Enderman

The Enderman (plural Endermen) is a 3 block-high, black mob with long arms and legs, glowing purple eyes and a purple particle effect similar to a Portal. Endermen will not attack you unless you look at them by pointing your crosshair on them. In creative, they will only attack you if you attack them. They are rare in comparison to other mobs (with the exception of the spawner-only Cave Spider), but can still be seen regularly at night on the Overworld in groups of up to five. Their two iconic abilities are the ability to pick up and move blocks, and to teleport. Endermen will take damage from coming in contact with water (including water blocks and rain). As of Minecraft full version 1.0 Endermen teleport when coming in contact with elements that damage it such as water, lava, and rain.

Endermen are not hostile until the player looks at them. "Looking at an Enderman" is defined as aiming the crosshair on the Enderman itself.

Endermen frequently spawn in the End, which is currently believed to be their homeworld, but they still require a light level of at most seven.

History

 * The Enderman was introduced in Beta 1.8, part one of the Adventure Update.
 * Endermen used to burn in sunlight, but as of 1.9 pre-release 4, Endermen won't burn in daylight. They will instead teleport away when the player walks up to them in the daytime, making it extremely hard to get close enough to kill them.
 * Endermen were originally planned to have dog-like ears.
 * At first, when Notch was still designing the Endermen, he thought they were not 'creepy' enough, coming with the idea that having a situation which the player would want to avoid could make the Enderman significantly more scary. This gave Notch the idea to implement the staring feature where aiming the crosshairs on the Enderman's face would cause a suspense in which breaking eyecontact would trigger an attack, as well as the Enderman having the ability to teleport so that when the player has stared at the Enderman they will have to face a consequence for that action.
 * In the Beta 1.8 demo at PAX, Endermen dropped diamonds as a placeholder.
 * In Beta 1.8 pre1&2, Endermen originally had green eyes and emitted black smoke. The release of Beta 1.8 changed the eyes to purple and black smoke has been replaced with purple particles similar to the particles emitted from Nether portals.
 * Before the Sound Update, Endermen used zombie sounds as a place holder.
 * As of Beta 1.9 pre4, the Endermen have a realm of their own: The End, where they spawn frequently.
 * Notch stated "Endermen suck because they're annoying, and because I nerfed them and made them too easy. I shall fix this."
 * Because of this, Endermen were modified to have 20 hearts of health, requiring 6 hits from a diamond sword to kill. Combined with their teleportation aspect, Endermen are more challenging.

Preventing Attacks
The only way to get an Enderman to chase you is to hit it, or look at it with the crosshair. As Endermen are 3 blocks tall, you can keep your house's interior 2 blocks tall to prevent Endermen from teleporting into it. However, if a house/construction is at the same or lower height as a nearby hill, the Enderman can still teleport in. You can perform preemptive strikes against endermen by keeping your crosshair over them, causing them to stand still until you hit them. Also, if the player sits in a pool of water, the Enderman will take damage from the water and then teleport away in response to the damage, and then run back to the player to attack. They will usually repeat this mishap until getting killed, this might be used as a way to make Endermen traps by making a room with 2 block roof height and a water tank on top, allowing the Endermen to glitch through the too low ceiling and into the water. If the player wears a pumpkin on their head,or looks at an Enderman through a fence, it will not turn hostile when looked at. Endermen cannot teleport when they are in minecarts.

Killing Endermen
Endermen are damaged by fire, lava, water and attacks. Emptying a bucket of water on the ground will damage the Enderman without it becoming hostile, though it will teleport away. All types of swords can be used to kill an enderman. Cacti will also damage Endermen, so a wall of cacti also serves as a passive defense against Endermen. Cacti are also a fast way to kill them because the Endermen will blindly walk into it without teleporting away.

Endermen can't swim. If the player is in a large body of water, he will teleport toward the player, take damage from the water, then teleport away. They will repeat this loop until they die or throw snow balls and they will die.

Before Beta 1.9 Pre-release, Endermen were very easily killed with the use of a bow, however as of all the Pre-releases and the full release; arrows, snowballs, and eggs will not hit them due to the fact that they teleport away before it hits them. Endermen will not turn hostile if an egg, snowball or arrow is flying toward them, if they can teleport to avoid it, as they are only hostile if looked at or attacked. However, if the player has a large army of snow golems, the enderman may not be able to avoid every snowball thrown and will get hit, turning hostile to the snow golems.

