Head

Mob heads, or mob skulls, are decorative blocks. There are six types of mob skulls: player, zombie, skeleton, wither skeleton, creeper, and dragon.

Obtaining
Mob heads can be broken using anything, and will drop itself when broken. If a player head has a custom skin, the skin will be preserved when broken.

If a head is pushed by a piston, or comes in contact with water or lava, it will also break off as an item.

Natural generation
Dragon heads generate on end ships.

Drops
A wither skeleton has a 2.5% chance of dropping a wither skeleton skull when killed by a player or tamed wolf. The chance is increased by 1% per level of Looting, for a maximum of 5.5% with Looting III.

Skeleton, wither skeleton, zombie, and creeper heads are also dropped by the respective mob if it dies due to a charged creeper's explosion.

$$, strays will drop a wither skeleton skull when killed by a charged creeper.

Player heads cannot be obtained as drops.

Decoration
Mob heads can be oriented in 16 different directions on top of a block, and 4 directions on the sides of blocks, similar to signs. They cannot be placed on top of each other, but they don't require a supporting block.

The dragon head will open and close its mouth repeatedly like the ender dragon when placed and powered by redstone. The same animation will occur when worn by a (horizontally) moving player, zombie, skeleton, or armor stand (note: the animation will not play if the  tag is set to 1)

Wearing
The player can wear heads, similarly to pumpkins or helmets. This will overlay the second layer of the player's skin.

Disguise
Wearing the corresponding mob head will reduce the detection range for skeletons (but not wither skeletons), creepers, and zombies to 50% of the normal range. This is similar to (and stacks with) the reductions in detection range from sneaking and the Invisibility status effect.

$$, wearing any mob head or carved pumpkin will make the player invisible towards other players on a locator map.

Withers
Withers can be created by placing soul sand in a T shape, and putting 3 wither skeleton skulls on top of the three upper blocks. The last block placed must be one of the three wither skeleton skulls. A dispenser can also create a wither, by placing the final skull onto soul sand directly in front of and below it.

Dispensers
Dispensers will equip a mob head on a player, mob or armor stand with an empty helmet slot, within the block the dispenser is facing.

Enchantments
Mob heads can receive the following enchantments, but only through an anvil.


 * Curse of Binding
 * Curse of Vanishing

Player skins
Human heads have an extra usage for map makers, they can be given NBT data so that they appear with the skin of any Minecraft account. This means if a player knows that a specific account has a head which they want to be displayed, the NBT data can be edited to make it appear.

The command to give the player a head skinned as another player is.

A player head will save the skin of the player from the time it was created, meaning if the player changes their skin, the head will still display the original texture.

Mojang skins


Mojang has created a number of accounts with specific skins, so that map makers can use common heads without the risk that someone will change their skin. These accounts have names in the format, for example   is the name of a Minecraft user with a zombie pigman head. MHF stands for "Marc's Head Format". There are also a few blocks and "bonus" heads, for more variety.

Because these are names of player accounts, these heads are obtained or placed using the  tag, for instance:.

The following names/heads have been made available:


 * Mobs
 * MHF_Alex
 * MHF_Blaze
 * MHF_CaveSpider
 * MHF_Chicken
 * MHF_Cow
 * MHF_Creeper
 * MHF_Enderman
 * MHF_Ghast
 * MHF_Golem
 * MHF_Herobrine
 * MHF_LavaSlime
 * MHF_MushroomCow
 * MHF_Ocelot
 * MHF_Pig
 * MHF_PigZombie
 * MHF_Sheep
 * MHF_Skeleton
 * MHF_Slime
 * MHF_Spider
 * MHF_Squid
 * MHF_Steve
 * MHF_Villager
 * MHF_WSkeleton
 * MHF_Zombie
 * Blocks
 * MHF_Cactus
 * MHF_Cake
 * MHF_Chest
 * MHF_CoconutB
 * MHF_CoconutG
 * MHF_Melon
 * MHF_OakLog
 * MHF_Present1
 * MHF_Present2
 * MHF_Pumpkin
 * MHF_TNT
 * MHF_TNT2
 * Bonus
 * MHF_ArrowUp
 * MHF_ArrowDown
 * MHF_ArrowLeft
 * MHF_ArrowRight
 * MHF_Exclamation
 * MHF_Question

Block data
$$, mob heads use the following data values:

Item data
Player heads use item NBT to save the owner.
 * : The item's tag tag.

Block entity
A mob head has a block entity associated with it that holds additional data about the block.

Trivia

 * When destroyed by an explosion, the block will always drop as an item.
 * Heads are one of the few blocks that do not have their own textures and take their textures from other objects.
 * When breaking any head, the particle effect of breaking it is the same as soul sand.
 * Interestingly, despite there being a default Steve head, an Alex head cannot be obtained without using custom names.
 * $$, the mouth of the ender dragon's head will show an animation when clicked with the debug stick. This is because the debug stick is changing it to a state that is used when powered by redstone.