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An image of two shulkers on a white background, seen from two different angles.
Deep Dives
Duncan Geere
Geschreven door
Duncan Geere
Gepubliceerd
11-12-25

Mob Menagerie: Shulker

They’ll turn your world upside-down!

There’s a lot of great loot to be found in and around Minecraft’s strange, distant End cities. There are vast quantities of chorus fruit, valuable enchanted iron and diamond tools and armor, the spire armor trim smithing template, ender chests and – of course – the elytra. 

But as you poke your nose through the alien architecture, you might find yourself suddenly and unwittingly ending your long-term relationship with gravity. As you rise into the air, you quickly realise that you’ve just been shot by our mob of the month – the shulker.

A screenshot of a shulker looking at the viewer.

Shulkers joined the Minecraft universe in the Combat Update, released in February 2016. As well as an entirely new combat system, shields, and tipped arrows, this update dramatically reworked the End dimension, giving players more to do once the Ender Dragon was defeated.

You’ll find them camped out in End Cities, but an untrained eye might not notice one before it’s too late. Their square, purple shells blend in pretty well with the surrounding environment. It’s only when they lift that shell to peek out that you’ll see their strange little faces.

As soon as they notice you, they’ll fire a projectile. You might think you’re safe because it’s not aimed at you, but these “shulker bullets” don’t obey the regular Minecraft laws of physics – they only move in straight lines, and they’ll follow you until they hit you, hit something else, or are destroyed with a weapon or shield.

Here’s Jens explaining why from back in 2017:

A tiny avatar with orange hair and a green hoodie.

It all started when we added the End City. 'End City' was a work-in-progress name, actually, but it just kind of stuck. We wanted to make a new mob for the area and, initially, I was working on a new type of golem you could craft, but I couldn’t come up with a fun design. Then I had the idea of a mob which lived inside the voxel grid. So, I made this cube-shaped mob that’d open up and shoot projectiles that follow the grid, chasing after the player by flying in straight paths and then doing 90 degree turns.

JENS 'JEB' BERGENSTEN

Defeating one isn’t easy – especially when it’s hidden in its shell. Sometimes they teleport away when attacked too. But if you manage to kill one, you’ll be rewarded with its shell – a valuable resource that can be crafted into a shulker box.

A photo depicting a collection of shells and fossils.

Image credit LoKiLeCh // CC BY 3.0

While Shulkers are likely the only creatures that shoot bullets that make you levitate, they’re certainly not the only creatures that hide away inside their shells. In the real world there are more than 100,000 living species that have shells they can hide in – a group known as “molluscs”.

Molluscs live on land and in the sea all over the world. I guarantee that you’ve seen one at some point – they include snails, slugs, clams, and even octopuses and squid. Their shells come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, ranging from a few millimetres to more than a metre across.

In Minecraft, there are squids and glow squids in the oceans, not to mention the newly added nautiluses, which are also molluscs. Could these be ancient cousins of the shulker? Pure speculation of course, and we may never know!

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