Description

Have you ever felt that after a while, Minecraft gets too easy? Have you ever wished that you could make it more challenging without the glass cannon nature of the hard difficulty? Have you ever found fighting mobs boring and monotonous due to their simplistic nature?

If the answer to any of those questions is yes, this is the datapack for you. Upgraded Mobs is a datapack/server-side mod that adds new attacks, mechanics, and features to many of the mobs you know and love.

Details

All of the changes and additions in this project are detailed below.

All zombies are capable of breaking doors, regardless of the difficulty.
Periodically, zombies will dash at a nearby player.
Unique to this dash is a bite attack that deals extra damage. This attack can be blocked, but be warned, it will eat through your shield quickly!

Drowned swim faster now, on top of the default movement buff for all mobs.
If a player has water below them, drowned will periodically pull them deeper underwater in an attempt to, well, drown them. This can even happen if you are traveling above them in a boat. Watch out for hordes!

Elder guardians have 300 HP, same as the vanilla wither.
In combat, elder guardians will periodically debuff a random player with weakness, slowness, and/or blindness.
If no guardians are nearby, an elder guardian will periodically summon mini-guardians that disappear after a short time.
Below half HP, elder guardians will periodically turn invisible.

A video demonstrating this is shown below. It is slightly outdated, however, as instant damage on the periodic debuff has been removed. Coincidentally, it also demonstrates the new drowned features!

Evokers now have 150 HP, and while below half HP, they gain Regeneration 1.
Evokers also hold a totem of undying in their off-hand that must be popped before killing them. This doesn't change combat with them that much, but it does make sense thematically.
Whenever an evoker uses their fang attack, it will also follow up with two more waves of fangs in the same place.
To compensate for all of this, vexes now die immediately if there aren't any evokers nearby.

Furthermore, two admin functions upgradedmobs:evokers/raid_loot/enable and upgradedmobs:evokers/raid_loot/disable are added. While enabled, evokers spawned during raids won't drop a totem anymore. Instead, they can drop golden apples, enchanted books, lapis lazuli, and the Sentry armor trim from Pillager Outposts. This is disabled by default.

Brutes have 75% knockback resistance by default.
Brutes will periodically dash at nearby players.
Brutes will also throw the closest player or wither skeleton high into the air. Watch out for lava!
Brutes have a small chance of spawning with random pieces of netherite armor, or with knockback on their axe.

Some pillagers will shoot weakness arrows or even firework rockets instead of regular arrows.
Some pillagers will also have Quick Charge II crossbows.
The above two upgrades are applied more often during raids.

Spiders will periodically dash at nearby players.
They will also periodically trap the closest player in a temporary cobweb. Remember to use a sword or water to break out!

Witches now have 60 HP.
Splash potions thrown by witches have a 25% chance of being lingering potions instead.
If a player is nearby, splash potions have a 10% chance of inflicting blindness.

Configuration

Don't like some of the features listed above? Want to adjust some of the probabilities? Want to give a modded mob some of these features? While there is no config file, you can open up the datapack ZIP to edit things yourself:

If you add a # symbol in front of a command in an mcfunction file, that line will be commented out and won't be ran.
You can integrate other mobs via the tag system. For example, if you have a mod that adds a new type of spider, you can add it to the upgradedmobs:spiders entity tag. Note that you can also do this in an external datapack by adding the same tag file but with the replace key set to false.
This datapack includes a list of predicates for random probabilities. If you want to change a probability, you can replace the associated predicate with a different one, or make your own.
If you want to exclude individual mobs (e.g. custom bosses) from the features in this datapack to make sure nothing is overwritten, give them the upgradedmobs.blacklist tag.

If you want to uninstall this datapack, you can simply remove it from your world with no issues. However, buffs to HP, follow range and movement speed, and the like that were already made to existing mobs won't be reverted.

Credits

I can't take credit for all of this. Below includes a few sources that I used while making this:

Some mechanics were taken from TheGayerest's old Tougher Everything and Tougher Bosses datapacks, with permission given by the original author.
Some inspiration was taken from Kindred408's old Smart Mobs datapack, although the actual implementation in this datapack is my original work.

Other Datapacks

I recommend the following datapacks, in addition to this one:

Vanilla Parity replaces the Wither with the Bedrock Wither.
The old datapacks Blaze Tweaks and Pillager Tweaks by FlanDere allow blazes and pillagers to move backwards when a player approaches them, like crossbow piglins do (and forward, in the case of blazes).
My other packs! Check them out on my Modrinth page :)

Compatibility-wise, this datapack should usually be fine. However, watch out for the following:

Datapacks like Incendium that have mobs or bosses with custom AI and features won't be overwritten (except for when this pack buffs a mobs HP and such), but this datapack's mechanics will also be applied, which may have unintended consequences.
For example, FlanDere also has a cool Jumping Mobs datapack, but dashes and jumps don't mix well (the mob can bounce really high accidentally).
Remember to give the upgradedmobs.blacklist tag to any mob that you don't want to be affected by this datapack.