Minecraft's characters are mostly referred to as mobs, or players, despite having no named characters. Every mob/player embodies many tropes.
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The Player
Steve / Alex / Noor / Sunny / Ari / Zuri / Makena / Kai / Efe
Promotional render with every default character.note
The main player character or protagonist, who wakes up in an unknown land and does whatever they want.
- The Ace: The player has knowledge of and basic to advanced expertise in almost every trade imaginable, including mining, spelunking, cooking, farming, forestry, animal husbandry, attack dog training, mercantilism, masonry, architecture, carpentry, leatherworking, blacksmithing, fletching (arrow-making), swordsmanship, professional adventuring, distance swimming (up waterfalls!), as well as monster-hunting (including dragons), object enchanting, redstone innovating, and potion brewing. Well-illustrated with this
◊ official t-shirt.- If you play with mods, you can add anything from magic to advanced nuclear science to that list.
- Adventurer Archaeologist: The player is perfectly capable of excavating fossils and the ruins of long-dead civilizations while beating the stuffing out of anything that threatens to hinder them. In fact, if looking to kill the Ender Dragon, this play style is encouraged: in order to find the required portal to the End, you have to uncover and investigate an old underground enclave, complete with age-old libraries, jail cells, and other signs of a long-forgotten past.
- The Aloner: In single-player, they are the only human being in the entire game.
- Action Girl: Mojang has confirmed that Alex is female. As Steve's female counterpart, she can do everything Steve can, e.g. kill zombies, forge swords, enchant items, etc.Owen Hill from Mojang: [...] But jolly old Steve doesn't really represent the diversity of our player base. For that reason, we're giving all players the opportunity to play with an Alex skin instead. She brings thinner arms, redder hair, and a ponytail; she actually looks a bit like Jens from certain angles.
- Aerith and Bob: The default player skins include names like Steve, Alex, and Sunny (which wouldn't be out-of-place names for American readers), alongside Ari, Kai, Noor, Zuri, Efe, and Makena (which are real names, but highly uncommon depending on where you live).
- Ambiguous Gender: All creatures in the game including the player character (but excluding the Ender Dragon) are genderless, although Steve and Alex are often referred to as male and female respectively.
- Ambiguously Brown: Steve has tawny brown skin much darker than Alex, but his exact ethnicity has not been revealed. Confusingly, Minecraft's official promotional merchandise tends to portray him a fair bit lighter than he actually appears in-game. Taking into account that the game started life as a Grand Theft Auto fangame and that Steve's model was possibly based on Tommy Vercetti (Seriously) also changes some things.
- Ambiguously Human: They've been officially identified as Humans, and certainly look more human than anything else in the game, but their immense strength as well as being the only one of their kind (at least in single-player) makes it easy to see them from a more enigmatic point of view.
- Animal Lover: It's possible to make the player character befriend all of the villagers, wolves, cats, horses, and donkeys that they encounter (for both practical reasons and for companionship). It's even possible to play as a vegetarian and abstain from killing passive mobs entirely, though this is slightly more difficult as plant-derived foods usually don't restore as much Hunger as meat, and many useful crafting items — leather in particular, which is necessary for making books, which in turn make the bookshelves needed for enchanting — can only be obtained by killing animals. Alternatively, it's possible to kill everything you encounter.
- The Artifact: Even though Steve's beard was removed in an early version of Minecraft Java Edition, marketing materials continued to feature a bearded Steve, causing this trope. (At least, until 1.19.3, when the in-game skin for Steve got its beard back.)
- Artificial Limbs: It's entirely possible to give them these via skins. Sunny; one of the default skins notably has a prosthetic left arm.
- Badass Normal: During a typical game, the Player is able to punch down trees, swim waterfalls, build entire towns, destroy entire towns, cart around thousands of pounds of equipment, slaughter hundreds of monsters with nothing more powerful than a sword and a bow, regularly travel to the Nether to gather more building materials, the list goes on. This upgrades to Empowered Badass Normal when they obtain magical items of almost any kind.
- The Beastmaster: They may be assisted in their travels by various loyal animals that they've tamed and/or bred, including entire wolf packs.
- Big Eater: The player can and will eat entire loaves of bread, cakes, and pumpkin pies in one sitting.
- Bizarre Human Biology: They're officially humans, despite having superhuman strength and almost no need to sleep.
- The Blacksmith: They don't even need a forge and hammer to make Iron (or better) weapons/armor, just a workbench and their bare hands.
