Minecraft’s latest update, Tiny Takeover, has just been released, and with it comes a complete overhaul of the baby mobs in the game. From chicks to zombies, villagers to kittens, not a single mob has been skipped for this revamp. We caught up with Minecraft’s product manager, Anna Lundgren, to talk about all things tiny, as well as what may, or may not, be on the cards in the future.
The Minecraft game-drop format started a little over two years ago, and saw the annual update split into four smaller drops spread throughout the year. Tiny Takeover came around, Anna says, because the mob artist hadn’t been “super happy” with the game’s babies for a while now. “We just wanted to make them cuter, more lovable, and have more unique personalities,” she explains. “I think after having done Chase the Skies, Copper Age, and Mounts of Mayhem, they all leaned into very different aspects of the game than this drop does. It felt like it could be good timing to lean into the more adorable and cutesy side of Minecraft, even though some of them are still very hostile.”
This, of course, brings up the question of player morality. If a tiny hostile mob is this much cuter, how are we supposed to face off against them? “I think you feel that way as a player stepping out into the night and seeing a baby zombie coming–it’s really cute! But as soon as it gets close enough and attacks you, I think you’ll be able to throw that moral doubt away,” Anna laughs. Minecraft has always had dark and scary aspects to it, with the more dangerous mobs coming out at night, the deadly Warden that lurks beneath the surface, and Creepers that could blow your entire build to smithereens with barely a second’s notice. It’s also been a place for bright, fun, and even cute interactions. As Anna notes, it’s easy to enjoy the game without making it too intimidating, which is why hostile mobs got the cute treatment, too. “It should have scares in there, but also you need the cuteness! It’s so important, because it opens up avenues for so many different ways to experience Minecraft,” she explains.
It was the arrival of the Happy Ghast and its infant form, the Ghastling, last summer that inspired the creation of the Golden Dandelion. Feed this to almost any baby mob, and they’ll remain an infant forever. “We saw so many players saying, ‘Oh my God, [Ghastlings] are so cute. We just want to keep them babies forever!’ and that feedback was even stronger when we released the first batch of new visuals for the baby mobs with the chicken and other cuties in there. We just felt like we should lean into this, because it’s not just about the cute aspect. That’s one important part, but it’s also about enabling players to have more agency and a say in what’s happening in their world, and giving them the extra tool to have more power.” The Golden Dandelion lines up with other items that already exist in Minecraft, too. There already exists the Golden Apple and Golden Carrot, “so a Golden Dandelion felt like a well-balanced step in progression for when we wanted players to be able to obtain this power,” Anna explains.
That level of player feedback is invaluable in the continued development of the game. “That’s basically where the success of Minecraft came from initially–working really closely with our community and listening to our players,” Anna says. “Obviously, all of us on the team read a lot of comments ourselves on the internet, but we also have wonderful community managers that make sure we don’t end up in our bubbles. We hear the feedback from different parts of the community. Of course, we can’t act on everything because there are too many ideas in the world, but we really try to lean into player feedback that goes hand in hand with where we want to take the game.”
Formerly, Minecraft’s developers had ruled out things like hostile mobs that were non-fantastical, the addition of voice chat, implementing community-made mods, and way, way more. However, Anna now says that “Nothing is ever off the table when it comes to what’s possible in the future.” In fact, some of the more recent drops include content that had been suggested and then shelved years back. “You always have more ideas than you can realize at one point in time. But I also love how that doesn’t necessarily mean that things won’t happen,” Anna says. “After a lot of years of thinking out in the public, the Copper Golem from the mob vote [in 2021] finally made its way in, and we had the firefly bushes coming in as a second interpretation of the fireflies we had been thinking about for 2022.” Those fireflies were scrapped since frogs already existed in Minecraft, and would have had to eat them. “It’s really nice when you have those ideas that, for some reason–time or other challenges– [don’t] make sense at the time.”
While the overhauled babies for Tiny Takeover have now made their way into the game, Mojang is already looking ahead to the next drop, named Chaos Cubed. The next drop should arrive within the next three months, and will see the addition of the Sulfur Cube–an interesting little block that can take on the properties of other blocks that it eats.
