1.21 Update Secrets Revealed! – The Spawn Chunks Podcast

Welcome to the spawn chunks episode number 273 for Monday November 27th 2023 my name is Johnny but the internet knows me as pixel riffs and joining me as always is the scam fighting superhero Joel Dugen hi Joel I don’t know about superhero uh but uh we were talking in

The render distance today about potentially avoiding holiday scams via email and text message and login prompts and all the fishing attempts that the uh Bad actors send out this time of year with all of the holiday shopping that is going on we are also talking a little

Bit about Black Friday deals and or the lack thereof really uh and things like that on the render distance that’s the extended version of the podcast if you’re new this week and you’ve never heard of it uh that is extra audio that our paid patrons get to listen to every

Single week it’s about a half an hour to 40 minutes of extra content you can go to patreon.com thees spun chunks uh join at any level uh outside of the Free level of course the paid members get access to that they also get access to things like the monthly Minecraft

Hangout and the quarterly hangout uh the November Minecraft hangout took place this Saturday on the 25th and that will be published on the spun chunks patreon page later today and we’ll Auto populate the RSS feed there if you are looking forward to the December hangout they normally happen on the last Saturday of

The month however that’s December 23rd which is really close to Christmas so people in our Discord will have to keep an eye on the announcements channel uh to see when we sort out the timing of the next Minecraft hangout we are currently discussing our holiday schedules and trying to figure out

What’s going to happen in December but we will let everyone on the podcast know about when the episodes are going out and then we will let everybody in the Discord know about where the extra content is happening over the holidays but if you got some Black Friday deals

Then maybe you have a little bit of spare Pocket Change consider signing up to the patreon it can make a good Christmas present for the family as well if you’re interested in getting deeper into the Minecraft community and participating in this extended conversation uh but our conversation

Obviously turns to what we’ve been doing in Minecraft this week so Joel how’s West Hill doing Wes Hill is doing pretty well I am getting closer and closer to finishing up this Marsh project at the front of the um the curtain wall and I’ll include some uh a little like

Before picture and and kind of where I am now uh the marsh section is actually done uh so I have completed all the foliage and this week what I did was remov the old decoration at the base of the curtain wall which was kind of grassy and and earthy and replaced it

With piles of cobblestone and mossy cobblestone so it’s it looks more like a manmade fill where you’d have to fill in the marsh before you built a wall on top of it otherwise your wall is just going to sink into the marsh and that wouldn’t

Be good at all so the curtain wall looks a lot sturdier now uh I then had to extend the marsh uh like five or six blocks up to the wall so that took you know a better part of an hour um but overall I think it’s come together quite

Nicely uh the tricky part now is that I am working on the Landscaping of that Bedrock sh that we talked about last week that kind of Rises up out of the river and what I’m attempting to do is get the water to look like it’s running

Down over the sh it’s hard to do in Minecraft because whenever you have water running over something essentially if it’s going down Hill each block is going to be a full block of water that then trickles down onto the next block so it’s hard to get a thin layer of

Water unless you’re going over something flat and so what I’ve decided to do instead is have a couple of like eroded streams like little places where the the water has pushed grooves into the Bedrock over time and then try to retexture the the Bedrock sh to look wet

And look like water is sheeting over it everywhere even though you can’t physically do that in Minecraft I’m about halfway done uh there’s uh three four uh little waterfalls I think that I’ve got going and those are pretty much finished uh I haven’t done there’s a wide section that’s like four or five

Blocks wide that I haven’t done yet so that’s left on the to-do list uh but I’ve been using uh deep slate tough and Cobblestone uh because we don’t really have a wet looking block that works uh I’ve got some mud in there but unfortunately it doesn’t blend very well

With anything around it because it’s got such a solid texture whereas Cobblestone and tough they’re kind of noisy so that you can kind of put them next to each other and they kind of blend together visually and uh I’m also trying to match the other side of the river so the other

Side of the river which is where the West Hill bridge is or the West Bridge is uh that has a lot of deep slate and tough in the geology there so I’m trying to make it look like that rock structure kind of continues under the river and

Then comes up the other side and trying to make it match and so far so good like I I I think the mossy Cobble helps uh it’s hard to capture in screenshots of course because of the timing but I do have soul sand at the bottom of each

Little River uh trickling down so it looks like there’s bubbles coming up as the as the water hits the the main river uh I think the trickiest part of all of it is just trying to make it look uh wet and and not too busy and I’ve I think

I’ve managed to go okay the the hard part of course is that the curtain wall is made out of andesite at the bottom and stone at the top and then this um Stone Bedrock sh that comes up is also andesite and stone so I’m trying to make sure that there’s enough happening that

They don’t blend into one another and um so far so good but it’s just it’s timec consuming it’s a lot of fun to control water and get it to look the way that you want though so it’s very satisfying in that way uh but it’s just it’s taken

A while and I’m throwing in some extra Greenery here and there and trying to make it look like like it’s been grown over a bit but it’s um when this is done that this is going to be a good portion of the the north side of of the Town

Finished nice to have like a big Landmark like this that you’re like we can do one thing in this area and then it’s done as opposed to having like a bunch of micro projects basically like you you’ve got the marsh section and then you’ve got this sort of yeah the

Bedrock sh section and that’s sort of like divided into two large chunks that you can take off your list one thing one question I was going to ask is that you were talking about how fun it is to like control water and like the satisfaction of getting it looking the way you want

It do you put in the water first and then build the rock stuff out of it or are you working from The Rock and carving channels for the water because one of the things I always love in Minecraft that Minecraft doesn’t do naturally is when water changes

Elevation and you end up with something that looks like a gradually forming River or a river that actually has sources and tributaries and stuff that bleeds into the river from from elsewhere so like I think the way you’ve done this looks really natural and I was wondering how you started that process

If you started with the rocks or started with the water first so I started with uh The Rock and then I carved the channels into it but I didn’t have the water flowing right away uh I’ve just have enough practice to kind of think okay I know that water in Minecraft is

Going to flow to the next lowest block and then you try and create like a a a Chasm for it to go down and in order for these waterfalls to look believable or for this runoff to look believable you want to try to have as few water sources

As possible so you want it to run three blocks or more and then you want it to drop and you want it to run a couple more blocks and you want to drop or you want it to go in a zigzag but what you don’t want it to go down is like a

Staircase because it doesn’t really look that natural yeah yeah and what I found that you can do is you carve that channel you let the water flow and sometimes it’ll stop but but other times it’ll go all the way to the bottom the way that you want and the trick there is

Sometimes you want it to backtrack a little bit and if you’ve got water falling down one or two blocks you can do things like water log a slab or water log a stair and that doesn’t affect the water flow because the moment that the water flows down a block it then becomes

A new count of eight before it you know will stop flowing M and so adding a water source there doesn’t matter it doesn’t affect the the height of the flow but it will affect the height of the flow coming into the top of it so

What I often do is I’ll have the water flowing down and then any spot that looks unnatural where it looks like there’s a really big like meter long chunk of water that’s going over something I try to cut that back as best I can and I find that the best way to do

That is to almost have more water than you need going down and then you kind of use blocks to push the water back and try to remove places where it falls too far um it it ends up being counterintuitive your trench looks too deep but then when it when you look at

It from a player standpoint uh the water doesn’t look like it goes over the rocks in big chunks it looks like it flows over them nicely and I find that that’s a nice trick and then what I do is I go back and I say okay well I’ve obviously

