r/Minecraft • u/zero-taeko • 7h ago
Discussion Shulkers are the most alien thing they could have come up with—seriously.
The first thing I thought when I saw them was that they’d used up the best idea they could possibly have had for creating aliens in the game.
Let me explain: they have two eyes, each on a different side of their head, and their entire body is oriented so that a corner faces forward.
No other mob is like this; they all have their faces on a single side—even Creepers and Creakings have their faces positioned that way, and they’re plants!

To my eyes as a taxonomist, this just doesn’t sit right. If the body plan of the other mobs is a monophyletic trait—one unique to them—and the sculkers are so vastly different, it implies they aren’t closely related to animals, plants, or, by extension, fungi.
This is a crucial point, because animals belong to the Opimoda group and plants to the Diphoda group—this is the fundamental division among eukaryotes.
In other words, either the sculkers are a type of eukaryote entirely distinct from all others, or they aren’t eukaryotes at all.
