Mob Level

Every mob now has a level. Survival just got a difficulty curve.

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MobLevel attaches a level to every creature in the world. That level silently rewrites the mob's health, damage, drops, and experience. A level-3 zombie is a pushover. A level-150 zombie is a boss fight you didn't ask for — faster than you, immune to the sun, and it cheats death once.

The catch: power has to be earned and found, not farmed in an afternoon.

How leveling works

Level 20 is the vanilla baseline — a level-20 cow is exactly the cow you already know. From there:

• Below 20 mobs are weaker than vanilla and their loot gets scarcer the lower they go.
• Above 20 mobs scale up in health, damage, loot, and XP.

Exact scaling numbers

Health climbs faster than damage, so high-level mobs are tanky before they are lethal — you get time to realise what you walked into.

Level	Health	Damage	Loot	XP
1	0.5x	0.5x	1 item, 25% chance	0.5x
20	1.0x	1.0x	normal	1.0x
50	2.5x	1.6x	1.6x	1.3x
100	5.0x	2.6x	2.6x	1.8x
150	7.5x	3.6x	6.6x	4.3x

Health scales +5% per level, damage and loot +2%, XP +1%. Level 150 adds a flat jackpot on top: +3x loot and +2x XP. These are the defaults: every number in this table can be changed in the config.

Low-level animals dropping less is intentional — a level-1 cow gives you a single steak, and only one time in four. The good loot lives at the top.

High levels are rare on purpose

Hostiles and passives roll on two separate curves. Monsters despawn and get replaced constantly, so a generous tail there is self-limiting. Farm animals never despawn, so every high roll is permanent — they are held to a much harsher curve.

How rare, exactly?

Cumulative odds — the share of spawns at or above each level:

At or above	Passive	Hostile
Level 21	1 in 50	1 in 22
Level 50	1 in 285	1 in 100
Level 100	1 in 810	1 in 278
Level 130	1 in 2,200	1 in 770
Level 150	1 in 50,000	1 in 16,600

A hostile is roughly 2.9x more likely to be dangerous than an animal of the same level band. Finding a natural level-150 is a story you tell other players.

Level 150: apex mobs

The top of the curve isn't just a bigger health bar. Purple particles mark them from a distance — approach at your own risk.

• Aggressive toward players — no matter the species. A level-150 cow hunts you. Passive mobs don't panic; they retaliate.
• 1.5x movement speed. You will not outrun it in a straight line.
• Sun-proof. Level-150 zombies and skeletons don't burn at dawn.
• A hidden Totem Necklace lets them cheat death once — and on their real death there's a 10% chance they drop it for you to claim.

See it in action

Creepers are a special problem

Creeper blast radius scales with level: 3 blocks at level 1, up to 12 at level 150. A high-level creeper doesn't just hurt more, it removes substantially more of whatever you built.

Breeding: the long game

Animals pass their levels to their children — the offspring inherits the average of its parents, rounded down. Two level-40 cows make a level-40 calf. A level-150 bull and a level-50 cow make a level-100 calf, not a level-150 one.

So how do you ever climb? Mutations. Roughly one birth in a hundred comes out a few levels above its parents (+3 to +8). Because the average is floored, a bloodline can never lift itself — only mutations push the ceiling up, and only a few levels at a time.

There is no shortcut. A level-100 herd is a genuine long-term project, not a five-minute exploit.

The spyglass is a level scanner

Names only show up when you're close and looking at a mob. Scope a spyglass and you can read a mob's level from up to 100 blocks away — through the scope only, and never through walls. Scouting before you commit is a real option.

Boss mobs stay fair

The Ender Dragon and the Wither are clamped to a sane level range (20-80 by default), so they scale up without turning into unkillable health sponges.

Villagers and traders level up too

Villagers and wandering traders have levels, and their trades follow the same curve. Level 20 is vanilla.

• Low level: worse prices, smaller stacks and fewer uses per trade.
• High level: cheaper trades (down to half price at level 150), up to double the result count on stackable items, up to 3x the uses, and enchantments one level higher (within vanilla limits) from level 75.
• The level shows in the trading screen title, e.g. [Lv87] Librarian.
• Baby villagers inherit their parents' average level, with the same rare mutations as animals. A cured zombie villager keeps its level.
• Villagers never turn aggressive at level 150.
• Trades are improved once, when they are created. Existing trades stay as they are, and /moblevel uninstall restores vanilla offers.

