Summary
Minecrafthas one of the most iconic rogues' galleries in all of gaming, sporting a wide variety of hostile mobs for players to battle. However, there’s one aspect ofMinecraft’s rich bestiary that could do with being expanded.
Among the game’s catalog of mobs,Minecraft’s spider has stood the test of timelike few others. It was the fifth mob added to the game — all the way back in 2009, prior to the title’s official release. Spiders fill a more specialized niche in terms of threatening the player, having less health than zombies, skeletons, and creepers to compensate for added utility. They can climb walls, pounce, and carry skeleton riders — not to mention the potion effects they can have in Java’s harder difficulties. They also have great loot drops, with spider eyes in particular being a necessary component in potions of weakness (needed for curing zombie villagers) as well as potions of poison.
Minecraft Needs More Creepy Crawlies
Spiders are part of the arthropod creature type, alongside cave spiders, bees, silverfish, and endermites.Minecraft’s most prolific arachnidsaren’t the only highlight here; cave spiders are a deadly twist on typical spiders, while bees are an incredibly unique mob that can source some useful resources. On the other hand, this assortment of creatures is far smaller than it really ought to be. Just as undead gets to be a thriving category filled with foes, the arthropod family should be expanded with some new faces.
Insects Need More Representation In Minecraft
After the firefly fiasco of yesteryear,Minecraftfans are still clamoring for new mobsto fill that void. Particle-sized creatures like flies or ants would make for some solid aesthetic flair, helping forests and jungles spring to life even more. These don’t even have to be aggressive creatures, just having more insectoid mobs would make the arthropod family feel more ingrained within the world. Of course, given complaints about modern mobs lacking mechanical use, it would be beneficial for them to have a gameplay function. In this case, the bee provides a perfect blueprint for how arthropod creatures could contribute to some fascinating subsystems.
On the other hand, this is the perfect category for aggressive or neutral mobs. Giant arthropods, like the killer ants ofThem!or Shelob inLord of the Rings, are staples in media. Even if being comically sized isn’t fantastical enough for Mojang to consider, as the studio has strayed away from making real creatures monsters to fight, warped creatures in the vein of endermites would still be an interesting direction to go down. To this point,Minecraftcould do with a new bossof arthropod origin; undead have the Wither, and aquatic mobs have Elder Guardians, so it only makes sense for arthropods to get this same ray of limelight.
Bane Of Arthropods Needs More Of A Reason To Exist
Bane of Arthropods has always beena poorMinecraftenchantment. No arthropod mob has as much health as a standard zombie, and Sharpness is already a better candidate for swords as is. The additional context of arthropods being an especially small family of mobs only compounds the problem.
Therefore, more arthropod enemies with better health and damage output would make Bane of Arthropods less of a footnote. It could make theenchantment relevant toMinecraftsurvival, akin to how Smite is worth investing in for a secondary weapon. It’s practically impossible to unseat the general usefulness of Sharpness, but that doesn’t mean a niche can’t be carved out. Unlike with armor, it’s not unreasonable to carry a separate weapon for certain situations, and dotting the map with thrilling arthropod encounters would make for great justification.
