Caves and Cliffs Update Snapshot Adds New Features

The next minor update has just dropped for Minecraft ahead of the major Caves and Cliffs expansion coming later this year.

This drip-feeding of content is proving popular with fans and it helps paint a picture of how amazing the next big content update for Mojang's iconic title is going to be.

LATEST- Snapshot Updates: 21W14A

The latest update for Minecraft ahead of the Caves and Cliffs update adds Smeltable Ore Drops as the main new feature.

There are some bug fixes too, as you might expect, and you can see them all in the full Patch Notes below.

New Features

• Added Raw Copper, Raw Iron, and Raw Gold items
• Tuff blobs can now be found between heights 0 and 16

Smeltable Ore Drops

• Ores that are smeltable now drop raw item forms of the ore instead of the ore block and these can be smelted just like before
• This is to prevent cluttering the inventory and have consistency with Fortune on all ores
• Ore blocks from old worlds and silk-touched ore blocks will continue to be smeltable

Changes

• Fully oxidized Copper can now be waxed

Bug Fixes

• MC-203854 – Fishing rod texture always looks like it has been cast when in the player’s hand
• MC-207173 – Entering only colons into multiplayer Direct Connection & pressing enter crashes the game
• MC-210155 – Command block output no longer is displayed immediately after running a command
• MC-213665 – Crash upon attempting to generate a world with a height of 0 blocks
• MC-214287 – Crash upon entering a nether portal when logical_height is set to 0 and min_y is set to 80 or greater
• MC-215120 – World-gen datapacks can cause crashes when first generating world
• MC-216697 – Having ‘min_y’ set to lower than -64 causes either a crash or the world not to behave correctly if the height limit wasn’t modified
• MC-217702 – Game crashes (ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException) during world feature placement / decoration
• MC-219849 – Fishing doesn’t animate or render the rod, line or bobber anymore
• MC-220652 – IndexOutOfBound exception hard crash when loading a simple custom dimension datapack
• MC-221553 – The end dimension generates differently than it did previously
• MC-221586 – Excessive pillager spawning in pillager outposts
• MC-221673 – Ocean monuments are completely empty

Caves and Cliffs Update

Minecraft players have been waiting for the Minecraft 1.17 Caves and Cliffs since its announcement in late 2020. The good news is we've gotten it piece by piece in Snapshot updates, letting players try the new features early.

The latest Minecraft Snapshot was a massive one, so let's dive right into the patch notes.

Patch Notes

Here are the patch notes for Minecraft Snapshot 21w13a.

New Features in 21W13A

• Added the goat!
• Added an accessibility option

Goats

• Goats spawn in Mountains
• Goats can scale the sides of mountains with their incredible jumps!
• Goats can be tempted and bred using Wheat
• Goats are another source of milk!

Accessibility

• Added an alternative solid black background color for the Mojang Studios loading screen, toggleable with the “Monochrome Logo” accessibility option

Changes in 21W13A

• Tweaks to Caves
• Tweaks to Ore Distribution
• Tweaks to Powdered Snow
• Dripstone clusters can now be found rarely in normal caves
• Deepslate blobs can now be found between heights 0 and 16
• Axolotls and glow squids now spawn in underground water sources
• Axolotls will now always chase after and attack squids, glow squids, tropical fish, cod, salmon, pufferfish, drowned, guardians, and elder guardians
• Axolotls now have a two-minute cooldown after hunting non-hostile targets such as fish, squids, etc.
• They will prioritize targeting hostile mobs first before hunting.
• Bees now see Flowering Azalea (and Flowering Azalea Leaves) as flowers
• Additions to Wandering Trader and Mason trades
• Additions to chest loot tables

Cave Tweaks

• Mineshaft tweak: increased the max length of pillars and chains.
• Carver tweaks: made carvers less likely to be too flat to walk through.
• Noise cave tweaks:
  • Increased likelihood of megacaves (large cheese caves)
  • Reduced likelihood of toothpick pillars (tall 1-block thin pillars)
  • Other tweaks to make the cheese caves more varied and interesting.

Ore Distribution Tweaks

• Slightly more iron
• Larger diamond blobs sometimes form

Powdered Snow

• Powder snow’s durability/hardness was slightly increased
• Freeze time has decreased to 7 seconds and hurt frequency has decreased to 2 seconds
• Entities on fire now melt Powder Snow when colliding
• Increase vertical movement speed within Powder Snow
• Strays, Polar Bears, and Snow Golems are now immune to freezing
• Mobs now shake when they are fully frozen
• Skeletons converting to strays now only require the 7 seconds it takes for an entity to be fully frozen to begin converting, instead of the 30 seconds it took before
• Leather horse armor now protects horses from freeze damage
• Mobs that enjoy the heat (Blazes, Magma Cubes, and Striders) take increased freeze damage

Trade & Loot Table Additions

• Added the following trades to Mason:
  • Will sell 4 Dripstone blocks for 1 emerald
• Added the following trades to Wandering Trader:
  • Will sell 2 Pointed Dripstones for 1 emerald
  • Will sell 2 Rooted Dirt for 1 emerald
  • Will sell 2 Moss Blocks for 1 emerald
• Moss blocks can be found in Shipwreck chests
• Glow Berries can be found in Mineshaft chest minecarts

Technical Changes in 21W13A

• Added metric cube of light!
• Unused parts of code are no longer removed

Light Block

• Op-only (/give) air-like waterloggable block
• Emits light at a level determined by block state
• Visible and targetable only when the item is held (similar to barrier)
• Right-click cycles light level