Minecraft is a peaceful game about building bamboo huts and fishing on rivers. It's also chock full of beings who are so otherwordly they wouldn't be out of place in a horror game.
- The Overworld, while being by far the most peaceful of the three dimensions, isn't free of some nasty pieces of work, although it makes sense considering it's the homeland of secluded mansions populated by mages, abandoned portals to other worlds and magical objects.
- The guardians and elder guardians are fish-like creatures that live in ancient underwater monuments and seem to guard it. The base guardians already are pretty weird, looking very deformed and being able to shoot energy beams from their eyes, but the elder guardian is an archetypical Animalistic Abomination. It's very big and looks pale and sickly, yet it can sense the player from a long distance. It can induce visions of itself and extreme tiresome by merely being next to you and its beams are even more dangerous and weird. Its name implied its been guarding the temple for a very long time. Want to get even weirder? The Mobestiary seems to imply that the guardians are cyborg organisms designed by the original humans and are made of a mixture of normal fish and technology. Yes, they are an Animalistic Abomination and a Mechanical Abomination too!
- The Vexes and Allays are little sprite-like beings who shine with the blue light related to soul manipulation. They seem to be made of stitched souls put together by the Evoker, and display some pretty weird traits:
- Vexes have a Voice of the Legion and can phase through walls, and when angered display red veins all over their body. The developers based them on angels.
- Allays, while more pacifistic, are also even more unearthly. They're an Abstract Eater who Word of God claims feeds on music, and shows Bizarre Alien Reproduction where when feeding on music and right-clicked with an amethyst shard, they will duplicate. They're found trapped on mansions and outposts, seemingly implying that Allays are imperfect Vexes that were born good instead of evil.
- The phantom resembles a flying manta in decay, and it leaves what seems to be a trail of itself while it flies. It pops into existence when a player hasn't slept for a while, and Word of God says it's supposed to feed on insomnia. The fact that its wings are presumably the same material as the elytra, an artifact found on an alternate dimension that allows flight means that phantoms maybe aren't as earthly as we think. Some players asume that the phantoms are a hallucination brought by sleep deprivation, or a case of Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane, but the clues are there to show it's very real. note
- The sculk is probably the closest thing Minecraft has to a Cosmic Horror Story plot. Its a fleshy fungi-like parasitic hyper-organism that seems to have come from an alternate dimension through the portal frame found in ancient cities. To make matters worse, it's heavily implied that the sculk feeds on the souls of beings that died near it, which are absorbed by the sculk catalysts and make the sculk grow even larger, transforming close blocks into more of itself. After the Overworld's population got wiped out, the sculk overtook the underground ancient cities and began expanding through the deep dark, creating entire biomes of itself. And everytime you kill hostile mobs in the deep dark to save your life, you're feeding it and getting it one step closer to devouring the Overworld (although fortunately, mobs don't naturally spawn in the deep dark, so they'll need to be brought in from elsewhere). It speaks volumes of just how powerful the sculk is that its defense mechanism is the flippin' wardens. Speaking of which...
- When the sculk senses a menace to its safety through the sonic organs it has, it first shouts some screams to scare away the intruder but if it senses the player is still there it summons a warden. Wardens are gigantic golem-ogre things that emerge from the sculk and are the single nastiest beings in the game, sharing traits fitting for a Humanoid Abomination, Botanical Abomination and Undead Abomination. They will try to find the player through the aformentioned sonic organs, or their sense of smell, while walking like a Cordiceps victim. Not only do they have 500 HP, but they hit like a truck and move at high speeds, and to top it off they has a sonic attack and can generate an aura of darkness. If the souls on their chests and their spawning animation doesn't spell it for you, the wardens appear to be sprouts of the sculk infused with the souls the sculk feeds on to briefly defend the organism before fusing again with the sculk. As one gamer puts it:
What creeps me about the Warden is that considering the Sculk organism is a whole biome, or maybe even a whole dimension, Wardens could very well be just be its immune system. From the Sculk's perspective, we're just germs damaging its body and the Warden, this monster of near-endless power, is just an antibody. - One theory for the cave sounds and underwater sounds is that they're the noises from an even more powerful entity sleeping under the Minecraft world.
- The Nether is Minecraft's equivalent of Hell, so it's no surprise that its the native homeland to some The Invisibles-type shit.
- While not a mob, but a block, soul sand shows signs of being this. It's a block with screaming faces over it, that when burning shows blue fire that does twice as much damage and that when stepped on with the appropiate enchantment, they free soul-like particles from underneath, the implication being that soul sand is either a cage of souls or that it's solidified souls itself! The fact that it slows you down when you walk on it and you sink a bit has led players to theorize it's the souls trying to drag you down and assimilate you into the sand. Piglins being scared of soul fire and it being the main block in the Soul Sand Valley, an Eldritch Location solidifies even more its Lovecraftian origins. And the cherry on top? It's a component to summon the Wither.
