Mob Menagerie: Panda

Pandas may appear to be simple creatures, lying around all day. But you’ll find surprising complexity once you spend a while studying them. Mojang’s animal behaviorists believe that there are a total of seven different kinds of panda in the game, many of which have different personalities. *sniff sniff*

There are worried pandas, for example, that avoid players and hide during thunderstorms. There are aggressive pandas that love a fight. There are playful pandas that roll around – sometimes off cliffs. There are lazy pandas that spend most of their time lying on their back. There are weak pandas with little health. And there are pandas with brown fur, instead of black. Atchoo!

You can breed pandas together with bamboo – but they’re a bit pickier than other animals. They’ll only produce a baby if there are bamboo plants nearby. Those babies will inherit some of the personality of their parents, but which one depends on a bunch of genetics that seem way too complicated for me to understand. Atchoo!

Sorry about all the sneezing. I’m trying to befriend a group of baby pandas, who also love to sneeze. Very occasionally, a sneezing baby panda will drop a slimeball. Yuck.

Fun fact: to create the sounds for Minecraft’s pandas, Mojang sound designer Samuel Åberg flew halfway across the world to China to record them in person. Rather than hunting them down in the jungle, though, Samuel went to Chimelong Safari Park in Guangzhou – where they were rather easier to find.

Why? Well, there are only a couple of thousand giant pandas remaining in the wild. As a result of farming, deforestation, and humans generally being humans, the panda has been pushed out of the lowland areas where it once lived and into mountainous regions instead.

Luckily, Chinese conservationists have been taking care of these gentle giants, which to many are a national symbol of the country. The area where pandas live has been designated as a national park and the population seems to be slowly rising again. With luck, perhaps in time you’ll see more of these magnificent creatures in the bamboo jungles of the Overworld too.