Endermen: The Why, What and How - 1.8 Update Discussion - Archive - Minecraft Forum (2024)

In this post, I will be detailing why the endermen were made, what they became, and how to make them better.

Notch originally intended for the endermen to be a creepy mob, as he details here. That's why the stare blankly at you when you look at them. That's why they teleport. That's why they move blocks.

But they don't come across as creepy, nor even remotely challenging. In fact, most things in the game kill it. Then there is the big problem. The one people are always complaining about. That the endermen can move all blocks, whenever they feel like it.

Let me dispel a myth. Endermen can, in point of fact, move all (completely solid) blocks. Including bedrock and obsidian. The only blocks they cannot move are blocks such as half-slabs and stairs. Mojang originally intended for them to only move natural blocks, but that obviously didn't work out.

Now when people complain about this, other people always say stuff like "light the area," or "build a moat." But that's not the only problem. Endermen can move, first of all. And light won't keep them away. But also, endermen wreck the natural landscape. Who wants a forest of floating trees? Not me, for sure. This could easily be fixed by simply coding in a list of blocks which endermen can move. Blocks like dirt, sand and clay I think would be acceptable. Also, so the blocks they remove won't look completely horrible, make it so that they can only move blocks with out any solid block above it. The second change alone would keep them from annihilating walls and making trees hover.

Another thing people say about moving blocks is "it's a challenge and you can't deal with it." Endermen moving blocks is not a challenge, because there is nothing you can do to stop it, short of preventing all endermen from spawning anywhere, which is impossible. A challenge must present a problem which the player can solve, instead of one that will repeat itself time after time again. As notch himself said,

One of the biggest game design decisions in Minecraft is that all (well, most) negative things that affect the world or the player should happen near the player, and be clear to the player. That’s why creepers only explode near players, and that’s why fires stopped spreading indefinitely. This is somewhat related to my dislike of mazes in game design, where the player has no way of knowing or figuring out before hand what decision is the correct decision. Don’t penalize the player for things they can’t control.

I conclude, endermen should only move blocks if the player is aware it is happening, and the player understands why.

And there's another problem. Endermen aren't interesting. Apart from the teleporting and block moving, they're pretty much like every other mob. They might freak you out the first couple of times, but that wears off quickly. So why don't we rework endermen behavior?

We need to make the enderman a more interesting and challenging enemy. We should make the mob much rarer, and they should only spawn one at a time instead of in packs. Once spawned, and enderman should survey the area. It should be smart. It will not wander into water. It will look for the darkest area nearby and stay there. It will stay on the border of darkness, just beyond where light level zero begins, and stay in that general area. This will also make endermen avoid the sunlight. Now the player comes by, and sees the enderman. He looks directly at the enderman, and the enderman stands still. It slowly turns to look at the player, and now its eyes are glowing a bright white. The player looks away, the fight begins.

We should prolong the fight, so as to allow the use of more intricate battle tactics. We can start by giving the enderman more health. Fifteen hearts, perhaps?

Now we get into the battle. The new enderman has three attacks. It can no longer teleport, but can sprint at twice the speed of a player sprinting. Its first attack, which it may use if the player is close enough, and is right in front of the enderman, involves sprinting for the player, and using its powerful arms to launch the player backwards. The player will take a base damage of two hearts, and will also take falling damage when he lands. If the player is far enough away from the enderman, or best path to the player is not clear, the enderman will launch his second attack. He will unhinge his jaw, and breath a dense particle smoke at the player, obscuring his vision for a while. The enderman will now survey the area. An enderman's computations should be hindered in the code, and when an enderman is checking a block, it should look in the direction of that block, so as to give the illusion of thought. If something is blocking the enderman from getting to the player directly, it will begin to pick up blocks, and build a way around it. Is the player on or behind a wall? Build a staircase. Is the player separated from him by water? Build a bridge. The enderman will, of course, sprint to speed up the process, but can only sprint ten to twelve blocks at a time, and only once every few seconds. Otherwise, the enderman may take a long route around the player. Once angered, the enderman will stop at nothing to kill the player. It can even open wooden doors (although it can't fit through them, because they're three blocks high). Now comes the enderman's final attack. It comes up from behind the player, and strangles him. The player can move, but as if in a cobweb. At this stage in the battle, your only reasonable option is to kill the enderman before it strangles you to death. As it kills you, instead of your health going down, your oxygen bubbles will appear on the screen, and as they deplete, the screen becomes black, and you die.

If an enderman is hit by sunlight, he will bow his head down, and stand still. He will slowly fade a way as he releases a particle cloud, not unlike the one he releases at the player. He will not drop anything if he dies in this fashion. If the player kills him, the pixels of his texture will crumble away, from the head down to the foot, and he will drop the new ender pearl, this one black.

The new ender pearl will be stackable to sixteen, and when right clicked with, will form another dense particle cloud which will spook and blind all mobs in the eight to ten block radius it hits. It will last for a few seconds, giving you a chance to escape your foes, and does not work on endermen themselves.