- Bold Explorer: They can explore the world they've spawned in bit-by-bit or in great leaps and bounds.
- Bottomless Bladder: Zigzagged. In Survival Mode, they don't need to drink, wash, or go to the bathroom, but they do need to eat and, to a lesser extent, sleep. In Creative Mode, it's played straight, and they have no needs at all.
- Bow and Sword in Accord: Generally, the most practical weapon setup is to have both a sword and a bow, since it's easier to just shoot down certain threats than run in and take damage, while the sword can handle those situations where you get boxed in.
- Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: Sometimes, the health bar can be depleted after winning fights with the Ender Dragon or the Wither.
- Character Customization: Through the use of skins, they can look like anything you want them to, within the limitations of a blocky humanoid form.
- Charles Atlas Superpower: The player can destroy blocks made of hardy materials like pure diamond using only their hands, in addition to lifting cubic meter blocks of any material, which must weigh several tons on average.
- Clothes Make the Superman: Enchanted armor provides incredible benefits to its wearer, from taking reduced damage from any source (the Protection series), to increasing the wearer's ability to hold their breath underwater (Respiration), and even allowing them to freeze water just by walking on it (Frost Walker). None of these features activate if the player is not wearing said armor.
- Combat Pragmatist: They can weaponize virtually anything. From things like shovels, pickaxes, dynamite, and gravity, to odd things like loose sand, fishing rods, cacti, and buckets of water, everything is a weapon to these guys.
- Dark Is Not Evil: They can wear netherite armor and can use it to defend villagers, although that may not be the case with everyone.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: With enough planning, skill, and the right equipment, The player can go toe-to-toe with abominations like the Enderdragon and the Wither and WIN.
- Dimensional Traveller: If they feel like a change of scenery, they can waltz into the End or the Minecraft equivalent of Hell if they have the prerequisite portal for it.
- Doesn't Like Guns: Despite having access to gunpowder and other materials required to make a working firearm, the player is notably unable to craft firearms. It's telling that the closest thing to a firearm they can possess is the crossbow. This, of course, can change with mods.
- Doom Magnet: Any village the player walks to under the influence of a Bad Omen is marked for death. Whether you leave the inhabitants to their fate or save their lives is up to you.
- Empowered Badass Normal: With normal gear, the player is a tried and true one-man army that can slay hordes of terrible beasts, dig through the mightiest of mountains and create the most awe-inspiring and sometimes, downright impossible, of structures. When they start using an enchantment table to upgrade their gear, they can butcher entire armies of monsters with near-contemptible ease, burrow through the toughest of stone like Moses parting the Red Sea, and become nigh-impervious to any trauma they may suffer on their way.
- Extreme Omnivore: They can eat toadstools with no issues. They also have the option of eating zombie flesh and pufferfish, but those do poison them.
- Fatal Fireworks: They can use fireworks as explosive projectiles to kill their enemies, whether in the form of traps or hand-fired weapons.
- Featureless Protagonist: None of them have any canonical personality traits. As far as their looks, all that can really be made out on Steve's blocky face is dark brown hair, purple eyes, a nose, and something that's either a mustache or a mouth (originally, he also had a beard, which was removed when pretty much everyone mistook it for his mouth). On Alex's face, you can make out a red ponytail, green eyes, and a mouth, and so on for the others. That's about as far as visual detail can go in Minecraft. Additionally, their appearance can be changed to resemble anything the player wants (within the limitations of a highly pixelated, blocky humanoid) since they only really exist as an expression of the player.
- Flight: The Elytra item is essentially a magical wingsuit that doesn't need the user's arms and legs to function. While under normal circumstances it only allows the player to glide, when combined with firework rockets, it becomes a method of fully-powered flight, allowing the player to move incredibly fast compared to any other kind of movement. In creative mode, the player can fly and hover freely under their own power.
- Fragile Flyer: Players wearing elytra can glide and, by using certain items to boost height, outright fly. However, elytra are worn in place of chest armor, so this means having less protection compared staying ground-bound and with a full set of armor.
- Gadgeteer Genius: Thanks to redstone automation, and their innate ability to shape the entire world around them as they see fit, the only limit to what the player can make is their own intelligence and effort. This results in them being able to build some extremely intricate contraptions that have incredible effects... without resorting to Game Mods.
- Self-constructing bridges and tunnels made from solidified lava.
- A functioning Quad-Core computer.