Made this trench too deep so then I can reduce the height of the sides of it so you might have a block that’s directing the water to go left and right but if the water is trickling down to like a level three or a four you don’t need a

Full block there you can change that to a slab and it still looks like the water will hit it and change directions and so that helps the water look like it’s more natural as opposed to like this big trench that’s been carved in by the

Player and so it’s a lot of it’s a lot of finicking around like it’s a lot of trial and error it’s hard to plan exactly um the only thing that I try not to do is have like a straight line of like three or four blocks in a row uh or

In this case I was trying not to have the water drop more than two blocks in a row either I wanted to kind of go steady like if it drops a block then it has to travel two or three then it drops another block that kind of thing and

That just is the the angle at which the rock the the landscape is I’m trying to make it look more natural yeah and and it’s a smart way of working as well I think it it looks very natural what you’ve got there in the screenshots and that’s a difficult look to achieve

Because more often than not the way the game makes water look it feels very very mechanical and even and precisely the opposite to how water feels in the real world which is kind of free flowing and organic and curved if it’s going over a fall or something like that and I find

That a lot of players are either going to do just a straight Flat River because animating water and allowing it to flow around objects and stuff doesn’t feel like it looks right A lot of the time because of the way water flow Mechanics Work and how difficult it is to have

Flowing water over the top of a larger body of water and then the other option is to have a big waterfall which is really just managing the water coming down from height and then continuing A Flat River beyond that and like while it works for larger bodies of water for

Smaller things like this it really helps to have some elevation change to make the water feel more Dynamic and so yeah I think it’s it’s a a brave task to even attempt something like this but I think you’ve pulled it off with style thanks man I I really appreciate that and uh I

I talk about this a lot on the stream so like the vods are available on Jog and vods uh well right now they’re only on Twitch because I haven’t moved them over but you know when they do get on to the the YouTube page then there’s portions

Where you can actually see me working through these problems and actually one of the the rivers that Forks in the middle of this that the fork wasn’t planned I had three streams and then I realized that I was having a lot of trouble with that middle stream and I

Just couldn’t get it to look right and I was like you know what I just maybe I’ll just I’ll Fork it and I’ll move it over and sure enough like that was the the thing that need to happen but that was not in the original plan and it created

A lot more work CU then I had instead of three to design I had four to design and so it added more to it but and ended up giving me more what I wanted and so there’s a certain amount of you can plan the textures you want to use but the

Actual path of things like it’s it’s kind of hard to plan you kind of have to go with what feels right and I know that’s hard for people that might not be artistic and and you know have those kind of visions and uh I think ultimately just you have to go with what

You know you’re trying to emulate and I’ve passed things like this in real life on Hikes and it’s it’s really it’s n impossible to do in Minecraft because what happens around here you’ll have this Bedrock that’ll come out of the ocean and on you know on a coastline and

There’s maybe four or five inches the top soil and you’ve got everything from trees to grasses and things that are growing on top of that but when it rains the water has got nowhere to go so you’re looking at runoff down the faces of rocks that’s several meters wide but

Only a couple millimeters deep and you just can’t do that in Minecraft you just have water sheeting Down rocks in that way at least not yet Mojang not yet but yeah it’s it’s uh I appreciate the compliment it’s it was an interesting experiment and I said before I’m glad I

Did the little Marsh on the East Road as like a proof of concept before attempting something three times the size yeah and so I had a method and this even though this took longer because it was bigger it felt like it went smoother because I had a process like I knew you

Flood everything first then you put in the mud in the roots and then you do the foliage on top and then you do the runoff like you kind of do it in stages and it works out quite well yeah well while you’ve been taking a more natural

And subtle approach to water I’ve been taking the Brute Force approach to water in my own world because I spent last behind the ears this week absolutely I spent the last week on a guardian Farm uh I’ve drained a circle around an ocean Monument similar to this Farm I did in

Season 2 of the Minecraft Survival Guide we are now on season 3 and uh I rebuilt the same style of farm but with a smaller spawning area it’s just two towers full of water with bubble columns at the bottom and just you know eight block sections to either side so that an

Eight block water stream can push the Guardians into a tunnel that effectively takes them down into the The Killing chamber 23 blocks below the farm um but in order to do that I’ve had to drain all of the water out of the surrounding perimeter I’ve completely dismantled The

Monuments down to the base layer of prismarine which is the lowest point at which any Guardians can spawn and then I built the farm on top of that and dug out an area below where the killing mechanism is and uh a few things have changed I don’t know if it was possible

To use path blocks in these Farms previously because I think having a water source dispensed over path blocks might have like reverted them back to dirt before or if it is it’s just not something that I’ve considered since I last built a guardian Farm but now I’m finding that path blocks work really

Well for the Guardians to fall onto they’re nonsolid so that items can drop through them they have that lower Visual and actual hitbox so that you can still hit them through the gaps but then not be lasered in exchange and I think it it worked out pretty well for me this time

It felt like I uh I kind of had the process down to a fine art I wasn’t having to look up a bunch of mechanics to remind myself how any of it worked I was just able to get on and do it so very happy that I now have that I’ve got

A skeleton farm that was my XP grinder up until this point but now Guardians are going to provide a ton more XP than the skeletons would the main thing is just getting comfortable with taking Thorns damage and so I have a beacon set up nearby with resistance and regen

That’s going to help a little with that the main thing that is left is deciding how to decorate the exterior because I wanted to make this a landmark of the world and I talked a bit about this in the video on this subject there are obviously Farms that you can make

Without draining any water whatsoever you can set up some Soul Sand bubble columns or you can you know apply a couple of other techniques you can have them all channeled into nether portals and send them through the Nether and back out into the Overworld and and kill

Them that way but in this case I decided I wanted to keep it as a landmark and have it be like a special project that we did as part of the series and so I’m still thinking about aesthetically what I want to do I’ve drained all of the

Water out from underneath the monument where the legs of it are which was only really on one side because it sits on this slope of gravel and stone on the ocean floor and from this point on I’m not certain what I want to do to decorate the exterior around where the

Monument is and it touches the circle on the four corners of the square base of the monument so it’s not like I have a huge amount of space around the outside but I’m left with these four slim semicircles or semi ovals that I want to fill with something I just haven’t decided what

Yet it’s the kind of thing where it might be frustrating knowing how many different copper textures are coming but not coming for six plus months right yeah yeah or more uh because of just the nature of clearing an ocean monument and prepping it for uh for this kind of

Thing means you end up having a lot of prismarine so very often you see uh Guardian Farms are made out of prismarine because you just you just naturally have a lot of that stuff because of that’s what you’ve just dismantled right yeah um but uh I also

Know that the reason why they’re always circular is because of course that’s the least amount of water removal in the least amount of work um but I mean you could you could always take out more water you know you could take little Corners like maybe turn it into

Something that looks like a compass rose or something where it would remain a little bit of extra water removal but it also might give you some extra patterns or shapes to play with on the floor um you could do some cool stuff with glazed terracotta if it’s meant to be seen from

Above you know you can create a mosaic or something like that um I um refresh my memory on the mechanics like if on a single player world if you’re sending the Guardians into The Nether like through a portal which you’re not doing now right they’re all dying in the

Overworld yes yeah no this doesn’t use Nether Portals at all thankfully right um yeah how would that work on a single player world like does do you have to like somehow keep the nether loaded uh you either have to keep the nether loaded or you have to push the Guardians

