Minecraft unveils new models for baby mobs, making them "chunkier, floofier, and more charming than ever"

Minecraft has just unveiled some of the first features coming to its next game drop, and it's made me all warm and gooey inside. Clearly wanting to start 2026 by tackling the most important tasks first, Mojang has revealed an overhaul for several baby mobs in order to make them way cuter - the perfect prioritization for one of the biggest and best PC games on the planet, if you ask me. With new textures, models, and audio, if you thought Minecraft's kittens, piglets, and chicks were adorable before, you're simply not prepared for how they look now.

Landing today in Java snapshots and Bedrock beta and previews, Minecraft's overhauled babies are incredibly sweet. One change you'll notice across all of them is that the classic eyes shared by almost all animal mobs, which feature one black pixel next to one white pixel, have been replaced for the baby variants. From what I can tell, all of the new-look mobs except for the baby rabbit have been given single-pixel eyes, and they look all the cuter for it.

Their actual models and textures have been totally reworked too in an effort to make them "even chunkier, floofier, and more charming than ever before." Previously, baby Minecraft mobs were simply scaled-down versions of their parents, albeit with their heads left disproportionately large. Now, they are totally unique. Baby chickens, for example, now look like tiny little cubes on legs and come in three different colors (including an adorable, chick-appropriate yellow). The piglets now have suitably stocky, chunky bodies. Baby wolves also have a more puppy-like appearance and look suitably fuzzy.

Both baby and fully grown rabbits are also getting a new look. Unlike other babies, the bunnies will retain their two-pixel eyes, and both the young and adult variants have more realistic-looking limbs. Animations have been overhauled as well, so they'll look a little different when hopping around. There's also an adorable little head tilt that they do now too, which you can see in the video above.

New audio has also been recorded for the baby mobs featured in the new drop, which are bespoke sounds rather than simply pitched-up versions of the adult animal's audio file.

A total of eight baby animal mobs have been overhauled to begin with - wolves, cats, sheep, cows, pigs, chickens, rabbits, and ocelots - and Mojang hasn't specified whether it's looking to update the models for any others in the future.

There's also one final feature that's been announced today and is now available for testing - Mojang is giving you the ability to craft name tags for mobs. You can assign a name to any of your mobs, and this will be displayed above their model as they roam around, helping you identify individuals more easily while giving them some extra personality.

We currently don't know what Minecraft's first drop of 2026 will be called, but if this first batch of features is anything to go by, a nature or homestead theme could be on the cards. Mounts of Mayhem already delivered a lot of new content at the tail end of last year, so this may be on a slightly smaller scale, but who cares when you've got brand new piglets to melt your tiny, blocky hearts.