Minecraft Live 2020
This weekend had Minecraft Live 2020 streamed to Facebook, Youtube, Twitch, as well as their own website. It was a fun event that brought in members of Mojang Studios as well as appearances by content creators who specialize in Minecraft.
The event began with what would become its biggest announcement: the title of update 1.17, Caves & Cliffs. This has been being asked for by many vocal fans of the game for a long, long, long time, so it is easy to imagine the excitement that went through so many people the moment they heard.
Not everything announced at Minecraft Live will be talked about here (because there was just so much to cover). In this post, the focus will be on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Minecraft Dungeons, and Minecraft’s Caves & Cliffs update.
(For everything else, here is the full Minecraft Live presentation)
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
Steve, Alex, Zombie, and Enderman are all joining the fight in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with their next Challenger Pack of DLC fighters.
Technically this news broke two days earlier, when Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s game director, Masahiro Sakurai, spoke in a video presentation to announce the new characters. But, hey, it continued to be addressed in Minecraft Live and is still incredibly Minecraft related.
The first thing that needs to be addressed here is that while there were four characters announced, this was done as a single character announcement. This pretty much guarantees that what is actually happening is that Steve is the new character being added, but with Alex, Zombie, and Enderman being included in possible costumes he can wear. This would make all four the exact same fighter, just with a different look. Which is completely fine and understandable, but worth mentioning here in case of misplaced expectations.
It also should be noted just how massive of a job including Minecraft really was. In order to get blocks to work right, Sakurai and his team reportedly needed to make adjustments to every single stage already in the game.
So, what will these characters play like in Smash Bros? Well, we see a large variety of moves in this announcement. To start with, we see them attack with both a sword and a pickaxe. But there is a moment where we see Steve use his pickaxe on the stage, gathering materials. In the next clip there is a crafting table where he builds an iron sword.
It is looking possible that you begin a fight with just a pickaxe, then over time can build up materials to get a sword or better damage. It feels like it could be a similar mechanic to fighting with Joker, where he eventually gets the ability to summon Arsène for a short time.
There is also a plethora of moves where Steve or Alex are seen using various tools and blocks from Minecraft. Here is a quick rundown:
They place down lava (which goes on a space directly in front of them for just a moment before disappearing),
Cooking food with a flint and steel,
Using a fishing rod to pull an enemy close only to launch them with a piston,
Placing blocks as they jump up,
Dropping down with an anvil onto an enemy,
Using TNT detonated by redstone and a pressure plate,
Smashing forward in a cart,
And flying with an elytra for a short time.
We also see the characters’ final smash, where a giant piston appears in front of them. If it hits the enemy, it launches them into a dark room full of creepers.
There are some quick glances as a new Minecraft themed stage. Like other stages in the past, this one seems to change over time. We see it as a birch forest, savanna, village, snow village, and a cave. It appears to be one of the smaller levels, which feels normal for the ones that shift around so much.
Challenger Pack 7 – Steve and Alex will be available on October 13.
Minecraft Dungeons
Minecraft Dungeons had a small variety to show off for what is coming down the line, including a few things that may not be too far away.
First off is a brand-new game mode, Apocalypse Plus. This will be a free update to the game that essentially works as the “extra hard” difficulty, for those who want additional challenge from the game. No definite date announced, but it was said to be coming “soon”.
Next up is cross-play. In Minecraft Live they were able to show off four players seamlessly playing together across Switch, PC, Xbox One, and PS4. This is said to be another free update, aiming to come out in November.
The big news here was the announcement of the Howling Peaks DLC, which should have a December release date. Minecraft Dungeons is racing to the mountains, where players will find goats before they make their appearance in Minecraft. Of course, with mountains being so vertical, it means adding in new mechanisms like mountain lifts to get players where they need to go.
This new location will also add a new wind mechanic, which (much like the goats) could push the player off the side of the mountain. This will be showing up as both an obstacle for the players as well as an element for puzzles. The wind may be necessary for moving certain items into place, or even opening doors. But, some mobs, such as the iceologer, will be completely resistant to the winds push effects. This mechanic will be used as an attack by a new mob, the wind caller, which summons wind from beneath the player, dropping them down for fall damage.
