Build your very own custom mobs

The stars of the recent Caves & Cliffs Update: Part I are several new mobs, including the adorable axolotl and the rambunctious goat. And yet – sometimes, more is better to make your travels through the Minecraft world ever more exciting. My daughter’s favorite not-yet-in-the game mob is a Strawberry Milk Cow – alas, it’s just not available in the core Minecraft experience. Of course, we can get a wide array of new mobs from the Minecraft Marketplace, but this wouldn’t be a Community article if we didn’t tell you how you can build one yourself! With updated tutorials and documentation for entities, exploring your own custom mob types is easier than ever. Read-on to find out how to build your own mobs (entities) for Minecraft.

Entities are any object that are dynamic and spawned within the Minecraft world. Most commonly, entities are the mobs you know such as skeletons and axolotls, but entities can also include objects like Minecarts or free-floating item entities (for example, an iron ore that is spawned when you break an Iron block). With Minecraft, creators can introduce new types of entities into the world.

A new type of entity is typically composed of interlinked resources (how the mob looks) and behaviors (how the mob behaves, described in JSON description files). To create that new entity type, you’ll want to use at least a couple of tools, such as Visual Studio Code (for JSON file editing) and Blockbench (for visual editing). Blockbench, by @JannisX11, is a great example of a tool that comes from the amazing Minecraft community.

Complementing these tools, we’ve also added several new sets of documentation for Minecraft entity creation, plus two tutorials on how to get started. Check out the Introduction to Resource Packs and Introduction to Behavior Packs articles for more.

Getting started with our first custom mob

The first step for creating a Strawberry Milk Cow is to pattern it from something that exists – in our case, the existing Minecraft cow. To download the standard Minecraft assets that you can use for inspiration, see the Resource Pack and Behavior Pack links from the Minecraft Add-ons page.

From here, you’ll want to use steps from tutorials to create your behavior and resource packs for the mob. Start by creating your cow using this behavior pack tutorial: Introduction To Behavior Packs. This will lead to the start of our strawberry milk cow. Just two small changes: find and replace all the instances of “minecraft:cow” with “coolstuff:strawberry_cow”, and replace “HelloWorld” with “StrawberryCow”.

Next, you’ll want to create a custom visual for the strawberry cow. This becomes easy with a tool like BlockBench. In Blockbench, open the cow from the default Minecraft resource pack that you’ve downloaded. One small fix is needed – you’ll want to rotate the body of the cow by -90 degrees on the X axis to make it fit. Then, you can then design and create many facets of the cow model. Here, we’ll just use the Blockbench Paint tab and select colors to change over to our desired strawberry color. With just a few clicks, you can repaint many of the existing mobs in Minecraft.

When that is done, you’ll want to export the Strawberry Cow to strawberry_cow.geo.json, alongside the cow.png UV map and a Resource Pack definition, like you’d find from this article. See this GitHub repository for a look into the final structure.

Down the road, we’ll show how you can further customize the behavior of the strawberry cow (custom strawberry milk!) but for now, this is all you need to create your first Bedrock entity. Use the tutorials and the new Entity documentation to discover all the facets of custom entities. With custom entities, every vibrant Minecraft world can hold even more surprises and fun.