Through the Nether and out the other portal in a short enough time that the portal keeps the chunks around it loaded and I’m not entirely certain I’ve never really Ed those Farms on anything other than a multiplayer server but I do think that the nether portal on the opposite

Side if you’re not in that Dimension will load stuff around it for long enough for like an entity to fall through it for like a second and then you know stuff can happen there but it really depends whether or not a player is around I think it’s going to function

Best if you have a second account you can leave logged in while you’re using the farm or something which I’ve done a couple of times just for spectator camera shots of various things but I didn’t really want to do too much like that and rely on afking with two

Accounts in order to build up drops and aside from that this Farm functions super well on its own like it gets decent rates it’s got two decent size spawning tanks which have like a maybe a 7 by 20 area on the inside and that’s enough like I I was thinking about

Building a third one or even a fourth and having like a plus- shaped kind of farm going on don’t need it um because yeah the Guardians fall through pretty regularly and you can get all of the Guardians drops just by leaving the farm off and having the Guardians ding full

Damage you just don’t get XP that way but you still get prismarine crystals and so you’re lacking you know the Looting that you might have on a sword to get hold of some more of the drops but you can AFK farm that as much as you

Want um my main reason for keeping it as a player kill Farm as a as an option was just because I don’t have a better XP farm yet I haven’t built an Enderman Farm or a Zombie piglin Farm I’ve got basic villager trading done which is

Getting is getting me more XP that way than it was worth going to the skeleton farm for at this point but but yeah I’m I’m feeling out the options as far as that stuff goes and decoration will probably come to me at some stage I I’ll

Settle on an idea but right now I think I’m just like not burnt out on this project but I’m a little tired of looking at it for the moment and a lot of work I’m going to feel out how I want to use the space from a utility perspective before I decide on

Decorations that may or may not get in the way well one utility you may want to wait for or at least plan for the future is the crafter yes absolutely I I kind of I built the storage room already and I don’t have pictures of that for the

Discord chat but I can I can maybe find some of those and I I built some of the item filters for the different things and we’ve got three chests just filtering out the prismarine shards CU you’re getting most of those and then obviously you’ve got to make room for

The fish and you know occasional stuff like that that you get and the prismarine crystals but on the other side of the room I have a little crafting station so that I can make some of the blocks as I go and I mentioned in the video you know what all of this is

Going to be basically obsolete once the crafter arrives and we have to figure out the spaghetti of getting a crafter to make us some sea lanterns and some prismarine blocks and dark prismarine and stuff as well and where I put a squid Farm around any of this is going

To be another task in time oh yeah right yeah at that point I will probably have a squid Farm in a river biome somewhere and maybe just import the uh the black dye from there but you know you only need you only need black dye to craft dark prismarine now you don’t need

Specifically ink sacks anymore so that could just as easily come from a Wither Rose farm if we set up something like that there are a variety of options at this stage I can tell you if you want a lot of ink or ink sacks then uh simply

Build a marsh near a river and they will just commit suicide and and give themselves to you I can’t tell you the amount of squids that just like show up out of nowhere and like headbutt Rocky shols until I get free ink it’s it’s kind of ridiculous I I have an ink Farm

We have an ink Farm in the modern city because of course for the concrete roads and things and uh for all the gray and the black Dy but I I’ve never had to go there because I have like a a shulker box full of ink sacks yeah from working

Around westle that has three rivers running through it they just they’re all everywhere honestly I can just imagine working around a river like that and bringing an LA with you carrying an ink sack and just having it pick up all of the stuff from the squid that you missed

You know there’s there’s a good use for aay if people are still missed opportunity people are still uh missing out on that uh well this week we have a couple of uh minor releases to cover we’ve got inecraft Java Edition 1.20 3 pre-release 1 and two pre-release 1

Arrived on November 20th and there are a few technical changes in pre1 including the data pack version now being 26 and the resource pack version being 22 both of these have just renamed the Minecraft grass block and item to Minecraft Short Grass this is not grass blocks this is

The grass that grows on top of grass blocks and I think that’s just for um ease of use when you’re navig na ating through commands and you think that grass is going to give you a grass block and it gives you the grass item uh so if

You’re filling an area with that it gets a little confusing anyway uh aside from that there are some changes to downloaded and World resource pack handling uh the changes apply to World resource packs that that’s the resources dotzip file that you can uh download and Realms resource Packs along with

Resource packs controlled by dedicated servers downloaded packs are now stored in the downloads directory with a slightly different file organization than old server resource packs files in this directory are no longer kept automatically cleaned where previously only up to 10 packs were kept and additionally there inside the directory

There is a log file log. Json that stores information about downloaded files for debug purposes effectively to summarize this seems to allow servers to set up and apply multiple resource packs throughout a play session so it could be possible to automatically apply a resource pack as you move from one area

To another some fixed bugs of note in 1.2.3 pre1 uh these all apply to the experimental features there are some changes to breezes uh specifically breezes in Minecarts and boats being passive that’s now been fixed along with their inability to attack in deep water and inability to attack well under the

Effects of the levitation status effect there is also a bug from a previous snapshot version which doesn’t seem to have affected any major releases but the number of blocks from TNT explosions was capped to 16 instead of dropping 100% of the blocks affected by the explosion radius that’s now been reverted and

Fixed as well along with end crystals and TNT mine carts that explode without a source entity were dealing no damage whatsoever that’s been fixed as well uh quickly after that 1.2.3 pre-release 2 followed on November 22nd there is one change in this version which is the breeze wind charges now break decorated

Pots chorus flowers and pointed dripstone blocks upon Collision a few fixed bugs of note in 1.2.3 pre2 include the rain texture not looping correctly and decorated pots with a loot table desynced item consumption if it could not be inserted in the pot so for those of you who’ve been trying out trial

Chambers and noticed that occasionally you accidentally right click on a decorated pot and it like eats your pickaxe for a few seconds before dropping it back into your inventory that bug should have been fixed with this pre-release further information on the technical changes along with a full

List of bug fixes can be found at the minecraft.net Chang logs on uh minecraft.net and Linked In Our show notes as well yay I’m looking forward to a new minor update fingers crossed before the Christmas holiday because I really want to update data packs and move West Hill

Forward and I’ve been waiting just because if I do it now I’m just going to have to do it again when 1.2.3 comes out so I’ve been constantly apologizing for broken tables and chairs floating around in West Hill as I walk around during streams so I’m looking forward to

Actually fixing that permanently and and moving forward and uh love the idea of resource packs being applied based on an area within a server that’s really cool as a server that has a medieval fantasy area and potentially moving on to a Sci-Fi future area with a modern

City area that’s been around for a while too uh along with everybody’s normal areas if anybody on a server wanted to do something really intricate with a custom texture or even just something like me where I’ve got a custom texture for hay bales and I’ve used them next to

Birch blocks and they go very well with in rofes around West and it would be nice if somebody walked into my area and the texture pack just loaded and said hey by the way you know you need this in order to proceed because otherwise things are going to look a little bit

Weird and uh I think that’s great like that’s that’s a lot of fun uh I think you know it depends on how vanilla you want to keep your experience right now we all just use the same uh the same texture pack but that’s because there’s

I mean I can count the number of regular players on the SEL in one hand so it’s a lot easier to manage that way but uh on a busier server or a server that is really large like something like hermitcraft or uh other creators that we’ve had on the show have been

