Better Zombie Leaders

Since 26.1, zombie leaders are a serious threat, but their drops are the same as a zombie 5 times weaker.

Better Zombie Leaders addresses this issue fairly with the following changes:

• more rotten flesh
• more exp
• bigger mobs

What are zombie leaders?

Zombie leaders are a rare spawn (~5% chance on hard difficulty).
They have anywhere from 40HP – 100HP and have a chance to spawn a group of backup zombies when fought.

What’s the point of this mod?

Zombie leaders are great fun to fight, but don’t feel very rewarding. They have the same loot table as normal zombies with 20HP, and drop the same amount of exp.

They also look the same as normal zombies, so often you’ll only notice you’re fighting one once you’ve hit it a few times and it hasn’t died yet.

Better Zombie Leaders fixes all these weaknesses by applying the following changes to all zombie/zombie-like leaders scaling with their extra max health:

• Larger appearance than normal zombies, scaling from 1.1x to 1.25x
• Deeper voice than normal zombies, scaling from 0.9x to 0.75x
• More rotten flesh dropped
• More exp dropped

The numbers

Check the Gallery tab to see screenshots of example drops for different amounts of extra max HP

The following table values are all averages:
| Total health | Average exp | Extra rotten flesh | Extra rotten flesh with looting III |
| ——– | ——- | ——- | ——- |
| 40 HP | 10 XP | +1 | +2.5 |
| 60 HP | 15 XP | +2 | +5 |
| 80 HP | 20 XP | +3 | +7.5 |
| 100 HP | 25 XP |+4 | +10 |

Balancing

This mod increased the size of leader zombies, which means that they can no longer fit through 2 block high gaps, much like Endermen. I believe this is balanced and fits vanilla for the following reasons:

• Precedent: Endermen being too tall encourages clever combat tactics that involve building defences and retreating at the right moment
• Leader zombies are able to summon normal zombies, which can fit through 2 tall gaps. Story-wise this makes sense, the henchmen go where the leader can’t reach.
• Visually, a large hulking zombie shouldn’t logically be able to fit through a gap that’s smaller than they are. Preventing them from doing so enhances that fantasy.

Extra drops:

• Extra rotten flesh is far from valuable, but makes sense (bigger body, more flesh).
• Extra exp is still not much (during testing a maxed out leader zombie with 100HP only dropped about 3.5 levels from level 0. Leader zombies are rare and can’t be summoned on purpose, so this mod isn’t showering players with exp, it’s just a nice bonus.