On top of this was a quick look at things coming in the future for Minecraft Dungeons. It was also a short trailer with no further information or timelines given. But it did show a variety of new levels. These include trips to the nether, the end, and an entirely underwater level.
Minecraft 1.17: Caves & Cliffs
Last year, players were asked to vote between three biomes to get an update: the badlands, the swamp, and the mountains, each of which would also include a new mob to their biome chosen. The results ended with mountains and their promise of “snowier snow” winning out, leading to the “cliffs” side of the Caves & Cliffs update being announced this year.
And as promised, this means that goats are being added into the mountains. These new passive mobs can jump a ridiculous height and deal a substantial knockback with their headbutt attack.
For the mountains themselves, there will now be “height dependent generation”. What this means, is that particular heights will adjust the way the mountain it is created. This is leading to things like tree lines, where trees won’t naturally spawn after a certain height, as well as new kinds of formations around the peaks of mountains.
The snow is confirmed to be “snowier”, and includes a new block called powdered snow. Powdered snow will look just like normal snow, but any player or mob to walk on it will fall through. A fun thing here is that leather boots can allow the player to walk on powdered snow without falling.
And that’s everything we learned about the cliffs side of things. The vast majority of the Minecraft Live was spent on everything happening with the caves. It is understandable why they did this, both because players have been asking for this for years, and because they are making some very substantial changes and additions to the game.
With this update, there is going to be a much larger variety in how caves are generated. Mojang was sure to let us know that the current caves will still exist to some degree, but there will also be much more cavernous ones. We got to see a player flying through a cave using an elytra because some caves are just that open.
They are also adding in “local water levels”. The big thing here is that it means that some caves can be completely flooded, or have lakes in them.
It was cited that one of their biggest goals was to create an underground where the player can marvel at the world beneath, where they can have whole adventures in these caves. From the looks of things, they may be pulling it off. Part of how they are doing this is by adding in new biomes for caves, such as the lush caves, dripstone caves, and the deep dark. The cave generation is independent from the biome itself, creating even more variation.
The lush cave appears to be relatively close to the surface. It can be found by locating an azalea tree, which they seem to be saying will always have a hole by its base that will lead down into the lush cave. At least in this preview, the azalea tree seemed to just be an oak tree with purple flowers on its leaves. Whether this will change into a totally new kind of wood or not remains to be seen.
When a player enters the lush cave, it is like an underground oasis. It is completely filled with foliage, much of which is built of brand-new blocks. The area is lit up by glow berries, which grow on new vines and can be a food source as well. There are also new moss blocks, which look like grass blocks but with green on their sides instead of just their top and moss carpets, which can be a game changer for people using green or lime carpets to hide hidden light sources in their builds.
There is too much going on to get into every new block here, but one last big one is the dripleaf plant, which is going to be a big deal for players creating parkour challenges in Minecraft. The dripleaf plant is one the player can stand on, but only for a short time. When a player (or presumably any mob) stands on the dripleaf it begins to angle itself. After a few seconds of being stood on, it will angle itself so dramatically the player will fall through it.
Inside of this biome will be a new mob, the axolotl. These things aren’t just adorable, they’re predators as well. From everything shown during Minecraft Live, they don’t appear to be hostile to players, but captured in a bucket and brought to other biomes, they will attack any other sea life (both hostile and passive mobs). They will “play dead” when attacked, making other mobs leave them alone to give them time to recover, and supposedly will also have a way to help heal a player, but there was no details about how exactly this could work.
Next up is the dripstone caves, that will be covered in new stalactites and stalagmites (being called dripstone in the game). These are probably the biggest change in the aesthetic of Minecraft, in that they are almost rounded as they come to a point.
