When The Wild update arrives for Minecraft, players will be able to get acquainted with the noble frog. The sandbox game’s frogs come in several varieties, and they’ve gone through several iterations since their announcement during Minecraft Live 2021 – including one short-lived version that used to eat goats.
Goat-eating frogs began, as these things so often do, as an experiment. As Minecraft vanilla gameplay developer Alexander Östman explains in the latest post on the official site, Mojang had to work out how to get frogs to eat things. At first, he says, frogs were hard-coded to eat only slimes, but Östman had to work out how to make the eating behaviour editable – creators should be able to get frogs to eat other kinds of mobs, or for new kinds of mobs to have their own diets.
As a test of this new behaviour, Östman said he made frogs able to eat goats, “because I thought it’d be funny”. To the delight of everyone in the studio (although, presumably not to the goats), this worked like a charm – the frogs hopped around swallowing any goats they happened upon.
When it came time to ship the first Minecraft frog beta, however, Östman made a key error: he completely forgot that he had instructed the frogs to eat goats. The beta went out, people seemed to love it, and Östman and the team went to bed in Sweden satisfied with another fun feature out in the Minecraft community’s hands.
Meanwhile, Minecraft players were discovering the new frogs’ monstrous eating habits. Videos popped up all over the internet with titles like “Frog eats entire goat.” Östman felt a mix of emotions the next day when he saw what had happened. “I literally fell off my chair laughing, I was SO embarrassed, but it was also absolutely hilarious,” he says.
Östman says he corrected the mistake right away, but players loved it and have asked him to bring it back. “To this day, someone occasionally tags me to bring back the goat-eating frog,” he says. “It’s even become a bit of an inside joke in our team.”
Frogs were originally meant to eat fireflies, but Östman says the Minecraft community pointed out that these can be poisonous to real-world frogs. Now, the little amphibians only eat slimes – a much safer source of nutrition, we’re told.
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