- A walking house.
- 360-degree FTL Pearl Cannon: A device that precisely launches an Ender Pearl (a throwable item that will teleport the player like an Enderman to wherever it lands) to any location that the user chooses within a 360-degree range, to a maximum distance of 44 kilometers.
- Space-based Dragon Slayer: an orbital cannon that can instantaneously kill anything that could theoretically live in Minecraft — including both of the bosses — with one, single bowshot.
- Self-constructing bridges
- Guest Fighter:
- Steve is the final unlockable character in the PC version of Super Meat Boy.
- Steve (alongside Alex, Enderman, and Zombie as alternate skins) joins Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as part of the Fighter Pass Vol. 2 season pass.
- Healing Factor: Their Hyperactive Metabolism allows them to regenerate from injuries far faster than normal. A well-fed player can fully regenerate in seconds regardless of how debilitating the injuries are.
- Heroes Prefer Swords: There is a reason the sword is their most iconic weapon. Swords are the fastest hitting dedicated weapon in the game, and have the most possible magical enchantments.
- Hyperactive Metabolism: Downplayed. Not being hungry means that the health bar can regenerate over time.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: The player can carry 36 stacks of identical items in their inventory. This means they can carry up to 2304 cubic meters of any material.
- As of more recent updates, the Player can now carry 36 Shulker Boxes for a total of 62208 cubic meters of material.
- Hunter of Monsters: If they are not in peaceful mode, this is a mandatory requirement for them, considering that to gather materials or just plain survive they are going to have to confront and kill all manner of hostile creature.
- I'm a Humanitarian: There is nothing stopping the player from eating a zombie's rotten flesh, though it does make them sick.
- Invulnerable Knuckles: They can punch through almost anything if they beat on it long enough and be no worse off for it. They can even punch through a block of Obsidian, albeit after roughly ten minutes of continuous hitting.
- Kleptomaniac Hero: Taken to extremes; when the player comes upon an NPC village, they can take the crops, anything in any chests, the chests themselves, the furniture, and even the entire village itself and the ground beneath it without any backlash from the villagers.
- Knightly Sword and Shield: In addition to sword and bow, sword and shield is a decently common and practical weapon setup that goes well with their extensive use of plate armor.
- Last of His Kind: In single-player, they are the only humanlike being in existence. The villagers, though humanoid, are physically identical and biologically genderless — clearly a somewhat different race of creature than the player character.
- Limited Wardrobe: Unless you change your "skin", they always wear the same clothes.
- Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: They can carry a large and highly protective shield to block both ranged and melee attacks.
- Made of Iron: The kinds of things the player can actually survive are incredible. They can be shot dozens of times, stand in lava without being immediately reduced to cinders, be struck by lightning, cursed with withering, fall great distances, have Creepers explode in their face, and so on.
- Magical Library: There's nothing stopping the player from building a library of enchanted books for the specific purpose of advanced spellcasting. In fact, most players do just that to get the more powerful enchantments.
- Magic Knight: They become this when wearing enchanted armor and carrying enchanted weapons. Or when wielding normal weaponry and carrying around potions. Or when wearing enchanted armor and carrying around potions.
- Magnet Hands: It is possible for them to climb ladders backward with a block of sand in their hand.
- Maker of Monsters: The Wither can only exist if the Player creates it.
- A Master Makes Their Own Tools: Most any tool they have at any time was built by them.
- Master of All: If there is something they cannot do, it hasn’t been added into the game yet. The player is perhaps the most versatile and intelligent entity in the Minecraft world, being able to master any profession or craft there is. With mods, the list of what the player can achieve is only expanded further. Nothing is beyond the realm of possibility when it comes to them.
- Muscles Are Meaningless: Alex's arms are skinnier than Steve's, which is purely aesthetic and doesn't affect anything.
- Non-Standard Character Design: Of all the default player skins, Steve is the only one who has facial hair.
- No Such Thing as Dehydration: While there are some things the Players can drink, such as milk and honey, they don't need to drink.
- One-Man Army: They can rack up quite a body count, including zombies, undead soldiers, demons, inter-dimensional aliens, Big Creepy-Crawlies, Creepers, dragons, wizards, witches, and The Wither. And keep in mind, this is discounting Game Mods.
- Notably it's pretty much required that you do this to "beat" the game. Bare minimum, you must kill a dozen Endermen and a dozen Blazes in order to craft enough Eyes of Ender to successfully enter the End.