Hostile Endermen will teleport away when the player hits or gets close to the enderman. When this happens in a small underground space, the Enderman may teleport into inaccessible caves or to the surface. They will not teleport back to the player unless they move to an area that has enough space for the Enderman to teleport back. The Endermen also teleport behind the player so it is recommended that the player go into third person point of view by hitting F5.

When killed, regardless of the method of death, any blocks held by the Enderman disappear. They do not drop or get placed.

As of Beta 1.9 Pre-release 2, Endermen teleport to avoid being hit by arrows and splash potions and teleport to a new location when hit with one. They are no longer damaged by sunlight in this version, and when they touch water they immediately teleport away.

An effective way of killing an Enderman is by staring below their torso, preferably attacking the 'feet' of its legs constantly with a sword or an axe. However, because endermen teleport when the player closes in on them, you should either stand still while attacking their legs or move backwards to keep your distance. This can also be done by simply punching them.

Another effective way of killing an Enderman is to make a 4 high pillar underneath yourself and to look at one. The Enderman will run toward you and come into melee range. You will be in range to attack them, but they will not be in range to attack you. Make sure there are no skeleton nearby (16 blocks or less) as they will shoot you off your pillar and make you a vulnerable target.

A useful way to fight an Enderman is with a fishing rod, this is useful because you can hook them when you are fighting, and when they teleport away, you can use the rod's line and hook to determine where the enderman is, and you can use the rod to bring them back and then fight them with a weapon of your choice.

A quick, effective way to kill an Enderman is to quickly run towards one with or without a weapon and without looking at its head, attack its legs once and have four or more tamed wolves to finish it off.

The best way to kill an Enderman is to fight them with a pumpkin helmet. The Enderman will not teleport away while you are wearing the pumpkin. However, they will still be hostile toward you and should not be underestimated.

Snow golems can also indirectly kill endermen. If a snow golem is kept in a small fenced-in area suspended above water, it will throw a snowball at an approaching enderman, turning it hostile. It will teleport toward the snow golem but fall into the water, damaging itself. It wil continue doing this until it dies. Snow golems can also be useful if The Player and itself are side by side. The Snow Golem will throw a snowball at the enderman, turning it hostile. The Player then can attack the enderman, turning it hostile to the player. The snow golem will repeatedly throw snowballs and the player can repeatedly attack. Since the enderman is constantly switching hositlity from the player to the snow golem, it cannot focus on one and attack it.

Moving blocks
Endermen will pick up and move certain blocks, regardless of whether they were natural or placed by the player. They will pick up blocks horizontally and vertically nearby, within a short reaching distance similar to the player's, at heights from just below their feet to just above their head (5 layers). They will not drop the blocks when killed - the blocks disappear.

Since Beta 1.9 Pre-release 2, Endermen can only pick up the following blocks:

Endermen cannot pick up entities, such as Boats, Minecarts, primed TNT, and mobs.

In Beta 1.8 Pre-releases, Endermen were able to pick up any block, including Bedrock.

Damage to structures and environment
Because Endermen possess the ability to move blocks, they can cause damage to the natural environment and player-built structures. For players with access to significant resources, Endermen may not represent a real threat in combat, and become nuisances when building. Before Beta 1.9 prerelease 2, Endermen were able to move player-placed blocks and the resulting holes could let in other mobs in addition to being simply unsightly. Due to the large amount of complaints of endermen taking apart player-built houses, the problem was fixed by severely limiting the endermen's block-moving ability to a handful of block types.

On the overworld, signs of Endermen activity will soon start to become apparent in frequently loaded chunks. In desert areas, Endermen pollinate cacti by removing blocks and placing them on fresh sand, gradually increasing the population of cactus in frequently loaded deserts. Endermen almost never take the bottom block of a cactus.

A common Enderman defense is to place lava or water moats around well-lit structures. However, this is not impenetrable, since they can still teleport inside when provoked by the player or even randomly by touching some water.

Notably the Endermen can reach through blocks to grab blocks behind so put anything important two blocks in, or make walls multiple blocks deep.

Endermen are able to build Snow Golems by placing the blocks to build it, but this is a very rare occurrence since snow blocks do not occur naturally, pumpkins are also rare, and the pumpkin has to be placed last to make a snow golem.

