Building your first custom mobs and add-ons for Minecraft

Within Minecraft, there are so many ways to be creative and build the worlds of your dreams. But when you want to extend Minecraft even further and introduce new mobs, items and other artifacts into your world, you’ll want to go to the next level of creation by building new Add-On packs that can transform Minecraft.

Never fear! With a growing set of tools and documentation – both on official Minecraft Creator sites and within communities like bedrock.dev – you’ll find a wide array of resources to help you get started. 

When you want to deeply customize Minecraft through Add-Ons, you’ll typically start by creating and editing JSON files. JSON files are basically just text files which have a particular structure – with curly braces and quotes – to allow you to express and tweak various settings within Minecraft. They can be edited in any text editor tool, like Notepad. We’d recommend Visual Studio Code, which is a free editor that provides enhanced tools for editing JSON files. The first stop in your learning journey should probably be to download example Minecraft behavior and resource packs, open those sample pack folders in Visual Studio Code, and explore how your favorite mobs are built. Read creator tutorials for more information on how to get started building resource and behavior packs. 

To better support exploration and the building of Add-Ons, we’re adding more reference technical documentation around Minecraft: Bedrock Edition Add-On packs over at https://docs.microsoft.com/minecraft/creator/. Here, you’ll see a range of topics from how to start building new Resource Packs up through building GameTests for scaffolding content and tests.  A suite of entity references and item references are some of the newer additions to the site.  

Create your first resource pack – Add in a custom texture for standard Minecraft blocks, like dirt.

Mod the Minecraft mobs – Change the behaviors of built-in mobs – here, a cow that attacks players.

Test out your content – Use the new experimental GameTest Framework to build validation cases for Minecraft and your creations.

With Visual Studio Code, sample JSON files, and a wealth of documentation and tutorials, you’ll learn how to build your own custom mobs, items, and more in no time. 

Welcome to the next phase in your journey as a Minecraft Creator!