- Our Mages Are Different: They can use various forms of rule magic, such as brewing potions out of monster organs and enchanting various inanimate objects using the life energy of dead foes. Combined with their blacksmithing and general crafting skills, they can make an arsenal of magical weapons and tools, including magically enchanted suits of Powered Armor.
- Person of Mass Destruction: A quality that can overlap with Person of Mass Construction depending on their whim — if it’s a requirement in their quest to build something, they can freely demolish and sculpt the land like clay to terraform it into their liking, and if feeling particularly bloody-minded, they can use a stack of TNT to blast massive holes in the land. Additionally, when kitted out for battle, the sheer amount of firepower they can bring to the table through their absurdly vast inventory can easily be enough to level a town in minutes, or permanently deform a landscape. They can carry literally hundreds of flaming arrows, fire charges, magical potion grenades, and explosive rockets. Add their engineering skill to this, and the damage they can do range from devastating to apocalyptic.
- Protagonist Without a Past: The player wakes up in the middle of nowhere, with no possessions at all except the clothes on their back, and starts punching trees for lumber.
- Purely Aesthetic Gender: Picking between the characters changes absolutely nothing in terms of gameplay. There's only one minor model difference: the arms of some of the characters, such as Alex, are one pixel thinner than others' such as Steve's.
- Redhead In Green: Alex has red hair and wears a green shirt.
- Robinsonade: You somehow end up in the middle of an enormous wilderness with literally nothing on you (since clothing isn't an actual item) and no companions save animals, monsters, and the occasional nonhuman villagers. Then you punch a tree, dig a hole, and soon enough you're well on your way to carving out your own private empire.
- Shock and Awe: As of the Update Aquatic, if they manage to obtain a trident with the Channeling enchantment, they can throw it at foes during a thunderstorm to summon a lightning strike upon them.
- Silent Protagonist: The player has never been heard speaking; the closest thing to speech was their grunts of pain when taking damage or dying (which were removed, probably to reinforce this trope).
- The Sleepless: Downplayed. They don't need to sleep, and they can't become tired, but for some reason, Phantoms will attack them if they go without sleep, making sleep more convenient for them than staying awake 24/7.
- Super Not-Drowning Skills: Played straight in Creative Mode where they can't drown, but averted in Survival Mode, where they can and do drown.
- Super-Strength: They can lift cubic meters of material with one hand, and assuming the block of gold is not hollow or suffering from Hollywood Density, Steve can presumably lift over 19 tons with one hand.
- Technicolor Eyes: Steve has distinct purple eyes.
- Throw Down the Bomblet: Potions can be mixed in such a way that they explode, dousing their variable effects over a wide area. The player can easily make enough of these for them to be a primary weapon.
- To Hell and Back: They can build a Hell Gate and wander through the Nether on a regular basis either to gain materials, use as a method of quick transport, or kick the stuffing out of the local demonic monstrosities for fun.
- Tomboyish Name: The original female avatar is commonly referred to as Alex, in place of the more feminine Alexandra. It also saves typing time. The newer characters are all deliberately given gender-neutral names, so could be interpreted as this.
- Tunnel King: They can easily tunnel meters into the earth in only seconds, sometimes going so far as to create and live in giant underground cities.
- Vague Age: They appear to be young adults, but it's hard to tell with their pixellated appearance.
- Walking Armory: Swords are typically their main weapons, but the sheer amount and variety of weapons they can carry and use at once is awe-inspiring: bows, crossbows, battle axes, tridents, bombs, exploding potions, fire charges and even explosive rockets.
- Walk It Off: They can fully regenerate from any injury eventually, so long as they have half a heart left and are more than 85% full.
- Walking the Earth: What they're doing in a nutshell. Minecraft has no fixed narrative or objectives to follow. Instead, the player are free to set their own goals and story as they roam within the game world freely. However, achievements are there to guide the player in order to progress the game though this is optional.
- Wizard Needs Food Badly: They need to keep themselves well-fed. A meter keeps track of how well fed they are, and it depletes slowly over time (faster if sprinting, jumping, or recovering from wounds). If it gets too low, they first lose the ability to heal, then the ability to sprint, and finally starve to death. Not that food is ever short in Minecraft.
Game Mobs
The End
Neutral Mobs
Endermen
- Another Dimension: They're from the End.