This new enderman, I believe, will truly be an interesting mob which, while you won't have to be constantly on guard for, you will want to avoid picking a fight with unless you walked out of your house that day prepared.

Comments? Criticisms? What do you think?

Quote from ThePaganLord

You should be a dev at Mojang if you know how to code.

:laugh.gif: Thanks. I know a bit of how to code, but mostly, I just know a lot about how coding works and what makes a good design.

While the crumbling to death thing would look amazing,I don't like the gameplay element of going out at dawn to get black pearls.You also seemed to want to make them boss monsters,but I think they were never intended to be boss-like.Overall,I think that Enderman combat behaviour is fine as it is and the abilities detailed in this thread should be given to a new mob,some sort of elite monster found in Strongholds or something.

I think the crumbling effect would be a cool effect to add to mobs after they die of burning,but much quicker.

I'm against removing teleportation, and I don't really agree with their new attacks.

They should be rare. Very rare. Slightly less rare than a spider jockey.When looked at, they should turn to face the player and unhinge their jaw, as they do, and as soon as they're looked away from, teleport away to an area the player CANNOT see, but within 40 blocks. If you were in a deep cavern, the Enderman could be lurking anywhere, and it would cause extreme paranoia. As soon as the player comes within 20 blocks of where the Enderman is, it should emit a terrible scream, and then teleport behind him and grab him with his long arms. It would do damage in the same way as being on fire or touching a cactus, and the only way to stop it would be to kill the Enderman. Also, as the player is being grabbed, he's also completely immobilized, and therefore easy to kill by other mobs.

I agree, the Endermen behavior should be much more intelligent. However I have my own depiction of Endermen tactics that I think would be easier to implement without losing their fear factor or without ruining notches vision of them, although I do agree we need a mob that uses a sprint to get to you, maybe zombies. I think Endermen would go great as an enemy who would be capable of the following:

Purposely breaching your base to let enemies in right in front of your eyes as you see him take your wall blocks and put them off to the side so you have to fix it after the assault of either just himself, or nearby enemies who were paying attention to you. Since Endermen can teleport to any location connected by air blocks they could use block moving to tactically set up new strike locations on the player. However this also means if the player is in a closed room with the Enderman, like he sealed himself in with it after it breached his base; then it should not try to dismantle his walls any further since really its only goal of removing blocks should be for the purpose of getting to the player with the side effect of leaving a door open for any other enemies.

I also believe they'd be scarier if they had illusion capabilities like making multiple fake copies of itself once out of sight and being the only cause for that pitch black void fog which currently is caused by depth, however many want it removed. I thought those two features could work together since they arrived in the same update and both have people raging about them. However I believe the void fog should be able to be anywhere, and only caused by the player looking directly at the Enderman like hes trying to conceal himself for his next move, although his eyes will stick out and then disappear once his body is out of sight and when he teleports to a location that is either A. a location to remove blocks in his way of teleporting to/around you, or B. teleporting to/around you.

I also think if they are in danger of sunlight burns they should use their teleportation capabilities to escape back into the darkness if possible airy dark exits are available to escape into, and same with water but if there isnt any air connection out of the sunlight or water then they are trapped in it and you have defeated them. If they cannot battle you and have means of escape I believe their best choice of action to make them seem intelligent still would be to stalk you from the shadows until they get another chance to scare the jeebers out of you with their illusion and teleportation tactics.

I also thought, but I don't know if this is already too harsh of a thing to happen to the player that they might be able to screech an "aggro" screech causing all enemies within a radius capable of getting to your location start on their way. But maybe to balance this could only happen if the Enderman is injured badly and he knows he cant defeat you alone, but he'll keep up his trickery in the meantime.

At least that's what I think of when I see the Endermen and decide not to look directly at them this time, although this brings me to a final idea of making Endermen seem like smart: Endermen should teleport to locations around you they know you want to look at so you trigger their evil mechanisms of illusion and teleportation: When you're fighting enemies the Enderman should teleport next to the enemy coming at you so you have to move your center of view around him and to the enemy or risk triggering his evil stare that turns into another exciting/scary tale.

That's my two cents on the Enderman scare tactics reworking idea.

1: Being rare is good
2: Not spawning in packs is good
3: Seeking darkness is good.
4: Staring down and dissapearing in sunlight is good

Fog and multiplying is bad, because there is no real counter.
Teleporting near enemy mobs is bad, because fighting both a random enemy mob and an endermen at the same time is plain suicide.

For attacking, I like them teleporting, moving a bit towards you, teleporting, moving a bit towards you and doing plain melee attacks that deal loads of damage.

I would also like to see them teleporting when you hit them sometimes, without taking damage, making it harder to kill them.

Another good scare tactic is having a small chance of dissapearing altogether when you fight them, but reappearing after some time (5 minutes).

And last but not least, endermen could also simply NOT dissapear in sunlight, but still try to avoid it, by, for example, digging a hole down and closing the top until it's night. This way when the player sees random blocks being moved they know an endermen is about and it hasn't dissapeared.

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