The new Summer 2015 LEGO Minecraft kits will bring us a bunch of new mobs to populate our Minecraft worlds. The Desert Outpost will add a dog/wolf to the mix. Zombie pigmen, blazes and ghasts are coming with The Nether Fortress. We'll be getting a snow golem with the Snow Hideout. Steve is even getting company as Alex joins the LEGO Minecraft line in two of those sets.
But there's still a lot of variety in Minecraft to be added in future expansions. Here's three sets of mob types I'm hoping to see eventually, listed in groups of six according to my preferred priority. Do you agree or disagree with my selections of what is most important? Let me know by commenting on this post.
Priority One -- Must-Haves
The humble but indispensable chicken is the only food mob not included in the first releases -- kind of a surprise because we did get cows, pigs and sheep -- and even added mooshrooms in the Crafting Box kit. Yes, a brick-built chicken tends to be pretty small. I've built a few based on a white 1x2 brick body topped with a yellow 1X1 modified plate with a horizontal tooth for the bill and a white 1X1 standard plate for the top of the head. (I know it looks more like a duck -- but so does the Minecraft chicken...)
It lacks wings and the distinctive red wattle under the beak -- but those details are too small to model unless you make the chicken badly out of scale with the rest of the mobs. Without chickens, where will Steve get feathers to make arrows... eggs to make cakes... or KFC take-out when a chicken finds itself on the wrong end of a flaming arrow?
The other essential animal would seem to be horses. LEGO already has horses that will work with the standard minifigures, so it would only take a bit of retooling to make it blockier to fit with the Minecraft model. LEGO could scatter a variety of horses into new sets, since Minecraft has 7 colors and 5 patterns to mix and match. Skeleton and Zombie horse variants are also available in the Minecraft world. It's only a matter of time before Steve and Alex can saddle up and ride the Minecraft range.
OK, it might be cheating to list this as a separate mob. It appears there will be an iron-armored skeleton among the Summer 2015 releases, after all. The only thing needed to do it is a new armor color -- which would fit both the skeleton and Steve. But the "skelly-bling" is so well known among Minecraft players that it would be a welcome addition. Do this one in real metallized gold rather than pearl gold for best effect. Shiny!
The truly dreaded witch is too good a mob not to have around when the Minecraft survivalists need a real challenge. Witches are just nasty, and a witch's hut would make a great construction to build a swamp-themed LEGO Minecraft set around. A new squared-off hat would be needed, but the head under it can be a recolored version of the next mob on the must-have list – one which would be my absolute number-one choice to add to LEGO MInecraft...
I was rather expecting these to come along with the second series of releases in Summer 2015, but not this time around. Still, I hope to see these by the end of this year. Villagers are too much a part of Minecraft culture to leave out, especially since there are so many building kits to be featured around them.
Heck, you could do an entire set of kit releases just putting together the iconic village feature locations with the appropriate villager minifigs. (MegaJonJon77 is already doing that with his growing series of YouTube video tutorials on village buildings, to which we link on Minebrix on a regular basis.) So we'd have a Farmer with a Village Farm kit, a Blacksmith with the everpresent Village Smithy, perhaps a Butcher with a standard Village House, a Librarian in his Library (Bookshelves!), a Priest with the big Church Tower set and even a hapless Zombie Villager hanging out at night by the Village Well for the low-end set in the group.
The iconic villager nose could be painted on a regular Steve head if LEGO is feeling like being frugal. To do it up right, though,the villagers should get a new head sculpt and a squared-off folded arms piece that snaps on where the usual minifig arms attach to the torso. Robes made out of cape material for the appropriate villagers would be the icing on the cake. With the different professions represented, this would be a highly-sought-after set of minifigs.
If you have villagers and are building villages, you will need an Iron Golem to protect them. This would make a nice brick-built addition to any LEGO Minecraft village building kit – perhaps to accompany one of the mid-range kits in a set of village releases as described above.
Priority Two -- Filling in the Gaps
The LEGO Minecraft spider is a triumph of cool brick-built design – one of the best creations of the theme. The smaller, faster and annoyingly poisonous cave spider would be a great addition to underworld settings, especially as part of a dungeon spawner. Can a smaller spider still be a brick-built piece? The distinctive blue-black color makes the cave spiders attractive even as they swarm all over you and bite you to death.
Speaking of spiders, wouldn't it be sweet to have skeletons riding spiders – “spider jockeys” – for your LEGO Minecraft layout. These things are about as deadly as you can get, combining the speed, vision and climbing ability of a spider with the ranged firepower of a skeleton.
Spider Jockeys are able to deal damage in two ways and take damage as if they were two separate mobs. Dispatch one, and you still have the other to contend with. An armored skeleton with an enchanted bow atop a spider is enough to scare any sensible Steve, no matter how tough his armor.
Getting a LEGO Minecraft skeleton to mount atop a LEGO Minecraft spider is a non-trivial matter. There's very little for a LEGO piece to clip or plug onto on a skeleton torso. Illustrated here is one method, requiring no custome pieces and only a small modification to the spider body to create a “footboard” onto which the skeleton's feet attach.