- Ghasts look like spectral jellyfish that can fly and are constantly weeping, and their screams sound like a child in pain. They vomit explosive fireballs and when they do it, their eyes light up with hellfire for a second. Furthermore, they're particularly common in soul sand valleys, further indicating their connection with the afterlife.
- Blazes are a downplayed example. They have Bizarre Alien Biology consisting of a floating head surrounded by spinning rods of fire, shoot fireballs and emit weird metallic breathing sounds and seem to occupy a similar role than guardians but for Nether fortresses. Their rods are used as a basic ingredient for alchemy, including the fuel, the brewing stand and the ingredient for potions of strength. Oh, and Word of God says they're robots. While not particularly eldritch, they're very very strange.
- Wither skeletons are much taller than their Overworld counterparts, appear to be partially made of coal and are all but stated to be linked to the Wither. Their skulls are used alongside soul sand or soil to create such being, they're the two only mobs that can give the Wither effect and the Wither straight up invokes a pair of them in Pocket Edition. This has caused players to assume that Wither skeletons are remnants of the Wither's energy, and by fusing Wither energy with the soul-fest that is soul sand, you're bringing it back to life (Or unlife). Which brings us to...
- The only being that approaches the sculk in terms of eldritchness? The Wither. Its existence seems to have been theorized by the original humans ages ago judging by one of the paintings and the pattern in chiseled red sandstone, and it could very well be the reason they went extinct. It's summoned by combining soul sand with three wither skeleton skulls, and its birth is heralded by an explosion that can be heard from miles away and the blackening of the skies. The Wither is a three-headed beast that seriously wouldn't be out of place in the Cthulhu Mythos. For starters, its only reason to be is to end all life, leaving a black flower (which can grow on netherrack) in the place of any mobs it kills and feed on their souls although it won't target the undead. It shoots little emanations of itself as ammunition, and it's a Poisonous Person Brown Note Being that kills or destroys everything near it, to the point where not only does it poison you with the Wither effect, but it is strong enough to break OBSIDIAN. The battle with it will result in acres and acres of explosion craters and Wither roses, showing its nature as a force for the Apocalypse. After having killed all life in proximity, it will continue to destroy every block until, presumably, the entire world is reduced to ashes. If you manage to kill it, it will give you a Nether star, which can be used to craft a beacon that gives you a permanent power up as long as you're close to it, and is implied to transform the vicinity into a Genius Loci. It's not a wonder that some players refer to it as the Angel of Death.
- The End is where the Final Boss resides, so it only makes sense that its population is 100% made of these.
- The endermen are Humanoid Abominations however you look at it: they're tall, black and apparently slimy, with pitch purple eyes, speak in surreal gibberish and have Bizarre Alien Biology where water burns like corrosive acid for them. When provoked by being looked at, they will teleport all over the place while emitting a horrific shriek that still persists after their death. Then there's the fact that their ender pearls are an ingredient for interdimensional travel, which is foreshadowed by the fact that they are also able to travel through dimensions. Their homeland is the End, an Eldritch Location in its own right, but they're also drawn to the Nether's warped forests, an Eldritch Location inside an Eldritch Location.
- The shulker is probably the most Starfish Alien of all Minecraft mobs, since it consists of a cubic center with eyes surrounded by a floating indestructible shell that they can open and close at will, and they shoot homing attacks that send your gravity field out to lunch. Plus, they can also teleport, they reproduce by shooting other shulkers with their gravity-altering bullets (which begs the question of what exactly are they shooting at you) and seem to occupy a similar role as the guardians and blazes mentioned above, who, as stated, are both Mechanical Abominations
- The endermite is a rare near-harmless example. On paper it sounds very scary: a parasite that comes from a Void Between the Worlds that you briefly access when teleporting with an ender pearl and grabs onto you teleporting it with you to the dimension you were in. There, it will try to kill you and presumably everyone else... and then you realise it's a two-inch long purple bug with as much health as a one-legged chicken and that after a couple minutes it will disappear, indicating that it either must return to its dimension, or continued exposure to another one will kill it. Not very threatening overall.
- The Ender Dragon is a typic Draconic Abomination, fitting for the Final Boss: She’s a giant jet black dragon who, judging by the name of the advancement you get upon killing her, rules an entire dimension. She has Brown Note Being properties, such as destroying every block not native to the End, as well as being able to phase through End pillars and vomiting a corrosive poison. After killing her she dissolves in an explosion of light and her death triggers the opening of a long-closed portal that teleports you back to your spawn point. Oh, and apparently killing her makes you ascend to a higher level where you can read the thoughts of two even larger cosmic beings.
- It's often overlooked due to its strangeness but the ending poem is the dialogue between two entities that are omniscient, speak in a Starfish Language that appears like glitching text, exist in various dimensions at once, and to cream it, are aware of the fourth wall and the fact that they're characters in a game (or rather, a dream in the shape of a game that's a reflection of your own Jungian psyche). And they love you.