Participating in then that could be really fun for either one-off experiences you know like people that do like um those hardcore servers for like a month or two uh you could have some custom textures there and just kind of have that experience be different depending on what area of the server

You’re in that’s really cool yeah definitely I I think the example I’ve seen of this in the past is in um like miname ser like Hypixel and Mineplex and some of those where it feels like it can apply a different texture pack as you travel out to different mini games that

Might retexture certain tools or items as as different stuff and and loot and weapons and stuff within the games but then you realize that those are effectively a series of servers that are tied together on the back end by plugins like bungee cord and effectively the lobby is a different server to where

You’re actually playing the game and it just logs you into a different server without ever signing you out of the original server in Minecraft and so this would allow for all of that stuff to effectively be built on the same server although I don’t know if that’s still

Going to make the the most sense technologically speaking because of the load on that individual server but yeah like you said being able to go from say you planned your sci-fi area on the Citadel being able to walk there and have it automatically apply a texture

Pack in the background I think it’s said in the change log although we didn’t read this in the main notes cuz there was a lot of like individual details that instead of having like a wait hold up it’s applying a texture pack are you sure you want to accept that can now be

Just a toast that pops up in the the top right hand corner like when you unlock recipes in game and so it will just say like applying texture pack for this area without interrupting the flow of your gameplay experience and then you can just walk from one place to another and

Then the world around you will change and we’ll load a new set of textures which yeah if it works smoothly I think that’s choice I think that works really really well I think it was really funny actually you asked for one 20.3 last week and I think we we clocked it in the

In the post show or even like after we’d finished recording the the uh post show segment of the render distance uh the the pre-release came up on Monday last week so we just missed it by a few fractions of a second but such is the way with these pre-releases they usually

Remind everybody that they don’t necessarily rely on the you know Wednesday every week schedule that normal snapshots of development features do so yeah we’re potentially going to get a couple more minor pre-release versions in the next week or or so before 1 1203 presumably arrives sometime in early

December I looked it up and 1.9.3 was released on December 7th last year 2022 there was a sound update the new look for the Vex and a lot of creative mode inventory changes and then 1.9.4 was released in 2023 in March and that had the horse breeding changes and

Jukebox changes and like a bunch of other under the hood stuff but those were the big Flagship things to note in those in those changes so we could potentially see a 1.2.3 before the holidays given that we’re in pre-release and we’re not even done November yet

That’s that’s likely I would say uh I mean anything is possible but I’m sure if they’re moving in that direction they’d like to check that box before everybody goes on Christmas holiday at Mojang yeah and and then going into the spring like we could see a 1.2.4 you know or potentially more

Depending on what they need or have to do sometimes it it they focus on bug fixes and that’s that’s great uh other times we see small things like we see tweaks like uh the bat you know as a as an addition in these minor updates so I’m looking forward to 1.20.1 but I’m

Now getting used to these minor releases that are often fixing bugs tweaking things in the game uh bringing things up to speed that make more sense like not necessarily crafting recipes but just I feel like they’ve lined things up in better ways in terms of like where the

Creative menu keeps things and as the Game grow rows these minor releases seem to be a nice way for them to say like wait wait a second let’s just if we reorganize this it’ll make a lot more sense for new players or it’ll make everything a lot more streamlined for

People that have been playing the game or or using the game in a certain way and I I think that what I get from the minor releases to Minecraft uh as a general feeling is that they tend to be updates for current players quality of life changes whereas

The big releases the major releases the dot 21 you know and on onward they tend to be for everyone like they they tend to be for people that have been playing the game for a long time but also meant to bring in new people you know like

Shiny new Trail uh or trial uh Chambers and like all the fancy stuff you know that that gets a lot of attention uh obviously help bring in new players but uh I think the minor releases tend to be more focused on like oh hey cool you’ve been playing this game for a couple

Years let’s let’s show you a couple of things that are going to make your life a lot easier that seem seems to be the impression that I get from the minor releases yeah and there’s a couple of things in 12.3 which are really quite cool features like being able to add

Items into decorated pots for example that’s coming in this update and I think that’s something I will use in the survival guide more or less as soon as it arrives but with keeping track of the snapshots and the snapshots obviously focusing decorated pots in areas like trial Chambers and having them have loot

Tables there and stuff I’ve been thinking oh that’s a 1.21 feature but it’s not it’s coming in 12.3 for players to play around with already and while it obviously makes sense to imagine oh 1.2.3 is going to be the last minor update for 1.20 well they’ll focus on

1.21 in New Year and then we’ll just kind of go until we get that update development doesn’t necessarily work this way anymore and it’s a hard habit to get out of when you’re thinking oh they’re just going to save all of these minor sort of refinements for existing

Features for the major update and it’s all going to come in one go and that’s not the case anymore and so so it’s difficult for me to get my head around that as somebody who’s been following the releases for you know almost a decade at this stage but yeah it’s it’s

Exciting to see that that stuffs on on in the pipeline and hopefully fairly soon we’re going to be be getting a bit more news about what’s coming in 1.21 itself our main discussion this week is going to focus on what we predict might be coming in 1.21 what the direction of

That update is going to be but in the meantime we’re going to read some emails uh we got a couple more chunk mails to read out and Joel is going to take this first one if you would like to email the show send that on into to spawn chunk

[email protected] please use that email address keep them short keep them sweet it increases the likelihood of getting them on the show as well as being topical like King Smiles a pile of bones hi Johnny and Joel with the new trial Chambers coming soon I felt there is a missed opportunity to introduce two

Other skeleton types that would fill the empty space in the difficulty range of course more mobs more problems however the modded versions of skeletons such as the axe skeleton and sword skeleton would be great additions to the trial spawners Not only would these add more challenge but also suspense in each room

Is that a normal skeleton Spawner in which I just need to let them shoot one another to survive or am I going to have to run away from four ax wielding bone boys curious what you think King Smiles sent all those who insulted the crown to join his skeleton army it’s very very

Skeletor behavior from King Smiles I expect that’s I I expect that smile is a permanent one because you are just a skull uh you’re revealing your agenda too soon um but yeah I I think this is a a fun thing they talk about the modded versions of skeletons being sort of Axe

And sword wielding ones but really all you need to do is modify the equipment skeletons can already pick up swords and they effectively become wither skeletons in everything but the Wither effect and the height so I think that there’s there’s potential for this to just be a

Very easy data pack kind of thing you might even be able to program that into a custom trial spawner already if you can modify equipment by messing with data tags and stuff you could probably have skeletons spawning with an axe although this is the point at which you

Should ask whether or not you should has science gone too far because axes in my experience are pretty powerful weapons the reason vindicators and piglin brutes hit as hard as they do is because they have axes and on Java Edition especially axes are very powerful weapons they have

A flat attack damage from Stone axes on upwards and I think netherite axes are a point extra because everything netherite does a point extra of attack damage but that’s what makes piglin brutes so lethal on Java even if they just have a gold axe is because the axe is a menace

Um so I’m wondering maybe give the skeletons wooden axes that do a little bit less attack damage because otherwise you’re just going to have a bunch of skeletons rushing you in very little way to defend yourself it’s funny mention that because as I’ve been building more and more around West Hill and my

Inventory has become Tighter and Tighter I don’t carry a bow and a sword with me I just deal with Mobs with my Axe and it’s a netherite axe and it it does the job you know like I have to hit them a couple times but still it’s it’s better

