Minecraft's 1.17 Caves and Cliffs update may still be months away, but news about its new features hasn't stopped since the Minecraft Live event was held at the beginning of the month. One thing that we recently got an extended look at was the mountain goat mob – part of Caves and Cliffs. Here is everything we know about Minecraft's mountain goats so far.
Mountain goats are one of several mobs that are being added to Minecraft with the 1.17 update, along with the axolotl, The Warden, and the Glow Squid. Based on the very brief look that we got during the Minecraft Live event, we knew that the mountain goats would be able to jump high in the air and would ram other mobs, but we didn't know much else.
Thanks to a beta version of part of the Caves and Cliffs update, we now know much, much more about the hoofed creatures. First of all, breeding them is different than with other mobs in a very interesting way — goats have multiple babies, not just one. As YouTuber Xisumavoid demonstrates, you can breed the goats with wheat, as you would with other animals (like cows or sheep). However, once they have their babies, you can end up with as many as seven baby goats — if not more.
We also learned from the beta that goats take reduced fall damage, avoid powdered snow in the wild, and don't drop anything if you kill them — but they will drop a horn if they ram a tree. During a Q&A with Mojang on October 30, we also learned that you cannot ride the goat. The development team emphasized several times that they want each addition to the game to be unique in some way, explaining that you won't be able to ride the goat because you can already ride a horse, for example.
Taking all of that into account, you should not expect the mountain goat (or any new mob for that matter) to behave like anything else that you've seen before. We do know that the development team is aiming to ensure that everything that is added has some use to it, so you should expect a reason to find the mountain goats in your world. We just don't know exactly what that reason is yet.