Roaming across the open world of Minecraft, you stumble upon a welcome sight: a house beside many others, a well-tended farm, and a bell. You found a village after what may seem like hours walking on foot!
You’re greeted by beings of your resemblance, with one striking difference. They have unnecessarily huge noses! Why is that?
Minecraft villagers have big noses because they were designed to look like the shopkeepers from Dungeon Master 2. Markus Persson or “Notch” confirmed it a Reddit AMA last 2012 that he took inspiration from the 1993 game’s NPCs. Although the said shopkeepers do have prominently large noses, they’re not as distinctive as that of the villagers.
Why Do Villagers Stare at You?
Villagers in Minecraft stare at you and follow you around if you come near them. The moment you are in range of them, they will continue to follow you around unless any of the following happens: they’re trying to get into a house at night, farming food, working, or fleeing from a zombie or illager.
Because they follow you around, players see these villagers almost every time they’re in a village. One noticeable thing to see in them are their unusually large noses.
They’re hard to miss, protruding out of the villager’s face and extending lower down the face.
This characteristic has players calling the villagers Squidward Q. Tentacles from Spongebob Squarepants, who also sports a large nose that dangles down the face.
This nose is also unique to all variants of the villagers, including zombie villagers.
Players are left wondering what exactly is the reasoning behind having such a prominent nose.
Why Do Villagers Look Like Squidward?
People have come up with the craziest ideas, mostly amusing, as to why Minecraft villagers have characteristically big noses, connecting them to in-game mechanics revolving around villagers.
One common idea is basically a play on words: players believe villagers have big noses because they are nosey and will gossip on what players are doing.
Another silly idea is that players think villagers use their noses to sniff out your emeralds, egging the player to give it to them.
Many people even try to make stories and theories about the origins of the large nose. Some people reference the proboscis monkey, a species of monkey known for their unusually large nose, very much akin to the villagers’ noses.
Some of them also rationalize the large nose with some sort of need to have a strong sense of smell.
On a more serious note, our personal conjecture is that villagers may have big noses because of a technical reason.
Judging from the textures of the villagers, a villager head can be thought of as composed of smaller pixels/blocks. These smaller blocks may be the smallest component that all mobs are made of.
Since noses in real life do protrude from the facial surface, the designer must have needed to add a few of these smaller blocks to recreate it.
Probably, one layer of these smaller blocks may not be as prominent as the team would have liked it to be, so two layers forward, as the current nose looks like right now, were chosen, which made it jut out too much.
As for why it extends lower down the face, it may have also been a deliberate decision.
Having only one layer may have been too small, two and three layers may have made the nose indistinguishable from the mouth, so they settled with around four layers down.
It did result in a rather unappealing nose in the end, but given the design philosophy of Minecraft’s visuals, this might have been fine for them.
Of course, that’s only our personal take on it. Maybe going through Notch’s Reddit AMA might help us gleam more information about this unpretty facial trait.
Minecraft Villagers Nose
Markus “Notch” Persson, the creator of Minecraft, held a Reddit AMA, which means “Ask Me Anything,” last July 31, 2012 for three hours, where he answered many questions regarding Minecraft.
One of the Redditors named “supercal” asked, “Where did you get the idea for the way villagers look?” To this, Notch replied that he took inspiration from the shopkeepers in Dungeon Master 2.
For reference, here are the shopkeepers in Dungeon Master 2.
In our discerning eye, the prominent features of the shopkeepers in Dungeon Master 2 are the elf-ears and the nose. However, they’re not as objectionable as the ones found in the villagers.
This is the closest reference we can get for the reason for the large nose. For now, we can only say that this might be Notch’s take on those shopkeepers.
How Do You Get a Villager’s Nose in Minecraft
It is even odder that player characters do not have a nose as prominent as those of the villagers. So there’s no apparent pattern for having a big nose in Minecraft.
You can use mods to get one though, if you want. However, it may even be more likely for you to want to remove these big noses from the villagers.
We may not have any definite reason why Minecraft villagers have big noses. Maybe Notch found the nose from the shopkeepers in Dungeon Master 2 exceptionally prominent and decided to exaggerate it in his villagers. Maybe it was to raise awareness about the proboscis monkey and their endangered population.
Despite being a mystery left unsolved, it did not stop players from speculating and theorizing. The community has made stories of how it may have come to be, creating in-game lore about them. Maybe we’ll never know why they have those noses. However, you can’t deny that Minecraft villagers will not become the iconic mobs in villages if not for their “Squidward” noses.
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