Than trying to punch them with a pickaxe that’s for sure or a shovel as funny as it would be uh to to Bean skeletons with a shovel and have it make a nice noise Pang I wanted to have that frying pan absolutely yes yeah too too real to%

Yeah uh I mean I have to remind myself it’s not a Canadian snow shovel it’s it’s a you know dirt shovel a spade but still um I think that the game right now telegraphs the spawners you know so you know by going up to that spawner what

You’re going to get whether it’s a mushroom for poison tipped arrows from skeletons or whether it’s just you know um podul or whatever um maybe something like a sapling around the spawner for axe skeletons and I don’t know Cobblestone or maybe dripstone for like a pointy reference for skeletons with

Swords if that’s what you wanted that I mean whether that’s part of the data pack or whether you know it’s just something that ends up being in the game um I think they would probably want to Telegraph what’s happening there seems to be a kind of balance between making the

Game more challenging for players but not making the game unpredictably challenging for people that are either not good at PVE or even younger players that are just like they don’t want that kind of surprise you know they kind of want to be able to learn to guess what’s

Coming and that becomes part of the game so I’d imagine if they did add any other variants to the mobs that were seeing in trial Chambers or from trial spawners that there would be some sort of telegraph via the blocks around the spawner as to what’s coming yeah yeah

Definitely and and I I can see myself avoiding the axe wielding skeletons honestly I think if you can program a trial spawner to do this already it might be worth play testing it yourself and seeing if you still have the same opinion because I I get the sense that

Having fought my way through a few of these in survival um I think anything with an axe in there there aren’t currently any axe wielding mobs that appear by default in there because the only ones would be if you gave custom equipment to something or if you got

Vindicators and when we did a a test run of vindicators in a spawner when I was streaming this with auma and and and the other folks there was honestly like a huge difficulty Spike once axes get involved because most of the time you’re going into combat situations like that

With a shield and people often forget this if they don’t use Shields regularly and they’re just facing down one mob at a time but axes stun Shields so you can’t use a shield effectively it goes on a cool down and you have to run away and wait a couple of seconds before you

Can raise a shield to one of these mobs again and that’s a problem when you’re dealing with spawners that in the case of trial spawners will spawn multiple of them at a time and in a multiplayer setting can be programmed to spawn even more so you go in there with three or

Four friends the spawner fires up and goes okay there are four people here I need to spawn eight vindicators and and suddenly those all Rush at one player because that’s the only player that you know was nearby for them to aggro on you end up with a completely different problem and so I

Think a lot of the gameplay experience of trial Chambers is balanced to how can players defend themselves against this and yes you can pillar up a couple of blocks and you’re usually safe from anything within melee range but that’s still difficult when another spawner FES

Up on the other side of the room and breezes come out and they start like chucking wind charges at you to bounce you off whatever pillar you’ve ended up finding yourself on top of so yeah that there’s there’s some balance questions there that I think deserve a little bit

Of play testing before we uh commit wholeheartedly to joining the skeleton army I think ax skeleton should have those little swirly particles around them showing that they’re just covered in axe body spray and so everybody has to run away it’s a it’s a joke that works for the North American audiences

Joel but unfortunately it’s called links over here so uh oh yeah so so add links is to Minecraft is the next request um but the next request we’ve got uh on in our inbox comes in from sabriel and OJ who is a landscape artist member of our

Discord uh and the subject is uses for Breeze drops very aopo from our previous discussion hi jol and pix after listening to your discussion this week about potential drops for the Bree I had some ideas the obvious drop would be a wind charge or something similar as an

Analog to the fire charge that lets players harness the power of the wind for themselves that would be fun but like fire charges I think players would struggle to find enough to do or anything useful or automated to do with it my other idea is for the breeze to

Drop something that can be used as a potion ingredient for brewing a potion of cold resistance similar to how blaze powder is an ingredient in fire resistance I don’t imagine it would be the most used potion but it would be cool no pun intended to have currently

Our only defense against powder snow is don’t fall in whereas other damage types like drowning and Fire have potions that specifically negate them sabriel and OJ fell in powdered snow but didn’t die thanks to their potion of cold resistance I often chime in about consistency in the game so I can’t say

That the idea of a cold resistant potion is a bad one but I agree in that it isn’t as useful as a water breathing or a fire resistance potion and I know that we can use leather boots to walk on top of uh powdered snow but I think that

Kind of falls in the the don’t Fallin sort of way of approaching it yeah uh and it forces you to wear you know leather boots that you may not want to because you want more protection or you want to have you know maybe maybe your boots are gold and that’s how you keep

The piglins away from you in the ne you know depending on what you’re doing uh I feel like forcing players to use leather boots it’s not something that most advanced players just don’t bother they just either deal with powdered snow or just avoid it all together um but I was

Thinking maybe the breeze could drop Frost uh so that could line up with being used in a potion for um for cold resistance if they wanted to just for consistency but I wondered if Frost could be applied to blocks or surfaces like lyen or pink petals making things

Look Frozen we have ice blocks we have snow blocks but the only thing we have in addition to that are snow layers which completely cover the top of whatever you put them on and so if you’re trying to make other blocks look cold or kind of mesh them into a frozen

Builder Frozen landscape we don’t really have much to do uh and I think that that would be really cool to have like a frost layer that you could apply to something I might be just having like Christmas Village Visions just because we’re getting close to the holidays yeah

But you know like I think it it’s another example of adding a single texture to uh to the world that would then add a lot of different texture com com combinations without adding like multiple items it’s just one thing and then you can put it on top of everything

In the game or almost everything in the game and maybe it has some rules you know like maybe you can’t place Frost in deserts bad lands and jungles you know uh or uh warm oceans you know that kind of thing maybe you can only do it in in

The mid to colder biomes I don’t want to restrict it in my brain just to like Tundra and and Ice bikes and stuff like that because you might want to have you know some of the things are available to you in like a grassy Plains and make it

Look snowy uh and then being able to price frost on your windows would be kind of cool I don’t know there’s there’s some ideas that there that I think could could be explored you know and potentially if you had frost as a placeable thing that you could lay down

A path of maybe that has some Synergy with frost Walker and you end up with a uh situation where like Soul speed it gives you a speed boost if you’re running on that compared to running on standard blocks you know there there’s some there’s some Synergy there I can

See that being a being an option and yeah like you I I do like the fact that they pointed out there are these environmental damage things which we have resistances to but a newer one that we we don’t without compromising armor and so I think the cold resistance idea

Is a a pretty fun one I will admit I was thrown slightly by thinking blaze powder is an ingredient in fire resistance cuz I’ve been doing some potion brewing recently and I wait I went wait a minute no that’s a strength potion but then I realized of course you can combine it

With uh slime to make magma magma cream and that’s how you get the the fire resistance potion so that that does make sense after all and uh my only thought from this one was that a throwable breeze wind charge sounds like a snowball but with consequences because right now snowballs aren’t really that

Effective at doing much you can damage blazes with them um but all they really do is knock back and the thing about wind charges is that they hit a surface and they apply knockback as like an area of effect thing regardless of whether they hit a Target they don’t have to hit

An entity for it to push entities in the area and so I think there’s some some cool ideas there the difficulty with comparing it to fire charges is that right now the player can’t throw a fire charge in the same way that you throw a snowball right it looks like one of