Dripstone on the ground will actually cause damage when someone lands on it, giving new possibilities to both traps and maybe even mob farms. Dripstone on the ceiling will drip water from it, and if you put a cauldron beneath one of these, it will actually fill up automatically.
Finally, there is the deep dark, a biome found only in the deepest depths of a world. In the video reveal of this biome, there was an effect on the lighting where from time to time the light from candles (another new light source) fades in and out. It is unclear if this was simply building atmosphere for the presentation or if it is going to be a real in game effect for the biome.
A whole new game mechanic is being added to the game for this biome. There is both a new mob and a new block that work with a sound mechanic where they react to things like footsteps, block placement, and even things such as pulling levers or snowballs impacting other blocks.
The major new block here is a sculk sensor, which is a redstone block. This actually allows for a degree of wireless redstone. The presentation showed off how hitting a lever can be “heard” by the sculk sensor from blocks away, activating a redstone signal. It senses sound from every side, but wool can be placed around it to act like a sound dampener to make the sensor more directional.
Wardens are the new mob that use this sound mechanic. They are completely blind and come after their prey based off the sounds nearby. They are pretty huge (look to be approximately 3 blocks high and 3 blocks wide) and are shown be able to charge very quickly toward the player if they are heard. On top of this, they seem to do over 6 hearts of damage to a player in full netherite armor. So, these things are going to be a real challenge.
A general change to caves is that there will be now be crystals, such as the amethyst geode. It is unclear if this will be the only crystal, or just the first to be seen. Crystals can only grow on special blocks, comparable to mob spawners that can already be found in the game. This means players looking to create a farm for these crystals will need to build it wherever they can find such an area.
There is also a new ore being brought in, copper. It does not seem like copper will be used for new armor or weapons, but amethysts and copper can be crafted together to make a telescope, giving the vanilla game a way to zoom in. Copper can also be used to create lightning rods, to keep lighting from striking things the player might not want catching on fire, or even possibly to be used to direct lighting if the player wants it to hit someplace in particular. Copper blocks will also have a unique property in that they will begin as orange, and over time will slowly change to green, including a couple phases in the middle where the block will be splotched with green.
Outside of the caves, bundles and archeology were shown off. Bundles are meant to help inventory management. They are bags where a player can put a stack worth of items, be it a single stack of one material, or 64 single ones. It was not said explicitly but it seemed that this can only hold 64 items if they are all things that can usually stack to 64. The UI shows off a pile of whatever is inside a bundle when it is scrolled over, and when it showed a bundle full of enderpearls it looked much emptier than other ones. This gives the impression that it could only hold 16 of them (the number of enderpearls that can be stacked regularly). This unfortunately means that bundles probably can’t be used for managing non-stackable items.
Archeology is a new system that can be used in excavation sites. These are special places that can be generated all over the world. In them, players can use a brush to attempt to get an artifact from inside dirt and gravel. It seemed implied that the brush is only useful in these excavation sites, but the dirt and gravel within this site does (at the moment) appear the exact same as it would anywhere else. There was also two colours of brushes shown, presumably being different levels of the tool (like a wood vs diamond brush, possibly).
These excavation sites were shown to reveal artifacts such as emerald blocks, diamond armor, and pieces of jars. These jar pieces can be combined to make unique jars, which will be new customizable decorative blocks.
It is worth noting (and they said this in Minecraft Live themselves), that none of this is totally decided. Mojang is always open to hearing what players think, and if any of this feels too far from what Minecraft is, they have shown in the past that they are good at listening to feedback and adjusting their plans to some degree.
By the end of Minecraft Live, they announced the winner of this year’s vote. Players were asked to vote which of three new mobs they would like added to the game, given the choice of iceologers (ice wizard illagers), mooblooms (yellow flower cows), and glow squids (glowing squids). Glow squids won the vote. These will add more interest to oceans, but while they glow, they don’t actually emit any light level. We can probably expect these squids to be part of the 1.18 update, rather than in Caves & Cliffs.
You can expect Minecraft’s 1.17 update, Caves & Cliffs, sometime around Summer 2021.
