The character wears the default Steve skin but with pupil-less white eyes, and never speaks or attacks the player directly1. Sightings in fan lore usually involve traces left behind in the world: sand pyramids dropped in the middle of deserts, two-by-two tunnels bored at right angles, and trees stripped bare of leaves1. Herobrine, also called HIM, was never part of vanilla Minecraft, though creator Markus "Notch" Persson started slipping "Removed Herobrine" into patch notes as a running gag3.

Fan-made mods do add the character, giving him teleportation, structure-building AI, and jump-scare behavior aimed at the lone player4. In the gaming press, Herobrine became a go-to example of the urban-legend-style rumor whose spread outlasts any real evidence2.

Players typically invoke Herobrine when they find something odd in a single-player world, like a strange pyramid, a stripped tree, or a straight two-by-two tunnel, and joke that HIM must have paid a visit. Modders often build encounters where he spawns, stares at the player, then disappears.