Those round items but you have to apply it to a block you can use them to light a nether portal but it just sets a fire somewhere instead of being a fireball that you Chuck Mario Style and I think Fire charges in dispensers will just fire in a very straight line uh instead

Of you know having a more organic throw to them and so I I would imagine a wind charge would be most effective used from the inventory as a player if it functioned a bit more like a snowball or an ender pearl as a throne projectile like

That it would be neat if you could use wind charges somehow to power Transportation my my brain is thinking like a line of dispensers along a wall that are pushing you down a track you know like it maybe it’s an ice ice line and you fire the dispenser behind you

And then the wind charge pushes you forward because you only have that way to go uh because that’s where you’re facing or that’s because the wind charge happened behind you and then you time it so that when you get to the end of your slide the next wind charge shoots behind

You and pushes you farther but that would require having a lot of these at your dispense and I don’t think that at the moment breezes don’t feel like they’re going to be something that you can Farm tons and tons and tons of you know so that could change but but that

Would be interesting um the other thing that would be neat is if you somehow put it in something in the same way that you know we have furnace mine carts and you can put coal in it maybe putting a wind charge somewhere like in a chest booat

You know maybe it turns it into an outboard motor I don’t know you could have you could have some fun with it it occurs to me that um now that there was a a change in one of the change logs a bug fix that said breezes can uh now uh

They’re no longer passive when they’re in mine carts or boats and I thought what if a breeze is in a boat and it’s firing nearby but the boat as an entity gets pushed by the wind charge and suddenly the breeze just kind of propels itself away from you and if you could

Somehow harness that and that’s similar to the functionality they had planned for Penguins if they got voted in as part of the mob vote right as being able to push boats for you uh so I sort of Imagine The Breeze somehow being finagled so you could use it that way

And if you get in a boat with a breeze yeah it becomes a uh a motor for you and starts pushing you along cuz I imagine that on ice booat roads that would be chaos that’ be wild so the main topic for discussion this week we wanted to

Talk about where 1.21 was headed since we expect that we’re unlikely to see any new features before next year when 2024 begins so with what we’ve seen so far is it possible to predict what else is coming in Minecraft 1.21 and I think we can start by

Considering what seem to be the two pillars of this update as they talked about them at Minecraft live which was the tinkering side of the game and the combat side of the game and I think combat is probably the harder of the two to speculate about because that involves

Adding new mobs and we know that’s something that is approached cautiously but I think with the additions of the breeze and trial Chambers we might have seen about as deep as the combat side of this update goes because those are two fairly large features in terms of what

They add to the game already the addition of the Bree as a mob and the trial Chambers being a whole new structure especially when you compare it to something like the last two updates where the ancient city has been the big structure and these trial Chambers get

Pretty large I can’t imagine them doing too much more for the combat side of the game without maybe a mechanical overhaul for combat like the experimental snapshots we had from a few years ago I don’t know about additional combat the combat the combat from a few years

Ago seem to be very focused on PVP versus PVE and this the trial spawners and the trial chamber seem to be more of a PVE experience than than the fighting one another you know like I I feel like the mission with the trial Chambers is

To team up with your friends uh I know we’ve talked about turning them into like a you know a combat chamber later on after you’ve defeated them and you want to use the space um but yeah I feel like the combat so far at least that

We’ve seen uh in 1.21 features has been mostly PVE focused yeah and and the the combat snapshots had a few changes that would affect PVE like the um there was a rebalancing of how much saturation affected your health regenerating which is a much more General mechanic than just something

That applies to PBP um there were some things that weren’t even necessarily going to help with combat all that much but would really help Builders like the ability to stack snowballs to 64 so that you could craft more snow blocks and the ability to stack potions to 16 was

Something they tried out in those uh snapshots as well so I I do wonder if maybe there’s some stuff that they can Shuffle around which will still affect the PVE experience um but yeah I I I do agree that a lot of the work that needs to be done on combat

Mechanics in general is probably going to be there to appease the PVP crowd and maybe bring them forward to a newer version of Minecraft if they’re still stuck on version 1.8 before Shields and the weapon cool down and and charge up time was really introduced I’m not really much of a PVE

Or PVP guy in Minecraft I mean I’m a builder for sure but I also just feel other games do it better so I I tend to get that itch scratched elsewhere and don’t really participate much uh that said though I mean like I know that it’s

It’s a big thing for a lot of people so I’m happy to see any changes that they make to combat you know if they bring any of those features that were being worked on forward um you know changing in saturation and changing the way that food works could help make the trial

Chambers feel more challenging or or if they if they end up being too hard then then changing that could also make it feel a little bit easier that kind of stuff could could happen and I know that many games are a big thing for a lot of people on servers and and changing

Combat mechanics could help with those and maybe create other games um I mean right when you said stacking snowballs to 64 I was thought like man if there was a way within the data of the game to track the number of times you’ve been hit by a snowball or hit by a person’s

Snowball then that would be great having a couple ACC of snowballs and you’re just running around playing tag and the person that has the most hits wins without actually killing anybody you know it just it’s just a matter of um throwing snow around and that’s it’s fun

And it’s it’s I mean not that Minecraft is a very violent game but like it you know it it removes the killing somebody else from the game if you wanted to have really young kids run around and play tag with snowballs it’s a lot more family friendly in that way um but I

Like the nice thing about this is that I am not invested enough in player combat via PV P VP or PVE to really have strong feelings either way so whatever they change I’m probably going to be okay with like I can’t see it really affecting my day-to-day that much yeah

Same honestly like I spend most of my time in single player worlds so I don’t tend to worry too much about combat once I’ve got a decent set of gear and on the flip side you and I are much more interested in the tinkering side of things and from that we’ve seen the

Crafter which sort of represents the Redstone side of this update we’ve also got the copper bulb as part of that and then the decorative blocks from the copper lock palette are the things that they have described as looking tinkered so far um and so tinkering to me already

C the idea of metal work and so there are a bunch of different ways that can go we have a bunch of different Metals in the game now and maybe expanding on the customization that we saw from armor trims in 1.20 potentially there’s room for accessories to pop up in 1.21 and

Beyond um this is something that modded Minecraft has frequently there are like bobles and things like that that add rings that can give you certain powers and small Buffs and that kind of thing but tinkering to me really cones the idea of of metal work and even on just

Like a decorative block level we could end up with more blocks like iron bars or chains and and you know in theory those would be interesting just as a pallet swap from what we have already so if you can make gold chains or copper chains instead of just the iron ones

Alternatively the craft team might decide that it’s better to have ideas that aren’t just a reskin of existing blocks so they might save ideas like that for something that has its own unique functionality like how they’re not just completely repeating the same set of textures for every type of stone

Block for example but they’re giving tough bricks their own personality and their own style um there there is potential for the update to go full steampunk if they want to go in that direction maybe have Clockwork additions to crossbows that allow them to Auto fire as you hold down right click or

Something like that that and I’ve seen a few people asking for things like steam engines to help with Minecraft travel I know Minecarts have been on a potential overhaul list for a while so while that feels like a major area of the game to be attempting to update at this stage

They’ve already shown us some pretty major features and I’m not convinced yet that we’ve been shown the major features of this update because remember last year all we got was chisel bookshelves camels hanging signs and stuff like that and then later in the year we learned oh

We’re also adding the Cherry Grove biome the armor trim system and smithing is changing and there were a few additions to 1.20 that were large and came as a complete surprise later on in the year like you when I think about tinkering I think about gears Clockwork

