Creepers in Minecraft should have different looks like Zombies and Skeletons.

Creepers are as much Minecraft mascots as Steve and Alex, but Mojang could do more to improve their appearance within the game.

Without creepers, Minecraft may not have become what it is today. Exploding mobs are essential to the Minecraft brand, despite the presence of other iconic monsters such as endermen. Even so, creepers don’t have many different types. With the exception of the rare charged creeper, players can always expect the same thing when they run into a creeper. In the meantime, Mojang has added new versions of some basic Minecraft mobs, like zombies and skeletons. This makes combat more interesting and makes some Minecraft biomes more different from each other. It is about time that Minecraft added new variants of creepers in the same style as these other creatures.

Over the past few years, a great deal of classic Minecraft content has been reworked. The Wild Update added lots of new features to swamps, while other updates from recent memory restructured the other and fundamentally altered how caves and mountains generate. In contrast, Mojang has preferred to add new mobs, such as piglins and the allay from the Wild Update, rather than make frequent changes to existing mobs. Creepers currently have less variety than zombies and skeletons, so they should be the focus of future mob changes.

How Mojang Might Develop Creepers

Currently, zombies and skeletons provide a great deal of inspiration for future creeper enhancements. The most obvious blueprints are husks and strays; husks inflict hunger and resist sunlight, unlike other undead mobs, and strays can slow the player, making it more difficult to close the gap. However, Minecraft has much more to offer. Baby zombies are significantly faster and therefore, arguably, more dangerous than regular zombies, and both mobs occasionally spawn mounted, ranging from spider jockeys to skeleton horsemen. Due to these factors, players exploring the entirety of the Minecraft overworld can encounter a wide variety of combat situations.

Creeper variants derived from husks and strays could have a wide variety of unique effects. For example, a red creeper that sets players on fire when it explodes seems like an obvious choice, although it would overlap with fire-themed Nether mobs such as blazes. The effects of potions in Minecraft also offer numerous options. Nausea would be a particularly deadly way to further disadvantage players after they’re caught in a creeper explosion, or Mojang could add a new Deafness status effect that causes players to temporarily lose hearing after a creeper sneaks up on them.

In addition to causing new conditions, creepers could benefit from a greater variety of sizes and shapes. Baby creepers could be a frightening new threat in Minecraft, moving faster than their larger counterparts but causing less damage and destroying fewer blocks. Baby creepers could also open the door to “cluster creepers” that spawn baby creepers when they explode, much like cluster grenades found in lots of other video games. On the other hand, enormous creepers that move slowly but deal devastating damage would add a terrifying new element to the rolling hills of Minecraft at night; this type of “siege creeper” could also be a useful addition to pillager raids in Minecraft as a cousin to the ravager.

Creeper variants would go a long way toward resolving the shortage of unique mobs in a number of Minecraft biomes, which is currently the case. Creepers can be frustrating to run into in Minecraft Survival and Hardcore, but if Mojang finds some ways to make them more engaging to fight, they could renew their places as icons of Minecraft. The upcoming spinoff Minecraft Legends seems to let players rally creepers to their cause while adding lots of new mobs, so maybe it’ll introduce some compelling new creeper subtypes that eventually make their way to the base game.