- Artificial Brilliance: Will teleport to avoid bodies of water and arrows, which makes them immune to projectile attacks. They'll even frequently teleport in the middle of a fight to avoid your sword blows. This can be mitigated slightly by attacking their feet since they're less likely to teleport when not being directly observed.
- Artificial Stupidity: While water harms Endermen and they normally avoid it, they will still teleport into water if they're set on fire, which will just damage them more than the fire would have...
- Bandit Mook: You will usually see one holding a block they stole, and they will drop it when killednote . They can also steal blocks you placed down, which can spell disaster if your building structure is extremely sensitive, such as making a lava dam. If you don't feel like trying to kill them to get your block back, Endermen may occasionally place down the blocks they stole. Fortunately, they can only steal a small selection of blocks, most of which are naturally occurring, and if you manage to kill them, they drop the block they were carrying. During the beta, they were once able to pick up any block and thus could potentially break holes in the world as they could pick up bedrock.
- Bizarre Alien Biology:
- Water is toxic to them.
- Their teleportation ability may also qualify. While it's doubtlessly linked to their "pearls," it isn't clear whether those are natural parts of their body or artificial devices.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: They're not actively malevolent creatures, being that they only attack when you look them in the eyes, and their habit of stealing blocks seems more out of curiosity than out of any general ill-will. In fact, it's entirely possible to coexist with an Enderman in the same space so long as you follow this abstract, yet simple rule.
- Berserk Button: They don't like being looked at. Specifically, at their eyes. If you look at any other part of them, you're relatively safe. They also don't like Endermites spawned from Ender Pearl teleportation and will actively try to kill them.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Won't bother you until you look them in the face, which is tantamount to assisted suicide.
- By the Lights of Their Eyes: Their eyes glow in the dark, making them easy to spot in cave systems or nighttime if you wait long enough for them to turn around in your general direction. Just make sure you don’t look at them directly lest you want them to cave your head in with whatever's taken their fancy.
- Creepily Long Arms: Their body proportions are inhuman. Their arms and legs are both incredibly long, giving them excellent reach.
- Dark Is Not Evil: Despite their proclivity for becoming very inimical when looked at in the wrong place, otherwise they are perfectly harmless if annoying due to their penchant for thievery.
- Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: The rare case of someone willingly engaging an Enderman in a staring contest while knowing full well it pisses them off.
- Dimensional Traveller: They're the only mob to be found in all three dimensions regardless of whether portals are present.
Word of God says that endermen are "planewalkers", which is why they're found in the Overworld and the Nether as well as the End. - Don't Look At Me: They're normally peaceful, but will become hostile and attack the player if looked at directly — i.e., if the HUD's crosshairs are placed on their torso or head. Their legs and arms are fine to look at, and they'll also not turn hostile you're wearing a carved pumpkin on your head due to it covering the crosshairs.
- Elite Mooks: They're rarer than other mooks, have more health than any non-boss mob, do a ton of damage (up to five hearts on Hard), can move very quickly, and can teleport to close in on you and dodge arrows, which makes them smarter than any other enemy.
- Expy: If the name didn't already make it obvious, they're based on Slender Man. They are dark, extremely elongated humanoids with mysterious origins and intentions.
- The Fair Folk: They're otherworldly creatures that teleport, grab blocks for some reason, and can be provoked by looking at them.
- Flashy Teleportation: They can teleport at will, and have a particle effect at their destination.
- Guest Fighter: A (much shorter) Enderman is made playable via DLC in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
- Hoist by Their Own Petard: One of the not-so-common blocks it can still steal is TNT. Add a bit of fire somehow...
- Humanoid Abomination: Human-like, but very tall and impossibly thin and completely black except for purple, glowing eyes. And then, of course, there's the teleporting, and the fact that they hail from the End.
- Immune to Bullets: Even if they don't teleport out of the way, any landed shots simply bounce off of them.
- Improbable Weapon User: Whenever they pick up a block. Before 1.9, they appear to be using the blocks they pick up to hit you if you engage them in combat. From version 1.9 onward, they instead punch you… while still holding the block.
- Implacable Man: If you somehow manage to gain the ire of such a creature, the only way to protect yourself barring confronting and defeating it is to sit in a lake until sunrise, and even that isn’t foolproof, as occasionally it will phase into the water for a moment to hit you, ignorant of the damage it will inflict upon itself by attempting such a risky maneuver. However, even if you take it on in a fight to the death, their large pool of health, Teleport Spam, and their significant damage output even with diamond armor ensures that it will put up a good fight before it expires, and hiding in water simply won’t work in The End if you don’t smuggle some in along with you, especially if you manage to attract a large pack of them onto your trail.