Those Old Spring powered tin toys you know from like 40s and the 50s like that kind of thing I don’t think necessarily big factories or or big machinery so much as I think like little things and I love the idea of of Steampunk and I think while Minecraft tends to stay away

From really heavily thematic additions they they have a lot of copper now in the game and they have a lot of things that kind of lean in that direction to inspire or facilitate that kind of thing but what I like so much about the idea of Steampunk is that it has the same

Kind of Whimsy that Minecraft has in the way that just things work the way that boats work that you can roll them on the grass like just stuff like that that’s a little bit quirky and it just reminds me of like the refrigerator that Doc Brown

Built in like 1878 and Back to the Future 3 it’s the size of a barn right and it’s got all these whirly gigs and like steam coming out of it and all this kind of stuff and it shoots out two little ice cubes into a glass of IC tea

Right like that kind of stuff I think is is really fun and definitely lines up with what Minecraft kind of has as a Vibe and if they do anything with t tinkering with Minecarts like you mentioned or anything else that allows players to then create these kind of Rube Goldberg type Contraptions or

Anything that allows for more modern looking structures but not necessarily going as far as like modern day 20th century but like you get into like steam engine type Tech you know metal rivets that kind of thing could be could be interesting I’d love to see uh Extra metal textures like you mentioned

In the game I know we’ve mentioned this before about me wanting iron textures to be more consistent across the board being able to keep the iron block as it is now or maybe with an update and rename it to like a polished iron block and then have actual iron blocks be cast

Iron similar to The Cauldron and and to the Anvil and I’ve seen texture packs and mod packs that have metal blocks in them and it’s a really fun look and it’s also made more fun by the sound you know when you’re walking in those mod packs

On metal blocks it sounds like a hollow metal like duct you know like like a a a air duct that you’d see in in different um different films and stuff and my satisfactory brain thinks it would be really cool to be able to smelt together

Iron and coal and get steel and like get like a different uh a different metal block in the game I don’t think that going into metal blocks would really be outside of the realm of Minecraft like I feel like they fit they’re very structural metal is often very straight

You know it like it kind of fits with the blocky nature of the game yeah I I think it’s reasonable to imagine at least decorative blocks in the other metal types than copper maybe they don’t have the range copper has but if you think along the lines of the chiseled

Copper block that they included in this snapshot you think maybe like a a stamped gold block or an engraved diamond block could be feasible and it’ll be interesting whether they decide that that locks it into the block shape and you can’t then uncraft it as a resource block into its component parts

Anymore like that diamond block is staying as a block and it’s not going to be nine diamonds for you anymore and that could potentially generate some controversy among people who obviously still want to use diamonds for various things especially now they have more uses with duplicating armor trim and and

Whatnot but uh yeah I I do think the uh the the the other metal types and the other precious blocks could be you know do for some sort of overhaul and so that you can do a bit more interesting decorative side with them when I think about tinkering I was

Also thinking a little bit outside the game and more about that word being applied to the internal development of Minecraft so tinkering is a great word to get people’s imaginations going out in the player base but if tinkering could also be applied to maybe the team Tinker tinkering around internally like

Maybe with Mob Models or mob animation updates in the future uh I’d love to see some consistency across the board for directional block placement you know uh I know it’s an old bone to pick but like that that kind of thing where they are just tinkering with how some of the

Things work in game not necessarily changing them just like making them more consistent or by allowing directional block placement that then opens up all kinds of different textures and they didn’t have to add anything new to the game they just had to change the way

That a block was being able to be placed right yeah and and given what we were talking about earlier especially if it’s a refinement to an existing feature that’s the kind of thing that you can see them sneaking into the minor updates for 1.21 as well like if they decide to

Continue tinkering with some of the concepts that they introduced in this update then sure yeah like you can you can definitely see the updates theme continuing into the work that they do in in minor releases as well um the other things we need to cover here are the

Outstanding things that we know are going to have some role in this update but up until this point have not really appeared um the trial keys are really the outstanding mystery and based on community speculation there is a huge range of possibilities from them reactivating trial spawners to unlocking

Some sort of locked loot chest to having some connection to ancient city Portal frames and I want to say in the past the Minecraft team has shown they aren’t Beyond just leaving some Mysteries unresolved like the the ancient city portal itself as a fine example of this

But I think it would be disappointing if they put the keys into this update with no use since there are few other useless items in Minecraft and the blocks of an ancient city portal can exist there without needing to be explained but they’re not something the player can

Physically hold in their hand and once you’ve given somebody something saying it doesn’t do anything feels like an anticlimax and so I don’t think that’s NE necessarily what they’ve got if they didn’t have something planned for them in 1.21 they wouldn’t have introduced them at this stage as trial spawner loot

Is my presumption here um so yeah I I am curious about what those are going to be doing and hopefully sometime in early 2024 that’s when we’d start finding out or at least getting hints about what they might do and I think one ongoing piece of feedback from players going

Back to the combat idea is the desire for more more boss encounters since I mean the Elder Guardians I think are technically counted as bosses but if you ignore those the last boss to be added to the game was the Wither I think that was in 1.4 or 1.3 and either way

That’s been over a decade since a boss experience was added to Minecraft and we all think the warden doesn’t count I think at this point because the warden is not intended to be a a fight experience they’ve not called it a boss even though by typical game standards a

Boss is just like a big scary enemy that is a difficult thing to fight and has lots of health which the warden meets in terms of that criteria but if it’s not intended to be an experience like that like an arena fight like the Ender Dragon is for example then it doesn’t

Really apply so in other games keys are often required to unlock boss rooms of some kind and it occurs to me that the trial key would be a great way of linking one combat experience to another combat experience the difficulty of course being where do you stage that

Combat Arena and if that means going through the ancient city portal and arriving somewhere that you can fight some kind of boss there or if it just unlocks something else that appears elsewhere in the world that can trigger a boss encounter I suppose that’s also an option um the other the other thing

To to link trial keys to tinkering is potentially a trial key is used to wind up some sort of clockwork mechanism and that goes back to the idea of making the game a bit more steampunk so there is a lot of potential there but I think I

Think one of the main things players are left with in this stage in the game is what are the trial Keys going to do what’s that looking like for the release of 1.21 when I think about the boss fights I often think about like what the

Rewards are so Dragon you get access to the outer end islands in elytra the Wither you get the nether star and access to beacons provided that you’ve also dealt with some wither skeletons along the way uh I I agree with you in that I don’t think the the warden is is

A boss fight I would call it a boss encounter I think that you’re like it’s meant to have the same weight as a boss but like the mechanic there is avoid it don’t fight it right and if the trial Keys activate that portal somehow then like hopefully they do something really

Cool like maybe the portal has to flash three times to turn on and it makes a noise so that when you turn it on it summons the warden and you really have to go through like for forces you to like a one way time time to run you know

You’re you’re turning the key in there a couple of times and it’s like you’re trying to start a car that won’t start while the horde of zombies is like encroaching on you right it’s like you got to you got to kick this thing in order to get it to work yeah it starts

To putter around like a a a Ford from like the 1900s I yeah I or like a crank start car yeah yeah I I I don’t know about the keys I from an artist perspective like I look at them and they’re a very attractive Sprite that’s

A lot of work to put into something that doesn’t do anything so they have to be used for something um I was assuming they were just going to be used to turn on more trial spawners as a way to negate the half an hour cooldown that

