Minecraft teases its first drop of 2026, and it might finally be the thing that stops me from being a passive mob killing machine
With the 2025 cycle of drops out of the way, Minecraft has already revealed a feature of its next update—and let me tell you, it's simply adorable. In fact, it's probably going to stop me from creating tiny little animal farms as a food source as a whole, which is a pretty dramatic statement given every Minecraft player seems to do the same thing.
In a post to the official Minecraft news blog, it was revealed that baby mobs will be getting an entirely new appearance. Prior to this drop, all baby mobs were just downsized versions of the fully grown model, with massive heads. Now though, this new look gives them single pixelated eyes and, depending on the mob, an entirely new model, like the little yellow blocky chick rather than a small chicken.
According to game director Agnes Larsson, Minecraft's artists have given each mob "unique textures and models that give each baby mob their own adorable look and identity." This applies to all passive mobs which you can breed in the overworld too, like ocelots, all 11 kitten versions, rabbits, all your standard farm animals, and wolf pups. These re-designs follow the biome-specific variants of mobs following the Spring to Life drop released in March last year.
Most impressively though, this redesign comes with new sounds too, so you won't have the jarring clash of a cutesy baby mob making a horrendously loud, up-pitched adult noise. According to audio designer Sandra Karlsson, "I wanted to capture the uniqueness of a kitten meow and a puppy yapping to let them have their "own" personalities and bring more life (and cuteness!!) to the Minecraft universe." Which will definitely give me more of an excuse to stand around groups of baby animals rather than doing anything productive with my time.
As exciting as all this information is, unfortunately this is all we currently know about Minecraft's first drop of 2026. We don't have a name for the release, let alone a release date, but if it follows the same pattern as last year we'll hopefully see it drop around March. Until then, we're stuck with big-headed baby mobs, which I guess are still kind of cute in their own way.