- Kill It with Water: They take damage from contact with water — standing in the rain for too long is enough to kill them.
- Killer Rabbit: If you play long enough, sooner or later you'll see an Enderman carrying around a flower. D'awwww. Just don't look directly at him...
- Lean and Mean: Endermen are tall, thin, and quite antagonistic if provoked.
- Lightning Bruiser: They have more health than most mobs, they deal quite a bit of damage, and their teleporting abilities make them the fastest enemies in the game.
- Mark of the Supernatural: The eeriest, most supernatural Overworld mob gets glowing, purple eyes.
- Mascot Mook: Not quite to the degree of Creepers, but they're some of the game's most publicly recognizable mobs and have a large presence in spinoffs and advertising. They feature commonly in real-life merchandise, serve as the ultimate antagonistic force in Minecraft Dungeons, and were chosen to represent the game as an alternative skin for Steve? in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
- Necessarily Evil: They may be irritating to deal with if they surround you and constantly attack you, but they're necessary to gather ender pearls to create eyes of ender to enter the End if you're not taking advantage of the Nether Update to trade with Piglins in order to get them instead. However, their reason for spawning in the Overworld and providing you the means to enter their home dimension is quite the mystery.
- No-Sell: Arrows are generally unlikely to hit them, even if you do a surprise attack.
- Obviously Evil: They're tall, thin, very suspicious humanoids with the ability to teleport and pick up blocks, who despise being stared at directly in the eyes, and have purple particles floating around them. It's quite obvious they're meant to be avoided.
- One-Gender Race: While they lack the "breeding" aspect that other mobs this applies to have, they seem to fit this trope because there are no Enderwomen. Of course, it’s possible that you just can’t tell the difference.
- Organ Drops: Possibly, assuming that their "pearls" are a natural part of their anatomy and not artificial devices of some sort.
- Orphaned Reference: They used to be killed by sunlight, but later, this weakness got removed. However, they still prefer the dark despite having no real reason to.
- Our Wights Are Different: They bear a great resemblance to J. R. R. Tolkien's description of a Barrow-Wight in The Lord of the Rings.
- Outside-the-Box Tactic: Accidentally anger an Enderman? Don't have the equipment to win a head-on fight with one? Just use your Flint and Steel to set it alight and it'll forget about you. Also, dumping a bucket of water on them discourages them from attacking you (they revert to neutral and flee when you hit them with a bucket of water).
- Punch-Clock Villain: Implied. The description for the achievement you get when you defeat the Ender Dragon is "free the End," which may imply that the Endermen were enslaved by her. Maybe their utter hatred for eye contact is just a cultural thing?
- Roar Before Beating: If you lock eyes with one, it will emit a horrific growling noise as it tries to close the gap between the both of you.
- Shadowed Face, Glowing Eyes: Their entire bodies are near pitch-black, and they have opposing glowing pink eyes. Their creepy appearance adds to the ominous, mysterious feeling their presence gives off.
- Stealth Pun: The Slender Man kills minors. The Enderman kills miners.
- Surreal Horror: They're 3-meter tall creatures of darkness that teleport and know when you're looking at them. They can even tell if you are looking in their direction in complete darkness when you can't actually see them.
- Teleport Spam: Their main fighting style consists mostly of trying to punch you, then teleporting away before or the exact second they get hurt. This makes them essentially impossible to fight from a distance — they'll just teleport out of the way of arrows. They'll also teleport out of the way of water, which will result in frantic, constant teleporting when they get caught in the rain until they reappear somewhere sheltered.
- Unstoppable Rage: If you do manage to rouse its ire, it will open its mouth and emit a growling/moaning noise while shaking in absolute fury, before crossing the distance between it and you in the blink of an eye and trying to murder you. It will not cease to try and kill you until either of you dies (or unless it gets interrupted by water or the sun).
- Villain Teleportation: Teleportation is one of their natural abilities, and one they will not hesitate to use against you for all it’s worth if you manage to anger such a creature.
- Weakened by the Light: In Beta 1.8, the Endermen couldn't survive in sunlight. This weakness has since been removed, though they aren't as aggressive in sunlight and will simply teleport around more or less at random until they end up somewhere dark.
