Last spring, a new feature emerged in Minecraft — crawling. You might have thought this was a well-planned addition that took months to develop. However, that’s not the case. Crawling is simply a glitch.
The issue originated from a bug in the hitbox, which defines the space occupied by a mob. You can view it by pressing the super-secret combination F3+B. The problem lay in the incorrect dimensions of the hitboxes and the height of the eyes. A prime example of this is the polar bear. When its attack animation triggered, the hitbox remained unchanged, causing the bear to rear up on its hind legs, making it impossible for players to inflict damage since the mob’s body didn’t fit within the boundaries of the box.
The issue wasn’t limited to just bears; it also affected players. When you sneaked by holding down the Shift key, the character model would bend, but the hitbox and eye level remained unchanged.
The polar bear attack occurs before the error is fixed. The body rises, but the hitbox remains unchanged.
What was the issue? The character’s eyes serve as a sort of camera for you, and when crouching, the height of this camera should decrease along with the eye level. However, due to a bug, this did not happen. By adjusting just one value in the code of Minecraft, the developers resolved the issue, so now when players crouch, they can truly perceive that their character has bent down.
However, correcting this minor issue led to a much larger problem: due to the reduced hitbox size, players could slip under blocks while sneaking.
In addition to being able to crawl beneath the block, the player’s head would pass through it every time they stood up. This occurred because Minecraft Bedrock was not designed for this new action, meaning that when the mining key Shift was not pressed, the character could only remain standing.
Adjusting the hero’s position even by such a small height (from 2 to 1.5 blocks) necessitated numerous other significant adjustments. Therefore, a discussion with the developers was essential before making a final decision.
Following the discussion, it was decided to proceed with this action. However, coding turned out to be quite a challenging task. The term “squat” in Minecraft encompassed 26 different meanings, ranging from darkening a name to dismounting from a horse or minecart.
All these actions were controlled by a single key, shift, and introducing a new movement that also needed to be linked to this key required untangling the behavior of all processes to ensure that conflicting actions did not activate simultaneously. This is where the story of crawling begins!
From Squatting to Crawling
With the addition of crawling, the developers aimed to create hotkeys but ultimately chose to abandon this idea, allowing players more freedom for creativity.
With crawling, you can do amusing things, like hiding in a composter.
The crawling mechanics are still a feature of the Java version. While it remains uncertain when this will be introduced in Bedrock, developers are continually working to enhance all platforms. What we can say for sure is that thanks to these little quirks, Minecraft is exactly the game we know and love!
