Future of Minecraft mob animation looks bright

Minecraft has loads of mobs with unique behaviors, appearances, spawning areas, and even animations. Each creature moves, looks around the world, and performs actions in specific ways. They are all 3D models that were created by Mojang Studios and were given a set type of animations. While the old vanilla mobs might look robotic in their animations, new ones are drastically better.

This is how Mojang Studios has gradually improved mob animations for their officially made creatures. Furthermore, they will continue to add more animations to make Minecraft mobs feel more alive.

Note: This article is subjective and solely reflect's writer's opinions.

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How Mojang has and will continue to improve Minecraft mob animations

New vs old mob animations

Mojang has drastically improved mob animations in recent updates (Image via Mojang Studios)

When Mojang Studios first released Minecraft in 2011, the first mobs that were present in the game did not have a lot of animations. The Ender Dragon, the final boss mob of the game, had the most character. Apart from that, regular hostile mobs like skeletons, zombies, and more were quite basic and appeared robotic.

In 2019, when the developers released the 1.14 Villager and Pillager update, they still did not add a lot of animations to villagers and pillager mobs. They still featured robotic movements, activities, and more.

In 2020, however, Mojang Studios started adding more animation details, starting with the Warden. This character was showcased in October 2020 when Minecraft's Caves and Cliffs update was introduced. When the new hostile mob was introduced during the live show, the entire player base was shocked at how detailed and lively the animation was.

Though the Warden was delayed, they further improved the animation and released it with a 1.19 update. Following this, every major and minor mob Mojang Studios has added to the game had significantly better animations compared to old mobs.

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Mob animation mods and resource packs challenging Mojang Studios in mob animations

Resource packs like Fresh Animations became widely popular, giving Mojang strong competition (Image via CurseForge)

Soon after Minecraft was released in 2011, players started making mods and texture packs for the game. Since the game was a sandbox, they were even able to alter the official mob's models however they wanted. This enabled them to create different packs that change their textures, and even models to make them look completely different.

In 2021, a modder named FreshLX created a new resource pack called Fresh Animations. This pack completely changes Minecraft's mob animations. From creepers to villagers, every mob was given a unique walking style, eye blinking animation, eye movement, breathing movement, and so on.

This became so popular that it has over 21,000,000 downloads from a single website (CurseForge) only.

Similar to this, several other mob animation-enhancing resource packs were made and downloaded by the community. Mojang Studios could observe detailed mob animation's popularity and work on their vanilla mobs in the future, making them look and feel more alive than old creatures.