- Weaksauce Weakness:
- They take damage from water and rain — you can fend them off indefinitely by simply standing in a one-block-deep pool of water, as they won't be able to reach you without taking damage. Snowballs also damage them like Nether mobs, being made of water. They'll immediately turn neutral and flee when getting smacked with one.
- Endermen are three blocks tall, compared to the usual one or two for most mobs, meaning they cannot enter any space below that height. Simply standing in a space two blocks high and at least two blocks deep makes it impossible for them to reach you, and easy to kill them for their pearls. This weakness can also be applied to shelters to prevent them from teleporting into your home (though this does make for a claustrophobic environment, and Endermen don't usually teleport into your buildings unless provoked or if it's raining). Some players like to make 3-block high sheltered areas outside their houses to provide an alternative shelter for Endermen when it rains, keeping them outside. Or just because they are fond of them.
Hostile Mobs
Endermites
Small purple creatures who got introduced in snapshot 14w11a. They sometimes appear when players teleport using ender pearls.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: They share this trait with silverfish. Being arthropods, they take extra damage from weapons with the Bane of Arthropods enchantment.
- Cyclops: Possess a single blood-red eye on their body.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: They can only be spawned if you use an ender pearl, implying that they or their eggs were inside them.
- Underground Monkey: They're very similar to Silverfish, making the same noises and having similar health, damage, and size. Up until an update, they shared a similar model too; identical to Silverfish, except purple and without the frills.
Shulkers
- Ambushing Enemy: They look just like the regular blocks that make up End Cities — until you get close enough for them to notice you and attack.
- Animal Motifs: The more you look at them the more you realize these guys have a lot in common with clams. They consist of a headnote that is protected by two bivalved shells. And funnily enough, their bullets have a slight resemblance to pearls.
- Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Shulkers will duplicate if shot with the projectile of another Shulker.
- Heavily Armored Mook: Their shells, when closed, give them a whopping twenty points of defense (equivalent to a full set of diamond armor), plus complete immunity to arrows.
- Helpful Mook: The levitation projectiles they shoot can be used to scale the otherwise tedious structures they spawn in.
- Not the Fall That Kills You…: Mercilessly exploited. Their chief attack does little damage but makes the player float into the air, opening up dangerous possibilities for fall damage.
- Organ Drops: Their boxes, in all likelihood being natural growths of theirs like the shell of a bivalve, probably qualify.
- Outside-the-Box Tactic: Ironic, considering the Shulker is in a box. The projectiles themselves don't do much, at least to a player wearing diamond armor. It's the fall damage you'll take when the effect wears off and you land that you need to worry about.
- Stationary Enemy: Shulkers cannot move from their place outside of teleporting, and shoot like turrets.
- Villain Teleportation: Like many creatures from the end, the Shulker can teleport.
Bosses
The Ender Dragon
The first boss mob to be introduced to Minecraft, and is sometimes acknowledged as the game's main antagonist. The Ender Dragon is a large black dragon that lives at the End, which is also home to the Endermen.
- Airborne Mook: Being a winged dragon, the Ender Dragon spends all of her time flying high in the air, swooping down to strafe the player with her Breath Weapon but never actually landing.
- Animation Bump: She has very fluid and smooth animations, especially her wings flapping.
- Attack Its Weak Point: There are crystals nearby that zap her with healing magic. She receives massive damage instead if you destroy a crystal mid-zap. However, unless you're really good at taking them out quickly, it's likely the rest of the crystals around the field will undo that damage. On the boss itself, her head takes more damage than the rest of her. The 1.9 update makes this even more difficult, as some of the crystals now have iron bars surrounding them. When it comes to attacking the Dragon itself, it'll heavily reduce damage taken from any attacks not aimed at its head or neck, making its head area the optimal place to strike.
- Bad Boss: The Ender Dragon attacks everything that appears in its dimension indiscriminately, including the Enderman group residing on its island that are apparently under her control.
- Big Bad: The Ender Dragon is the main enemy the player has to fight to "complete" the game, and once entering her dimension, she traps the player there until they kill her, making her into a Self-Disposing Villain of sorts.
- Big Bad Wannabe: She is the main antagonist, but killing her doesn't affect anything in the game, because there isn't a plot, and despite her power, she can still be turned into an experience farm.
- Breath Weapon: One of her attacks is spewing "ender acid" at the player as well as Fireballs. The Breath can now be collected from her ender acid and breath attacks by simply clicking it with a bottle.