Configuration

Every number on this page can be tuned. The config file is config/moblevel-common.toml on Forge and NeoForge, and config/moblevel.properties on Fabric. The defaults are the balance described above, so nothing changes until you edit them. New values apply to mobs that spawn afterwards; on Fabric, restart the game after editing.

Scaling: health, damage, loot and XP

| Key | Default | What it does | |---|:-:|---| | vanillaLevel | 20 | Level where a mob matches vanilla. Below it mobs are weaker, above it they scale up. | | lowLevelStatMultiplier | 0.5 | Health and damage at level 1, ramping up to 1.0 at vanillaLevel. | | healthPerLevel | 0.05 | Health added per level above vanillaLevel (+5%). | | damagePerLevel | 0.02 | Damage added per level above vanillaLevel (+2%). | | lowLevelDropChance | 0.25 | Drop chance at level 1, ramping up to 100% at vanillaLevel. | | lootPerLevel | 0.02 | Extra loot per level above vanillaLevel (+2%). | | maxLevelLootBonus | 3.0 | Extra loot multiplier at maxLevel. | | xpPerLevel | 0.01 | Extra XP per level above vanillaLevel (+1%). | | maxLevelXpBonus | 2.0 | Extra XP multiplier at maxLevel. |

Optional: armor per level (off by default)

| Key | Default | What it does | |---|:-:|---| | armorEnabled | false | Mobs above vanillaLevel get bonus armor. Mounts are excluded. | | armorPerLevel | 0.1 | Armor points per level above vanillaLevel (+1 armor every 10 levels). | | armorMax | 20 | Cap on the bonus, in armor points. |

Optional: level by distance from spawn (off by default)

| Key | Default | What it does | |---|:-:|---| | distanceScalingEnabled | false | Mobs spawning farther from the world spawn get extra levels. | | blocksPerLevel | 100 | Horizontal blocks per extra level. | | distanceMaxBonus | 50 | Most levels the distance can add. The result never exceeds maxLevel. |

The bonus is added to the normal random roll. Bred animals still inherit from their parents, and boss limits still apply.

Spawn rarity, breeding and bosses

| Key | Default | What it does | |---|:-:|---| | highLevelChance / hostileHighLevelChance | 0.02 / 0.045 | Chance that a passive / hostile mob spawns above level 20. | | levelRarityExponent / hostileLevelRarityExponent | 8.0 / 6.0 | How fast the odds drop within the high band. Higher = rarer top levels. | | commonLevelSkew | 0.75 | Shape of the 1-20 band. Below 1.0 makes the weakest levels rarer. | | maxLevel | 150 | Highest level a mob can roll. | | breedingMutationChance | 0.01 | Chance that a baby mutates above its parents. | | breedingMutationMinBonus / breedingMutationMaxBonus | 3 / 8 | Levels a mutation adds. | | bossHaveLevelLimits | true | Clamp boss levels. | | bossMinLevel / bossMaxLevel | 20 / 80 | Boss level range. | | uninstallMode | false | Same as /moblevel uninstall. |

Commands

Command	Who	What it does
/moblevel report	anyone	Opens a prefilled GitHub issue with your version and the mob you're looking at. Nothing is sent from the game — you submit it yourself.
/moblevel restartLevels	operators	One-time migration that re-rolls pre-1.2.2 mobs with the current rates. Re-rolls never raise a level.
/moblevel uninstall	operators	Strips every trace of the mod from entities as their chunks load, so you can remove the jar and keep the world. cancel reverts it.

Loaders and versions

• Forge: 1.20 to 1.20.6
• NeoForge: 1.21 to 1.21.11 (except 1.21.2), 26.2 and 26.3
• Fabric: 1.21 to 1.21.8, 1.21.10, 1.21.11, 26.2 and 26.3. Requires Fabric API.

Not covered by 2.3.0: 1.21.2 and 26.1.x on any loader, and 1.21.9 on Fabric. Use 2.1.2 there.

At a glance

• Levels drive health, damage, loot, and XP together, on separate curves
• Color-coded names reveal a mob's level when you look at one
• Particle auras mark the most dangerous mobs
• Despawn-safe by design — levels live in entity tags and the label is drawn client-side, so vanilla naming, persistence and despawn rules are untouched and hostile mobs never pile up
• Fully configurable — spawn rarity, health, damage, loot and XP scaling, breeding odds and boss limits, plus optional armor per level and level by distance

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Install, start a new world, and find out what's been hiding in the dark.