The Minecraft mob vote candidates for 2023 are in, and it seemed like an actual fight until somebody said "dog armor"

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The Minecraft armies draw their battle lines as the 2023 mob vote candidates are revealed

Minecraft
(Image credit: Mojang)

Developer Mojang has revealed the three candidates for this year's Minecraft mob vote, and it seems like it'd be a pretty even match if not for the promise of dog armor.

Whenever the annual Minecraft Live event rolls around, the devs show off concepts for three new mobs, and fans vote for whichever one they most want added to the game. In practice, the mob vote has always been a contentious concept. Recent Minecraft updates have been criticized for being light on content and there remains a strong "just add them all" sentiment in the community - especially since the increasingly numerous losers of previous votes haven't yet gotten a second chance.

Nonetheless, the votes still get fans fired up, even in years where there's a pretty lopsided favorite, as was the case with 2022's Sniffer-led vote. In 2023, the choice is between three real-world animals: the crab, the armadillo, and the penguin. The general sentiment from fans across the three options seems pretty split, but the bonus offered by the armadillo has it pulling ahead.

See, armadillos will drop a unique scute - that's a bony plate, in less zoological parlance - that you can use to craft wolf armor to help protect your canine pet from damage. Once people started talking about dog armor, the vote started quickly swinging in the armadillo's favor.

Of course, the cuteness of crabs and penguins mean that they still have plenty of support, but armadillos are cute and offer a bonus for another equally cute set of animals. Can the penguin's boost to boat speed compete with that? Can the crab's offer of increased reach for block placement match the power of wolves clad in armadillo shells?

I guess we'll see when Minecraft Live broadcasts on October 15. The mob vote itself opens on October 13, and the results will be revealed as part of the stream 48 hours later. For now, you can get more details on the crab, armadillo, and penguin options and how to vote through those links. 

If you're looking for more new features, check out the best Minecraft mods.

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.