Mob Menagerie: Goat

What’s this? A new series on Minecraft.net? That’s RIGHT! We cover blocks, we cover inventory items, we cover biomes (though we’re starting to run out of those, so we’ve been pestering the dev team to add more). But we recently realized that we were totally neglecting the living creatures that roam around Minecraft’s various dimensions. Welcome, dear reader, to Mob Menagerie.

We’re kicking things off today with a relatively new entry in our animal canon. This horned screamer was added to Minecraft in the first part of the Caves & Cliffs update, and patrols the highest parts of the world. Do you know who we’re talking about? That’s right – the star of our first Mob Menagerie column is the goat!

Goats spawn during the daytime in groups of two or three in the uppermost reaches of mountain biomes – that means snowy slopes, jagged peaks, and frozen peaks. Generally, they just hang around in these inhospitable places, munching on what grass they can find and leaping over obstacles.

Here’s Alexander Östman, who was part of the team who created the goat, explaining how this jumping-between-blocks behavior was implemented:

Warning: when goats see other creatures, they can get a little ornery – and a small number are particularly unfriendly. They’ll charge and ram any intruders in an attempt to scare them off. If that intruder is you, then here’s my advice – keep an eye on the goat, and as soon as it lowers its head and starts stomping, move out of the way. The goat won’t notice, and will charge at the place where you were, rather than the place where you are.

If you don’t move out of the way in time, you’ll be knocked back a huge distance. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but the terrain you’ll tend to encounter goats in is rather precipitous, and there’s every chance you’ll be knocked off the mountain entirely. Which hurts.