closer for melee combat.
Variants
These rare twists keep combat interesting.
Spider Jockey
One-in-one-hundred giant spiders spawn with a skeleton on top of them. This composite has all the properties of both: it attacks at range, it climbs walls, and it (or at least the rider) ignites in sunlight.
Drowned
Wet zombies, found underwater. Neutral. As undead, they ignite in sunlight, after they dry out.
Husk
Dry zombies, found in deserts. Don’t ignite in the sun.
Villages
In the overworld, peaceful villages can be generated with their own ecosystems.
Villager
Passive mobs, have professions like beekeeping, farming, fishing, etc. They can also be bartered with.
Iron Golem
Villagers under threat (and players) can create iron golems to defend their village from mobs that spawn at night and in nearby caves. This balance means that villages are stable, but precarious.
Cat
Villages are generated, not actually built, so structural damage from creepers threatens to wear them down over time. As a fix, cats are attracted to villages, and creepers avoid cats.
Pillager
Spawn in raiding parties to attack villages. NGL, I didn’t have a firm grasp of these mechanics, but they’re interesting as inversions of villagers.
Deep
Monsters found only in the deep are weirder and more threatening, although the overland mobs are also still present.
Silverfish
As players excavate, some blocks are infested with giant silverfish, which attack if the players attempt to mine them. These infested blocks shimmer and squirm in the light.
This is a kind of “trick” monster commonly reviled in tabletop games, like the infamous Gygaxian ear-worm that punishes listening at doors. The game play is about mining, so it seems questionable to punish that activity. But in a video game, not only is there an objective arbiter of reality, the act of noticing is a seamless player action instead of a nit-picky character one.
Slime
Small aggressive bouncing blobs. Split into smaller, weaker blobs when attacked.
Cave Spider
Small giant spiders, inflict poison.
Nether
Eventually players can travel to a dangerous hell dimension called the nether. Monsters here are more dangerous and different from overland monsters, but ultimately comprehensible.
Ghast
Giant floating squids that shoot explosive fireballs, a kind of wandering natural disaster. Immune to lava and fire damage. The fireballs can be deflected back at the ghasts.
Piglin
Pig-headed inhabitants of the nether, hostile unless the player displays any gold items, will barter for gold, and attack with golden swords.
These aren’t so much inversions of the surface villagers as intensifications of them. Hard, strange people from hard, strange places.
Zombie Piglin
Neutral, but if attacked all other zombie piglins in the region become hostile. Presumably, they would ignite in sunlight if hell had a sun.
Others
There are about 80 mobs total in the game, including “NPCs,” variants, bosses, and numerous fauna. Many of these are rare (or newer than my heyday), but many are also worth examining as riffs of the patterns above.
Enderman By LucianoRomanJr, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0, via DeviantArt.
Reflections
This is a lot of variety for a game with seemingly little tactical interaction, and where a majority of monsters already have a common (pop) cultural understanding. Moreover each monster feels like it fills a niche:
- Zombies and skeletons are the “workhorse” enemies that see variants and improvements throughout the game. They have simple mechanics that are tweaked differently in every iteration.
- Spiders, cave spiders, slimes, and ghasts are the dangers of dangerous times and places.
- Creepers, silverfish, and pillagers “invert” usual gameplay. Players primarily want to build, mine, and trade, and these monsters undo, obstruct, and threaten those activities.
- Endermen, piglins, and to an extent villagers all magnify or distort different aspects of the player. They are comprehensible, yet alien.
Mechanics
Despite the limited activities in Minecraft, the monsters do a good job interacting with every part of the “character sheet.” Standard enemies can be fought or run from, but fighting is not a very technical affair: the only stat here is hit points, and other determinations are down to equipment and terrain. Creepers attack on the “terrain” axis (terrain and construction being indistinguishable here), mooting cover, elevation, and a player’s other efforts. Cleverly, endermen interact on the subtle axis of “looking,” an activity so intrinsic that it feels invasive.2 Furthermore, their uncanny teleportation moots distance and speed. Like monsters that require line-of-sight to attack, piglins respond to wielded objects, or what they see of the player (again inverting the typical PC-NPC dynamic).
On a deeper level, the behaviors of the monsters themselves become mechanics. Zombie piglins offer nothing mechanically distinct from zombies, but their “collective hostility” makes them more threatening. The creeper-repellence of cats makes them desirable pets for a fortress. The predictable bouncing behavior of slimes makes them well-suited to mindlessly pushing machinery.
I wonder how much mileage a D&D-like game could get from a smaller monster manual with tighter integration and a focus on simple behaviors and rules. (Especially if we start with “humans” in the mix to preferentially fill common niches.) Each monster serves a type of encounter or purpose, interacting with specific (existing) subsystems. And then we give them recognizable variants and remixes, and simple rules for interacting with each other.
Creeper By LucianoRomanJr, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0, via DeviantArt.
According to Magic: the Gathering market research, while previous generations associate skeletons with reassembly (perhaps after Harryhausen or Merry Melodies), generations that grew up with Minecraft strongly associate them with bows and arrows.↩︎
In TTRPGs, perhaps this is similar to “metagame” monsters that can listen or respond to out-of-character conversation.↩︎