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Minecraft may be a game with a fairly bright and light-hearted presentation, but it also has some rather creepy occurrences. Throughout the title's developmental history, fans and even employees at Mojang have pointed out facts that can be a little disturbing. They may not necessarily be outright horrific for most players, but they can be fairly unsettling to think about for a time.
From strange glitches centering on mobs to the history of how gameplay elements and locations were created, there are a lot of strange and unusual little tidbits of information in Minecraft. Some of them are creepier than others, but all of them do have a certain level of eeriness to them that fans may want to know.
Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective and reflect the opinions of the writer
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10 creepy Minecraft facts that fans may not know
1) Enderman eyes can turn white
Minecraft fans know quite well that enderman eyes are typically purple, fitting with the overall theme of the black/purple End dimension. However, since these mobs technically have eye textures independent of their body textures, a strange glitch can occur when they look straight up.
When this happens, the textures of an enderman's eyes and body are misaligned, which causes their eyes to turn bright white. It's a fairly unsettling sight after seeing ordinary purple enderman eyes for so long.
2) The history of Blazes
Blaze mobs don't necessarily look all that intimidating, but Mojang has revealed that they have a particularly horrific past.
According to a 2019 Mojang blog post titled "Visit the Nether!," Mojang's Duncan Geere speculated that Blazes are sentient creatures made purely out of lava that were created by the original founders of the nether fortresses. However, they eventually rose against their masters and wiped them out.
Granted, this hasn't been supported by anything in-game, but hearing this statement directly from a Mojang employee may leave players feeling a little differently about Blaze mobs in general.
3) The Warden's inspirations and lore
Brandon Pearce of Mojang previously stated that the Warden mob is the most developed creature in Minecraft's history, as it went through several different revisions before reaching its final form. Pearce added that the creature was heavily inspired by the musical puzzle at the end of the music disc "11" and the works of H.P. Lovecraft.
According to Mojang developers, they wanted the Warden to be similar to Lovecraft's eldritch horrors: a creature that inspired fear through being incredibly alien and otherworldly. This is part of the reason the creature contains souls within its chest, which, Pearce said, are crucial to the mob's overall lore.
It's still unclear as to whose souls reside within the Warden or why the mob possesses them. However, it's certainly creepy to think about the deep dark biome's resident claiming the souls of the previous inhabitants of the ancient cities. And that's merely one theory.
4) Phantoms make the sound of a screaming baby
Phantoms may be one of the least favorite mobs among Minecraft players due to their ability to harass targets when they haven't slept for three in-game days. However, these mobs also have a pretty creepy story behind the memorable sound they make as they fly through the sky.
In an interview with Asoundeffect.com, Mojang developer Samuel Åberg made a strange revelation:
"For the Phantom, heard in both Vanilla and Dungeons, I used recordings of my baby son screaming."
That's right, the sounds that phantoms make in-game are actually the sound of Åberg's infant son screaming. This really gives just one additional reason to avoid these high-flying terrors in the future.
5) Witches and Baba Yaga
Witches are far from the most intimidating mobs in Minecraft, but they do have a particularly eerie backstory attached to them. According to a Mojang YouTube video titled "The Last Ten Years: Ten Things You Probably Didn't Know About Minecraft," the developers stated that the witch mob was based on the Slavic folklore legend of Baba Yaga.
The creature's mythology differs depending on sources, but some Slavic tales believe Baba Yaga to be an elderly woman who lives in a swamp hut and fries children before eating them whole. Her hut is also known to stand on chicken legs, and she has an affinity for making poultices and potions, which sounds somewhat similar to the final in-game mob, though Minecraft's witches are a bit less creepy.
6) The origins of the "Johnny" Easter Egg
Many Minecraft players are aware of the name tag "Johnny" Easter Egg. When a vindicator mob is named Johnny via a name tag, it will indiscriminately attack any target it sees with its axe. This is, in fact, a reference to the horror novel The Shining by Stephen King as well as its iconic film adaptation directed by Stanley Kubrick.
In the novelization, the character Jack Torrance is possessed by the spirits of The Overlook Hotel, causing him to go on an axe-wielding rampage against the hotel chef Dick Halloran as well as his own wife and son. The name "Johnny" is uttered in the film adaptation, where Jack (portrayed by Jack Nicholson) breaks a hole in a bathroom door with his axe before looking through it and shouting, "Here's Johnny!"
Funnily enough, this improvised line in the film was itself a reference to The Johnny Carson Show. However, it's a bit eerie to think that Mojang would implement an Easter Egg about a creative work as dark as The Shining into an all-ages game like Minecraft.
7) The face in the "11" music disc
The "11" music disc is well-known in Minecraft for its creepy sound effects and mysterious story, but some players went a step further and made a strange discovery. When placed in a spectrogram program that visualizes audio waveforms, players can find a face within the audio. Some have stated that it has a likeness to the default character, Steve, or one of many different mobs.
Hexadecimal values that read "12418" can also be seen, which is likely a reference to the game's audio engineer C418, who created the majority of Minecraft's songs. This is supported by the first two digits "12" being the hexadecimal value for the letter C.
Whatever the case, finding the likeness of a face in the music graph of the 11 music disc is undeniably eerie.
8) Creepy ambient noise is coded in
There's a lot of information on Minecraft: Java Edition's debug menu, and players often don't make sense of all of the values and words seen on-screen. However, one they may have glossed over is the mood percentage. This value increases as the light level decreases around the player, particularly in dark locations like caves.
When this percentage reaches 100%, Minecraft plays the eerie cave exploration sound before resetting and beginning to increase again. The only way to keep the sound from playing is to increase the light level.
Whatever the case, it can be a bit creepy to know that spooky sound effects are intentionally coded into the game based on how dark and eerie a player's environment is.
9) The Killer Bunny
A reference to the classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the killer bunny is an unused Minecraft mob but still resides in the game code. This little rabbit is hostile to players, foxes, and wolves and can deal a whopping four hearts of damage when it strikes its target on Normal difficulty. Despite being unused, players can still summon this mob with the command "/summon rabbit ~ ~ ~ {RabbitType:99}".
This red-eyed bunny won't appear under normal circumstances, but it can certainly scare Minecraft players who find a summoned one in the environment and end up getting attacked.
The idea of a killer bunny mob might be a bit silly, like it was in the Monty Python film, but players might change their tune when it takes a chunk out of their health bar.
10) Steve's zombie origins
Steve's appearance is the default skin used in Minecraft, but where did he come from? Interestingly enough, Markus "Notch" Persson, the game's creator, utilized Steve's model and skin in an older game he had been working on known as Zombie Town. Not much is known about this unfinished title, but the lone video of it during development is quite creepy to behold.
In the video, watchers can find a group of entities that look like Steve running about in a horde, flailing their limbs and rotating their heads. It's unclear as to whether these "Steves" were friends or foes, but seeing the imagery of a group of Minecraft protagonists running about and thrashing in the dark is undeniably creepy. It does make one look at Steve himself in a different light.
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