Highlights
- The Armadillo won this year's Minecraft Mob Vote, allowing players to craft Wolf Armor.
- The victory of the Armadillo shows the desperate desire of fans for more interactivity with the game's armor system, despite the interesting potential additions of the Crab and Penguin mobs.
- The introduction of Wolf Armor is a huge development for expanding the role of wolves in the game, and other mobs such as cats and Iron Golems should receive similar armor updates in future updates.
Minecraft players are once again gearing up for a big content update for the massive sandbox title, with next year's 1.21 update starting to shape up nicely. A huge part of this upcoming update was dependent on the winner of this year's Mob Vote, with the results recently being announced.
The Armadillo was the winner of this year's Minecraft Mob Vote, being a clear favorite from the very start of the voting process. This new mob has a lot of quirks and mechanics, but its most alluring feature is how it allows players to craft Wolf Armor. Fans have been demanding a mechanic like this for years, and the introduction of the Armadillo may be the catalyst for similar content updates in Minecraft's future.
Minecraft's Armadillo, Wolf Armor, and the Future of Armored Mobs
The Crab and Penguin Minecraft mobs sadly lost out to the Armadillo in this year's Mob Vote, despite offering further block placement and ship speed-boosts respectively. While these were interesting potential additions to Minecraft, the clear victory of the Armadillo goes to show just how desperate fans are for a greater level of interactivity with the game's armor sytem.
Minecraft's new Armadillo mob will spawn in dry and warm biomes, giving much-needed life to the likes of Badlands and Deserts. Armadillos will have a fairly calm demeanor, but will roll into a protective ball if threatened. Crucially, Armadillo's will drop a resource called Scute, which can in turn be used to forge armor specifically designed for Minecraft's wolf companions.
Wolves are one of the most longstanding and beloved mobs in Minecraft, essentially turning into dog companions when tamed that follow the player and fight alongside them in combat. Players form a close bond with their wolf companions, and have long demanded some extra wolf mechanics in Minecraft to give their furry friends the best chance of survival in the title's unforgiving world.
Wolf Armor is a huge development for expanding the mob's role in Minecraft, which has remained essentially the same for the past 12 years. Not only does this new armor mechanic add an extra layer of protection for tamed wolves, but it also gives a much-needed level of personalization to the friendly mob. With this in mind, it only seems right that the Armadillo should eventually give way to other armor types in future updates.
Before the Armadillo and its Wolf Armor capabilities, horses were the only animal mob in Minecraft that had its own dedicated armor mechanic. Wolves seemed like the next logical step for armor compatibility, but there are still a lot of mobs that deserve similar updates in the near future. For example, there is now no reason that cats should not also receive their own armor in Minecraft, with cats holding the same kind of love from fans as the game's wolves.
To take this even further, mobs like Iron Golems could also be given armor functionality in future updates, asking the player to collect a lot of Scute to craft such a large armor piece. It would also make sense for future updates to give more functionality to Horse Armor, with Scute potentially allowing the player to craft non-leather Horse Armor, instead of having to find it as a loot drop in the wild. The Armadillo mob is set to give a long overdue improvement to Minecraft's wolves, but should also herald in a new era of armor mechanics across the board in the game's future.
Minecraft is available now on Mobile, PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One, and legacy platforms.