This exploded view shows in red the two parts that need to be added to make the “footboard” that holds the skeleton rider to the back of the spider. The gray block is where the normal head should be on this model, since LEGO Digitasl Designer doesn’t have Minecraft-style mob heads added (yet).
This one's easy. LEGO would only need to cast a four-footed mob head in the proper colors, perhaps first for the “natural” sheep colors (black, light gray, dark gray, brown and – yes, it is possible to have one spawn naturally – pink), then the “dyed” colors. Paint those heads with sheep faces, and you are ready to go. The rest of the sheep is all unpainted plates and bricks cast in the proper colors. This would be a great centerpiece
for a Sheep Pen set.
Red, orange, yellow, lime, green, light blue, cyan, blue, purple and magenta are all possible Minecraft colors for dyed sheep – and most can easily be constructed using existing brick colors. It might be too much to hope for to get LEGO to make sheep heads in all these colors, but a “rainbow” sheep flock with several bright colors might be a cute poly-bagged item. (Want a legendary “Notch” color-changing sheep? Just layer several colors of “wool” plates together topped by any colored sheep head!)
These might be the easiest brick-built mobs to do. A printed transparent lime 1X1 brick topped with a 1X1 transparent green plate makes an acceptable mini-slime, a printed 2X2 transparent lime brick with a transparent green 2X2 tile on top and a similarly-colored plate on the bottom is all it would take for a middle-sized slime, while a large slime could be made with four printed transparent lime 2X4 bricks stacked in two overlapping layers with 4 transparent green 2x2 tiles on top and 4 transparent 2x2 green plates below. Easy-peasy.
We're getting a wolf/dog in the series 2 LEGO Minecraft releases this summer, so it only seems fair to give cat lovers (like me) a nod as well! Besides the printed-block ocelot, we would also need parts colored properly for the tabby, tuxedo and siamese cat variants from Minecraft. Meow!
I have mixed emotions about LEGO Minecraft versions of these mobs. I really hate silverfish. I'd rather face an angry Iron Golem than a brace of these scuttling little horrors. They give me the creeps. But if LEGO is to do a stronghold set with an End portal (and this would be a great set for series 3 or 4), I suppose we have to have them.
Doing a brick-built mob here and keeping the silverfish both small enough to be in scale and accurate enough to be recognizable might be challenging. It might just be better to cast a single piece silverfish with a single socket on the bottom to sit on a jumper plate.
Priority Three – Specialty Mobs
Uncommon, certainly. A creeper has to be hit by lightning to create an electricified creeper – and you sure hope that doesn't happen anywhere near to Steve. But hey – why not?
A passible electrified creeper could be easily made by casting a standard creeper in transparent green to simulate the electrified glow. Give it a wide berth. If it's close enough to see, it's too close.
I can't believe these don't appear in the series 2 Summer 2015 Nether Fortress – they missed a bet. But a second Nether Fortress expansion should have them. To do them right would include making a somewhat taller skeleton in a dark grey hue. (Just going to a slightly longer set of bony arms and legs would be enough to make them the requisite 2 1/2 blocks tall so they tower over normal skeletons.) The standard LEGO Minecraft skeleton head would work fine in the darker color.
Of course, once you have wither skeletons, you can easily have...
A brick-built figure topped by three wither skeleton skulls, the Wither could be an add-on in a set containing wither skeletons, or even be a wonderful poly-bagged item by itself with some appropriate decorative items. This would make a nice mini-diorama with Steve and Alex (in really good armor with top-notch weaponry, if they are smart)!
Why should this fairly common cave fixture mob be a lower priority item? Well, partly because it would probably be best done as a cluster of small bats on one base – but mostly because bats don't do anything! They would be cute window dressing for a LEGO Minecraft layout and that's reason enough to make them, but they're not going to draw attention to a set the way dangerous (and larger) mobs will. I want them, but I'm willing to wait until a Deep Cave set released as part of series 3 or 4.
The magma cube is more or less an extension of the slime concept, and should be built in three sizes. I'd do them with stacked translucent plates printed on the edge for the eyes (like some of the micro-sized mobs were created). This would allow you to build the bigger ones in mid-jump by adding smaller translucent red tiles between the layers. Again, this would be a fine addition to a second Nether Fortress set along with the wither skeletons.
Donkeys and mules can wait until later but I definitely want to see them! Donkeys and mules would be built the same, differing only in color. They need to have a way to mount a chest on them, too. (The LEGO chest in use now absolutely needs to be replaced by a block-built Minecraft chest that is the size and shape of the crafting bench and furnace – but that's another article.)
So... what mobs are you hoping for in Series 3 and beyond of minifig scale LEGO Minecraft? If you have customs for some new mobs, send pictures or plans along and we'll share them with the community!
titsay
andulkaphoto
areudirty
gamechangershow
turnnoffyourmind
vaporwave