Is it possible for mobs to be left-handed in Minecraft: Bedrock Edition?
I recently learned that the skeleton mob in specific has an 11% chance of being left-handed:
right hand: 89%; left hand: 11% [JE only]; may be enchanted
Due to my curiosity, I began searching to determine if other mobs can be left-handed, and based on my research, mobs seem to have a NBT tag for LeftHanded
, as per this post regarding zombie mobs:
The
LeftHanded
byte tag determines whether or not the mob's main hand is its left or right hand (when set to 1, it is left-handed).
However, NBT tags are specific to minecraft-java-edition (which supports the [JE only] tag on the wiki), so I continued my research with a focus on minecraft-bedrock-edition, but unfortunately, this yielded no explicit results (which were easily found for Java edition).
Is it possible for mobs to be left-handed in Minecraft: Bedrock Edition?
Solution 1:
Mobs cannot be left-handed in Minecraft Bedrock Edition.
I summoned several hundred skeletons and all were right handed.
Furthermore, attempting to replace their offhand slot with a bow (/replaceitem entity @e[type=skeleton] slow.weapon.offhand 0 bow
) returns an error saying that slot cannot be filled with a bow.
Items which the player can normally hold in the offhand slot such as arrows or sheilds can be put in that hand although no mobs spawn naturally with these.
Exception
There is one notable exception but not exactly what the question is requesting is that drowned will spawn with Nautilus Shells in their left hand in order to hold the trident in their right, so technically mobs can be left handed in that instance.