Mob Menagerie: Goat - Minecraft

Skip to Main Content Deep Dives Written By Duncan Geere Published 8/29/22 Mob Menagerie: Goat

Minecraft's very own battering ram!

What’s this? A new series on Minecraft.net? That’s RIGHT! We cover blocks, we cover inventory items, we cover biomes (though we’re starting to run out of those, so we’ve been pestering the dev team to add more). But we recently realized that we were totally neglecting the living creatures that roam around Minecraft’s various dimensions. Welcome, dear reader, to Mob Menagerie.

We’re kicking things off today with a relatively new entry in our animal canon. This horned screamer was added to Minecraft in the first part of the Caves & Cliffs update, and patrols the highest parts of the world. Do you know who we’re talking about? That’s right – the star of our first Mob Menagerie column is the goat!

Goats spawn during the daytime in groups of two or three in the uppermost reaches of mountain biomes – that means snowy slopes, jagged peaks, and frozen peaks. Generally, they just hang around in these inhospitable places, munching on what grass they can find and leaping over obstacles.

Here’s Alexander Östman, who was part of the team who created the goat, explaining how this jumping-between-blocks behavior was implemented:

"When trying our code out, we usually placed a goat on a single block up in the air and another block nearby to verify that the goat would jump between the two. Here we encountered a number of funny bugs! For instance, one of the first times the jump-force math was off, so the goat skyrocketed up and up, only to fall to its demise! Another time the rotation calculation was off so the goat jumped backward into empty air instead of forwards to the other block! Eventually though, we were able to find the right math and the goats now (almost) always manage to jump to their desired target block!”

Alexander Östman

Warning: when goats see other creatures, they can get a little ornery – and a small number are particularly unfriendly. They’ll charge and ram any intruders in an attempt to scare them off. If that intruder is you, then here’s my advice – keep an eye on the goat, and as soon as it lowers its head and starts stomping, move out of the way. The goat won’t notice, and will charge at the place where you were, rather than the place where you are.

If you don’t move out of the way in time, you’ll be knocked back a huge distance. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but the terrain you’ll tend to encounter goats in is rather precipitous, and there’s every chance you’ll be knocked off the mountain entirely. Which hurts.

Goats, as I’m sure you know, exist in the real world too. They’re actually a type of antelope which was domesticated about 10,000 years ago in what is now Iran. Since then, humans have been raising them for milk, meat, fur and skins.

The total world population of goats is about a billion, according to the United Nations, and this is largely because they’re fairly easy to look after. They’re highly curious creatures, and will taste just about anything that remotely resembles a plant to see if it’s worth eating – including cardboard, clothing, and paper.

As well as curiosity, goats are known for their agility – able to climb and balance in precarious situations. They often climb trees, and are notorious for being able to escape almost any enclosure – often just for fun. In some studies, they’ve been found to be as intelligent as dogs, even asking humans for help solving puzzles.

In Minecraft, our goat sounds are maximally authentic – recorded from real goats. So if there are none near where you live, then head in-game, trek up a mountain, and enjoy the chorus of screams.

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