A common misconception is that vines prevent Endermen from taking blocks, however Endermen will not pick up vines and will reach through them instead (like stairs).

Endermen do not spawn in lit areas, but they may wander or teleport into lit areas from adjacent dark ones, so simply lighting structures liberally with torches is not a guaranteed defense.

Endermen may teleport into your house by chance if they touch water, rain, or anything else that damages them, and of course this is very unpleasant, because if there is anything inside your house that an Enderman can pick up, then you could end up with a very ugly-looking structure. Two suggestions are to either have a pool of water on hand somewhere to fight the enderman in or make the ceiling two blocks high, in which case the enderman will suffocate to death.

Trivia

 * The exact size of an Enderman is 0.6x0.6x2.9 blocks.
 * If a Skeleton shoots an Enderman when attempting to shoot the player, the Enderman will completely stop chasing the player even after it has killed the offending Skeleton.
 * A similar nature can be encountered when an Enderman is hit by an Enderdragon; They will ignore the player and chase after the offending Enderdragon, should they survive the attack.
 * Endermen located in The End do not pick up Endstone.
 * The name "Enderman" is a reference to the Internet meme known as "the Slender Man", a similar-looking fictional cryptid. The name was given to the mob by Notch in a Minecraft Reddit thread.
 * The audio for Enderman are a slight nod to the video and audio disrupting nature of the above mentioned Slenderman, and thier scream sounds much like that of the Slenderman.
 * Endermen have the ability to open their mouths. In their texture, their jaw is separated from their skull and in the 1.8 Official Trailer, an Enderman attacked the camera with its mouth open. This makes the Enderman the first mob with the ability to physically open their mouths without simply switching to a different texture. They only open their mouths when they attack. Due to the player's perspective, the player sees the back of the Enderman's head when they open their mouths. If a player is one block higher, they see through the Enderman's open mouth. They open their mouths by moving their skulls higher than their jaw.
 * When first introduced, Endermen had the same set of sound effects as Zombies. This was confirmed to be a placeholder, and that they would receive their own unique set of sounds. In the pre-release of version 1.9, Endermen are completely silent. On November 13th, 2011, in an invisible update, Endermen did in fact receive their own audio scheme, most notably a long moan overlaid with static for while the player stares at them.
 * Endermen's eyes glow in the dark, like Spiders', and Endermen's full body glows in the fog, also similar to a Spider's body.
 * Contrary to popular belief, there are no other Enderman eye colors besides purple. The mob/enderman_eyes.png file in minecraft.jar only has one color, and what looks like white eyes in mob/enderman.png is actually the spot where the eye texture gets overlaid, to make the eyes glow like spiders'.
 * When an Enderman picks up a block, it makes the sound of that block type being destroyed.
 * Endermen are quite common above ground, as stated above, spawning in groups of sometimes about 5, while below ground they are a bit rarer and cannot spawn in low roofed areas, such as confined caves. It is not recommended to run underground to get away from them as they may still spawn and will chase you if provoked.
 * Endermen spawn in the rain, but will continuously take damage unless they find shelter.
 * Like every other creature in the game with the exception of Spiders, Endermen can't see the player through transparent blocks such as Glass.
 * In the 1.9 Pre-release 2 Endermen will teleport away whenever they are damaged by anything other than a direct player hit, including sunlight, cacti, other mobs, arrows, and water.
 * Endermen can harvest cacti and collapse the entire cactus. However, they are known to replenish the numbers of cacti in the desert by planting their cactus blocks, and since they generally don't take the bottom block, the harvested cactus generally regrows during the day.
 * Endermen can teleport very far, even when moving several hundred kilometres from them, they will continue to follow until killed.
 * If an Enderman carrying a block is killed, that block is not dropped on death.
 * It is unknown if there is a limit to the number of Endermen that can follow a player, but as shown here, 30 is not the maximum amount that can follow.
 * An effective way to gain easy experience is to go the End, make a 1x1 tower 4 high, stand on top of it, look at Endermen and have them teleport to you while you slaughter them. They cannot reach you because the tower is too tall.
 * Even in an aggressive state, they can still pick up blocks, which at times makes it seem as though they are tearing through walls to reach the player.
 * In 1.9 pre-release, if you were to pour water on a hostile Enderman, the Enderman will teleport away and become neutral again.
 * When an Enderman picks up a flower or a normal mushroom, those blocks will appear to be floating between their grasp.
 * In 1.9 pre-release 4, if you look at an Enderman the inventory bar will be highlighted.
 * Since they burned in sunlight before 1.9, like Skeletons and Zombies, but, were not able to cool those flames down by jumping in the water, since that also hurts them, the only way you could have found an Enderman during the day is if he was in a secured dark area.
 * Looking at an Enderman at point blank range will not cause it to become hostile.
 * On the mysterious track 11, most people think that the player is being chased by an Enderman.
 * Even though water/rain is harmful to them, it will still put out a burning Enderman.
 * Endermen are the only current mobs which spawn naturally pan-dimensionally, appearing both in The Overworld and The End. Zombie Pigmen can be created in The Overworld if Lightning strikes a Pig, and Snow Golems can be made by the player anywhere. Chickens can be hatched anywhere.

