5 things players probably didn’t know about slime in Minecraft

Slimes are one of Minecraft's rarest mobs, meaning that most players probably have little experience with them. There are a handful of interesting mechanics surrounding the jumpy green cubes that all players should know.

Read on to learn five interesting facts about the hostile, green slimes you probably didn't know.

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5 interesting facts about Minecraft slimes

1) They move no matter what

Slimes home in on a player (Image via Minecraft)

Unlike almost every other mob in the game, which stops moving when there are no players nearby, slimes continue hopping around even when there is no one around. The way they move is as follows:

First, they check to see if a player is within 16 blocks of the spherical distance. If no players are found, the slime then checks for iron golems or snow golems in the same radius. They hop every 0.5 to 1.5 seconds, changing direction by 1 radian left or right between each jump.

If a target is found, they will instead jump with a delay of only 1/3 the normal time and set their direction directly towards the target before jumping.

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2) Slime chunks

A quirk of Minecraft mob spawning is that in every world, there are certain chucks that are designated as slime chunks. They make up roughly 10% of all chunks. While the entire chunk is considered a slime chunk, slimes only spawn below Y level 40, regardless of light. Slime chunks cannot be generated in mushroom field biomes.

Where Minecraft's Java Edition uses an equation that pseudo-randomly generates slime chunks based on chunk coordinates and world seed, Bedrock Edition uses a random formula that ignores world seed. This means that in Bedrock Edition, the same seed will have a totally different set of slime chunks.

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3) Full moons

A full moon at night (Image via Minecraft)

Slimes can also spawn in swamps, but only under some relatively specific circumstances. The game checks for two factors:

• If the light level is equal to or less than a random integer, ranging from zero to seven
• If the fraction of the moon that is bright is greater than a random number, ranging from zero to one

If both of those are true, and the altitude of the block is between 50 and 70, there is a 50% chance to spawn a slime whenever a mob spawns. This means that the chance of swamp slimes increases as the moon approaches the full moon phase. Swamp slimes also cannot spawn in any variant swamps, just the normal swamp.

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4) Name tags and ladders

If a large slime is named using a name tag, all the smaller slimes will have the same name when the slime is split. This continues all the way down to the smallest size of slime. In addition, the two smaller sizes of slimes are some of the only mobs that are able to correctly path their way up ladders.

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5) Spawn area

A representation of the slime spawn area (Image via Minecraft)

Slimes need an area roughly equivalent to 3x2.1x3 blocks of free space to spawn. There cannot be any solid or liquid obstructions in this space, as the game checks for an area large enough for large slimes to spawn, even though the size of the slime spawned is generated later in the spawning process.