- The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Invoked by Notch, who explained that the dragon originally could not pass through solid objects, but doing so caused players to build walls around themselves until the dragon's AI bugged out and froze in place. Notch then decided to make the Ender Dragon destroy any block she touches (except for a select few) so the AI's pathfinding would work correctly and prevents the player from trying to hide.
- Contractual Boss Immunity: Unlike every other mob in the game and even its fellow boss the Wither, the Ender Dragon cannot be hurt by any source of damage that doesn't come from the player, the only exceptions being explosions. This notably makes her immune to all damage from other mobs, no matter how powerful they are.
- Critical Existence Failure: She doesn’t show any damage up until the mortal blow is received, upon which she’ll come apart and disintegrate in a spectacular light show.
- Damage-Sponge Boss: She has a TON of health, which when combined with her ability and proclivity to heal from the various End Crystals means that taking her out can take a fair while.
- Dark Is Evil: The main villain, and a black dragon.
- Diabolus ex Nihilo: Despite her being the Final Boss for the game, no explanation is given for her existence and defeating her doesn't end the game so it's possible to just continue playing well after her defeat.
- Draconic Abomination: She may look like a normal, if black-scaled and purple-eyed, dragon, but the fact that she lives in the End and possesses the same teleportation abilities (although she uses it to phase through objects) gives away the fact that in the natural order of things, there's nothing natural about her.
- Final Boss: She's been confirmed to be this. You can continue your world after defeating her, but killing her gives you the only scripted sequence in all of Minecraft. Getting to her is pretty much the ultimate result of the progression through the game.
- Final Boss, New Dimension: The Ender Dragon can only be found and fought in The End.
- Fireballs: She spits out purple fireballs at you.
- Flunky Boss: Sort of. The End is crawling with Endermen, but they won't aid the boss unless you aggravate them. Even then, as is the standard, attacking one won't anger the rest.
- Flying Firepower: She flies quite quickly, and shoots explosive fireballs at the player.
- Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Seriously, she does not explain existing. Then again, neither is any other mob, and you need to invade another dimension just to find this one, but still. In-game, the only hint at her existence is one of the random title screen splash texts stating:"Kind of dragon free!"
- Glowing Eyes of Doom: These eyes are glowing purple.
- Greater-Scope Villain: A rare case where this and a Big Bad can work simultaneously in that the player can choose not to fight it but still let it roam around in the End, as it's not in the player's direct opposition in that state. It's only if the player is directly opposing it that it can be seen as a Big Bad.
- Griefer: She immediately destroys any block she flies into except for Obsidian, End Stone, and Bedrock.
- Implacable Man: Her healing crystals and immense health ensure that anything you do to her will, barring certain measures, be shrugged off, and her ability to phase through or outright erase anything in her path also means that there’s nowhere her quarry can hide from her rampage.
- The Juggernaut: You literally cannot stop her from going where she wants — she'll just destroy most blocks she flies through, and even the ones she can't destroy, she'll still pass through unhindered.
- Lightning Bruiser: She's fast and agile enough to dodge arrows mid-flight and powerful to the point that she plows through anything in her way.
- Mighty Roar: She delivers heavy draconic roars while flying around during her boss fight, making it easy to notice her.
- Our Dragons Are Different: This dragon can destroy any block she touches (except for End Stone, Obsidian, and Bedrock).
- Pre-Explosion Glow: On Console, when near death, a purple light will shine from her chest.
- Pregnant Badass: She leaves behind a dragon egg upon dying.
- Ramming Always Works: Unusually for a dragon, she uses this a lot. It's also quite effective, since it can deal up to 5 hearts worth of damage and the knockback will send you flying several blocks across (potentially into the void).
- Shoot the Medic First: Either take out the healing crystals in The End or have a very un-fun time fighting the Ender Dragon.
- The Smurfette Principle: Played with; in that while she is the only female enitity in the game, it's not because all of the others are males. Rather it's because all the other mobs are ambiguously gendered for the most part.
- Technicolor Death: While the other mobs simply fall over and vanish in a puff of smoke when killed, the Ender Dragon starts to explode and disintegrate pixel by pixel while shooting out beams of light.
- Throat Light: Also purple, the same as her eyes.
- Victor Gains Loser's Powers: Zigzagged. You can collect her breath, which allows you to upgrade your potions to linger on the ground like her breath beforehand, but you're going to have to kill her to keep it. Although played straight with the elytra, considering that if you want to get them, the dragon must be killed.
