Marlix Battle – The Horse Strategy

Many players consider fighting Marlix to be difficult, and it’s true. For those who are unaware, Marlix is a custom skeletal mini-boss, donned in full armor, who rides around on an invisible flying bat. Armed with a powerful flame bow, unprepared challengers can meet a quick death when facing Marlix on Empire Minecraft. With all the Enraged Guardians, flaming arrows, and overall general chaos, Marlix can be a very hard mini-boss to even reach, let alone kill.

Marlix Battle Basics

Marlix has 24 HP, or 12 hearts. He’s armed with his signature Marlix’s Bow and wears his special Marlix’s Armor. Enchanted with various versions of Protection V, Thorns, and Unbreaking, Marlix takes little damage from attacks. However, a shot from a bow does damage more than a swing from a sword, so keep that in mind when fighting. 

When engaged in combat with the player, Marlix will rapidly shoot arrows at the player and spawn Enraged Guardians. The knockback from these mobs can make lining up a bow shot or going in to get a hit on Marlix with a sword difficult. If the spawns become too frequent, a small trick is to switch to another smp on Empire Minecraft and lower your difficulty for all servers. Stay on that alternate smp for at least five minutes, and then return to the battle. On lower difficulties, Marlix will spawn Guardians less frequently. You can read more about Player Difficulty on the Empire Minecraft Wiki.

Marlix Battle with Horses

The solution for the problems listed above: horses. Using a horse, and using it properly, can make fighting Marlix a lot easier. Horses take little knockback from arrows, and can run through hordes of Enraged Guardians with ease. Instead of getting smacked around by Marlix and his minions, you can smack around Marlix!

How you choose to fight on a horse is up to you. Shooting Marlix from range can be time consuming, but safer, especially if your horse is about to die.

Melee fighting is another option, and it’s the one I personally prefer. Marlix is much easier to hit when on a horse. You can rush right through the Guardians, taking very little knockback. Your horse will definitely take more damage, but if you have an adequate amount of food and remember to heal frequently, this shouldn’t be an issue.

Healing Horses

Even with a good horse and armor, your mount can still die very quickly. It’s in more danger than you are. When a horse gets hit and you dismount to heal, it’ll run around randomly. If it gets away before you’re able to heal it and you’re in the middle of a bunch of Guardians, it may not survive. As a result, it’s important to know how to heal your horse and to choose a horse with high health so you don’t have to heal it as often.

Sugar, apples, wheat, golden apples, golden carrots, and hay bales can all be used to heal horses. Hay bales heal 20 HP (10 hearts), the most of any food, so if you have access to hay bales, they’re definitely the way to go in terms of horse healing.

You should heal your horse as often as possible. To heal a horse, simply dismount (default LSHIFT) and, with the food in hand, hold down right click until you mount the horse again. At that point, your horse is fully healed.

Installing Damage Indicators is definitely very helpful for not just for telling when the horse is low on health, but what health Marlix is at too. Even splashing you and your horse with regeneration and fire resistance can help keep it alive. If you don’t have potions, bring a water bucket so you can extinguish the fire if you or your horse gets shot. 

If all else fails, have the command /stable store copied to your clipboard, so if your horse is about to die and you can’t heal it while in battle, you can at least keep it alive.

Try It Out!

I encourage you to give this horse strategy a try and share your tales of battle in the comments section below. I’ve had quite a few run-ins with Marlix while on horseback and it’s always made the fight significantly easier.

Good Luck!