#creeper mc

design notes!

i've always personally much preferred fluffy creepers over the more popular "irradiated flesh-melting humanoid mutant" interpretation. i know that a tweet doesn't exactly make something "canon" to the game, but i do like to think this fits with the "leaf-like texture" they were described as having. i do enjoy the "plant creature that explodes to spread pollen" theory, but even if you want to just interpret them as furry not actually leafy it makes sense from a camouflage standpoint. i used to give them pointier more upright ears (actually i usually made them back-pointing ears), but given that their model doesn't prominently display ears (like say, the wolf model does) i decided to allude to their "pig mistake" origins and give them triangular floppy ears like some pigs have. also, everyone always staunchly refused to give them ears despite only ONE mob at the time actually having modeled ears (that being wolves), so the idea of a creature having ears but not having them be individually modeled in the game was 100% plausible. nose and mouth! i am SO PROUD of this interpretation. i always found giving them a huge frown always looked a little goofy, so i tried to think of other ways to get that iconic shape, and i think joining the skin of a nose and a defined lip together really accomplishes this well. not to mention, it's actually closer to the pixelated shape, due to the nose sticking up higher than the lip. (that's just me being self-aggrandizing at this point tho. i don't think i've actually got the "better more correct" interpretation here or anything.) long neck / body plan - i NEVER understood why everyone always INSISTED on giving them humanoid torsos with no arms and four mutant legs when the option of having a LONG NECK was right there???? i mean if you're leaning into the rotated pig body thing it makes sense, but istg it was every. single. one. no matter how un-pig-like they were in every other respect. and besides it was usually a humanoid torso not a pig torso anyway. giving them slightly bent digitigrade legs i think also captures the "sticking out" look of their legs. again, i always preferred a more vertebrate look for creepers rather than the "alien walking around on spindles" look, but this was 100% done back in the day so i'm not as mad about it. also i'm proud of myself for the higher shoulders resulting in an angled body, because that lets me have the body a little longer without having to make something that would have absolutely 100% been modeled with another block for the body. tail is the same deal as ears - the only mob with a modeled tail (wolf) had an extremely prominent tail on its real counterpart, so the idea of the creature having a tail but not having it be modeled is 100% possible. actually snout too - i still don't give my creepers a very prominent snout/muzzle just to keep them recognizable, but long-faced/snouted animals like cows and (at the time) pigs were modeled with square heads, so a real creeper could 100% have a big ol' muzzle. i actually thought creepers had hooves for a long time before i realized the dark texture was only on the front of their legs, not all the way around. i could interpret this as them having longer fur that partially covers their hooves, but i like them with claws as well. they seem like they'd want grip. i did still give them partially joined claws to allude back to the hoof thing tho. but who knows? maybe i'll give them cloven pig-hooves in the future. nothing to say about coloration except that i obviously did a more simplified pattern to match my cartoony style rather than giving this drawing realistic mottling and brindling.

overall i guess my main deal with creepers is that i always wanted creepers to be animals (and specifically fairly large, terrestrial animals, that existed commonly within the world), rather than either insectoid cyborg aliens or cubes of melting flesh (that's one i didn't really touch on - many people were so unwilling to stray from making them cubic in their non-minecraft interpretations of creepers. i understand why for recognizability, but from a "actual creature vs minecraft model" standpoint, mobs just. aren't as square as they are in the game).