Stray

"Stay alert as you travel through the frozen landscape: there are more deadly things here than the cold! Lurking in the snow are strays - ragged wanderers with baleful eyes and deadly bows, ever on the lookout for foolish warm-bloods intruding into their territory. And beware! Those arrowheads will do more than stick you - their icy tips will cast a freezing pall, slowing their hapless victim to a frosty shuffle."

- Marsh Davies

Strays are variants of skeletons that spawn only in frozen, ice, or snowy biomes.

Spawning
80% of skeletons spawned directly under the sky in Snowy Tundra, Snowy Mountains, Ice Spikes, Frozen River, Frozen Ocean, Frozen Deep Ocean, and Legacy Frozen Ocean biomes are strays. Strays spawn in group of 1-2. In Frozen Ocean, Frozen Deep Ocean and Legacy Frozen Ocean they can spawn on surfaces at altitude 60-66.

Strays do not spawn from naturally spawned monster spawners, even when exposed to direct sky. $$, 1% of spiders and cave spiders can spawn as a spider jockey with 80% chance to be a stray spider jockey or stray cave spider jockey.

The stray has its own spawn egg in the creative inventory.

Drops
Strays drop:
 * 0–2 s
 * 0–2 s
 * 0–1
 * Any picked-up equipment has a 100% chance of dropping and drops with the same damage level it had when picked up.
 * Any naturally spawned equipment (including the bow) has a 8.5% chance of dropping (9.5% with Looting I, 10.5% with Looting II and 11.5% with Looting III). It is usually badly damaged, and has a chance of being enchanted.
 * Strays drop 5 experience when killed by a player or tamed wolf, and 1–3 extra experience, if the stray has equipment.

Behavior
Strays behave much the same as normal skeletons do. However, they shoot tipped arrows that inflict for 30 seconds on any target that it hits. When stray is underwater, it does not shoot arrows. Instead it uses melee attacks that inflict Slowness. Strays themselves are not immune to Slowness inflicted on them.

Strays make similar noises to skeletons, with an echoing effect.

In addition to normal skeleton drops, strays have a 50% chance to drop an arrow of Slowness. With the Looting enchantment, this chance increases to $4×level-1/4×level$, which comes to $3/4$ for level I, $7/8$ for level II, and $11/12$ for level III.

Data values
Strays have entity data associated with them that contain various properties of the mob.

Trivia

 * According to Jeb, the concept for the stray emerged from a game jam the Bellevue team had, where they were just adding a bunch of stuff to Minecraft - whatever they wanted. Jason Major made a bunch of cool mobs and he thought this one fit really well with what they were already planning.