Bugs

 * In SMP, Endermen don't open their mouths or shake when aggressive.
 * When using a custom texture pack, Endermen will be bright white overlapping their texture. This is caused by the blank spaces of their enderman_eyes.png file. If you create a custom texture pack you must make sure that you only change the 6 pixels actually used by their eyes. An alternative would be to use the original png from the minecraft.jar in your pack. Using the most recent release of MCPatcher also fixes this bug. This can also be avoided by making the enderman_eyes.png translucent, even only slight translucency will fix this.
 * If an Enderman is holding a block and the world is exited and then re-entered, the data value of the block is not preserved, and will reset to 0x0. For example, in the case of the wool, it will become white wool, and brown mushroom blocks will display the pores texture on each side. This is due to a mixup in the saving/loading of Endermen entities, it is saved as carryingData and tries to load carriedData.
 * If a hostile Enderman is forced to teleport because they have wandered into a water block they will no longer be hostile to the player, it is yet unknown if this is a bug or not.
 * Strangely, it looks as if some Endermen teleport to the overworld to avoid falling off a cliff in The End.
 * If a hostile Enderman is attacked by another mob and kills the attacker, it resets to being neutral towards the player.
 * In the Minecraft Beta 1.9 Pre-Release 2, Endermen commonly teleport away from the player, even if they were just attacking him/her, and become neutral.
 * If an Enderman picks up a flaming block (i.e. Wood, Netherrack, etc.) and then places it again, the block will be extinguished, but the Enderman will be on fire.
 * During the day in 1.9 pre-release 5, if you look at an Enderman, it will open its mouth and become hostile but if you try to shoot a projectile at it, it will teleport and become neutral. Also if you look at it without shooting it, it will open its mouth, shake, and become hostile then when you look away, it will become neutral again. Only happens during the day.
 * If you look at it, it will only stay hostile if it can run toward you; if it has to teleport to get to you, it will become neutral. Only happens during the day.
 * On rare occasions, if the player and an Enderman are on opposite sides of a large body of water and the Enderman turns hostile, it will stare back at the player like normal but will never attempt to get closer, even if the player is not staring back. It will continue staring at the player for a while until it suddenly disappears. (Not by teleporting, but by being completely erased. It will not drop any loot.)
 * Endermen will rapidly teleport in a maniacal manner to avoid being hit by rain. If there is no areas for them to hide, they will teleport here and there until they finally die. At night, they can be seen flashing red and appearing all over the place, which is actually quite humorous.
 * In Minecraft 1.0 Enderman sometimes teleport to the surface then immediately teleport away, probably because they got hit by lava or water somewhere in the underground.
 * If you quit a game while being attacked by a hostile Enderman, and re-join the game, the Enderman will return to being neutral.
 * Wherever the luminance level is 15, i.e. the Sun, Glowstone, Jack-O-Lanterns, or Lava Endermen teleporting there will become neutral.
 * If caught with a fishing rod while neutral, an Enderman will remain neutral even after being pulled in, and switching to another item. The Enderman will become aggressive again only if it is hit by the player.
 * When an Enderman picks up TNT, the TNT block's texture is inverted (Notice the "N" in TNT is reversed(ТИT)).
 * If you fire an arrow at an Enderman who is in a mine cart, it will teleport away and reappear in the same mine cart. Also, at times it will turn red as if it had taken damage, but it will not die from arrow shots.