Would be to me the less exciting but more likely use of a trial key u but we’ll see I’d be happy to to see them do other things I mean it is a crafting and building game maybe trial keys can be combined with something else just like

You have to get the nether stars and the Wither Skeleton skulls to make a beacon maybe the trial Keys have to be combined with something else in the game you know like TR key plus copper grate equals I don’t know you know and and that could be fun tinkering you know using the

Trial key to turn something or power something I don’t I don’t know if that’s something that we want to add to the game whether that gets into modded territory and I feel like that kind of stuff starts to evoke visions of like the create mod and things turning and

Clockwork and that kind of stuff so I I don’t know like I’m not sure where the trial keys are going and the last thing that you brought up uh that I didn’t even think about in my uh notes but we’ve we’ve had glimpses of this is that

Of course the mob vote winner has not been added in any of the recent snapshots we are waiting on what’s going to happen with the armadillo yeah and I I want to know if you have any additional thoughts as to what you know might happen with the

Armadillo we did get some concept art that came out uh I I want to say it was last Monday uh on Twitter the Minecraft uh channel on Twitter put out a concept art of the armadillo nothing too crazy it’s just you know a bunch of different things that uh show what the armadel

Potentially could look like and uh I uh I I like it I I think it looks pretty cool they uh they have uh a version in the concept art that I think is is really nice which has I best the best way to describe it is like the shoulder

Area of the armadillo is a bigger box than the bum part and I think that that looks a lot better than just a straight up box right because it just looks like a shoe box with a head and a tail which I understand armadillos kind of look

Like that but I think from a flavor standpoint I think the armadillo model that they exploring with a bigger kind of chest or shoulder area uh is more interesting and more modern looking and then still sticks with the you know cuboid nature of Designing things in Minecraft I also

Hope that the ears and the tail in the model have volume like they do in the model similar to piglins ears rather than just like a flat pixel thing uh I you know gives you an opportunity to have ears wiggle have the head turn and look around uh the tail could move that

Kind of thing I mean a happy armadillo could waget tail like a dog I really have no idea um but that that could be really fun uh and I know obviously that it has to be able to pull those things in and probably change texture and look

Like it’s in a little ball because I think they showed that as something it might do yeah in the animations the little tiny yens encountered one um so yeah like I I think that um the model is looking cool I don’t know what you know how it’s all going to be implemented

Because you sky’s the limit U going back into that internal development uh tinker idea I mean maybe wolf armor will lead to tinkering with the wolf model and animations perhaps even tamed wolf model variations that could be really cool too um I know you’ve mentioned on the show before about potentially adding armor

Trim to Wolf armor I I can see it as a cool thing but like I’m not sure whether that just adds like a really complicated list of textures that have to be added just because if we know all know how complicated the texture is for player armor and and um armor trim

Yeah and I certainly don’t want to give the art team too much stuff to do but I think in single player worlds it also gives a great option for what to do with armor trim once the player has decided on their armor trim set like you know

Obviously you’re going to want to keep some around just in case you lose that armor set and you need to make more and you want to have more stylish designs to put on it like that happened to me recently but I I do think having something else to do with armor Trim in

A single player world is an attractive Prospect so that’s another reason that I’m I’m kind of uh encouraging the uh the community to think about wolf armor and and give feedback about whether it can be trimmed or what can be done to to customize it um I think overall my main

Question about the armadillo is going to be yeah does it have any other mechanics related to it say for example when it rolls into a ball it becomes impervious to arrows in the same way that shulkers are when they are closed and then does that make it a more accessible

Alternative to shulkers if if you want to have a mechanic that say rebounds an arrow off of something in a farm like I I I don’t know if that’s that’s necessarily going to be a worthwhile mechanic to have for anything but it it could be potentially usable like

Technical Community does some some wild stuff with mob mechanics they can they can find some stuff the other thing is what does it eat because if it’s going to drop armad dillow skute in the same way that turtles do when they you know breed and the small ones grow up you

Have to have something to breed it with and we’ve remarked on the show previously about how armadillos eat insects and the termites that were going to be added as part of the Savannah Biome update could be a perfect candidate for that but in the meantime they have to be fed something that

Exists in the game already and we don’t really have much in the way of like bugs that the player can pick up as an item right so whether the armadillo feeds on live food from its environment and you have to like Chuck an endermite at it or

Something and then then rely on it attacking the endermite like an Enderman does or if if you you know end up adding some new food stuffs that are specific to feeding armadillos or if you go the other rout and you know this this armadillo likes vegetables and you just

Feed it a carrot or something and it does the same thing I’m I’m curious as to what they will do typically lately they have been quite Keen to get the food right for you know passive mobs like this like obviously the the Frog uh indication if if if that’s anything to

Go by they don’t want to be feeding this something that’s potentially going to be harmful to it in nature but there also aren’t that many people out there interacting with armadillos so I don’t know quite how much of a concern that is for Mojang when it comes to developing

The way we breed these mobs yeah a quick Google search says they eat fruit and eggs oh eggs eggs could be an interesting one just even caran so I mean there’s there’s a long list they tend they look like they’re omnivores so really I mean apples but

But I mean I guess if you want it to be unique you know um there isn’t any other animal in the game that eats eggs right it’s only players yeah I mean foxes will eat the chickens but I think I think they leave the eggs alone which let me

Tell you from personal experience is quite the opposite of like the foxes that are in my neighborhood they’re always just leaving eggshell all over the lawn where they like dug eggs out of the neighbors bins um but yeah like this this is going to be the launch of the uh

The the Minecraft picture book adaptation if you feed an armadillo a cookie um then you’ve got then you’ve got to bring it a bucket of milk I think is the followup um so yeah armadillos are potentially still a a gray area and one that we’re looking forward to them

Exploring in in 2024 I think we’ll wrap up our discussion there uh but it’s been great to talk about this stuff and of course I’m sure the folks out there in the community have tons of ideas for what could potentially be part of the 1.21 update so we’d love to hear about

Them and we’ll be reading a bit of extra chunk mail as we go into the holidays and we pre-record a couple of episodes ahead of the holiday season so we’d love to hear from you on the usual email address but that’s going to be it for

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Platform you can email the show at spawn chunk [email protected] the RSS feed is linked on the spawn chunks. comom and the patreon only RSS feed is on the patreon page that’s where you can listen to the render distance the extended version of the podcast my name is Johnny

Boton Leto by pixel riffs you can find most of what I do at youtube.com/ pixels where the Minecraft Survival Guide is currently in its third season I also stream 3 days a week on Twitch where I do behind the scenes work for my YouTube series that’s where a lot of the

Guardian Farm got done and I’m also the voice of The Unofficial hermitcraft recap which you can find through a quick YouTube search aside from that I’m at pixel riffs on both Twitter and Instagram Joel where can people find you online everything that I’m doing online is at jen.com including a link to the

Cadal cafe my other podcast about sci-fi and fantasy entertainment although right now we’ve got a holiday episode out about upcoming holiday movies you might might want to check out I am Joel Dugen on social media very easy to find Joel Dugan on Twitch where I stream Thursday

Through Sunday but I’ve been fitting in a lot of extra satisfactory streams lately I am however still pushing forward on the Citadel working on westel I’m trying to get this finished before the end of 2023 and so again hoping for that 1.2.3 release in the next few weeks

Thanks for visiting the spawn chunks the world outside is infinite but we’re still tinkering with the future