slicedlime – What’s New in Minecraft 1.18 – The Caves & Cliffs Update Part II?

My name is slicedlime and I’m here to show you all of the changes in this version. Let’s dive right in and start with the broad strokes of how the world generation has changed. The build limit has been extended 64 blocks up and 64 blocks down to a total range of

384 blocks, ranging from -64 to 319. Underground features, structures, and caves now generate all the way down to height -64 and the terrain shape and elevation varies dramatically and indepedently from biomes. This means you can now have forested areas that vary in hillyness, desert mountains,

Rolling savanna hills and a huge number of other combinations, including exotic ones like ice spike mountainsides. In addition to that, the new mountain areas are much higher than previous terrain, reaching elevations up to 260. Rivers are wider and sometimes deeper, looking more like real rivers and sometimes even like lakes.

You get taller cliffs and gorges, even canyons forming around rivers sometimes. Temperature, humidity and other such factors now vary consistently across the entire world, so you’ll tend to get cold oceans next to cold coastlines and you’re less likely to get icebergs right outside deserts.

All features of the world generation also fit into this new terrain, which means you can get absolutely spectacular villages, mountaintop pillager outposts and so much more. The random number generator used to generate the new terrain has also been upgraded, which

Means the entire range of each seed is now used – there are no longer any so called shadow seeds. The new mix of biomes and terrain is extended even further with the addition of new biomes. There are six new mountain biomes, to begin with. Let’s start at the top with the Frozen Peaks.

These are Smooth mountain peaks covered in ice and snow. The only animal that can spawn here is the goat. There are also Jagged Peaks – Dramatic jagged mountain peaks with snow and exposed stone on one side. Like the frozen peaks, the only animal you’ll find here is the goat.

In warmer climates, there are also Stony Peaks, which are snow-free stony mountain peaks that may be jagged or smooth. These stony peaks provide a new opportunity to get calcite, since they sometimes generate wide strips of it. You wont find any animals here at all.

Moving down the mountainside, we find the Snowy Slopes biome. This is very snowy terrain that also generates powder snow that’ll trap the unwary explorer. Here you can also find rabbits and goats. Another new mountain biome is the Grove. This is a snow-covered biome with spruce trees.

You’ll find this biome on hilltops or beneath mountain peaks, and here you can also find powder snow. Wolves, rabbits and foxes all spawn here together with the common Minecraft animals. The final new mountain biome is the meadow. This is a large, high-altitude grassland biome with lots of flowers.

Each meadow tends to have its own unique flora, with lots of a certain few flowers. Meadows are mostly open but you can sometimes find a few trees here. These trees are more likely to have bee nests than trees found elsewhere. In meadows you can also find donkeys, rabbits and sheep.

Another thing you can find in a Meadow is a village… and with Villages around you know the Pillagers will be right there too. Pillager outposts can now generate in all the new mountain biomes. These biomes all work much like mountains did before – you can find emerald ore here,

And if you dig down you can also find infested stone. There are also changes to the existing overworld biomes in this version. Because the terrain now shifts indepedently from biomes, a number of biomes that were identical except in terrain shape have been removed, and edge biomes no longer exist.

One exception to this is the Jungle Edge biome, which now exists as its own proper biome and has been renamed to Sparse Jungle. Other biomes have been renamed as well. Snowy Tundra is now called Snowy Plains, Stone Shores have turned into Stony Shores.

The forest types with larger trees are all now called Old Growth, so Giant Tree Taiga has turned into Old Growth Pine Taiga, Giant Spruce Taiga into Old Growth Spruce Taiga and Tall Birch Forest into Old Growth Birch Forest. The old mountain biomes have all been renamed as well.

Mountains is now Windswept Hills, Wooded Mountains is Windswept Forest. Gravelly Mountains has turned into Windswept Gravelly Hills and Shattered Savanna has turned into Windswept Savanna. Wooded Badlands Plateau is now simply called Wooded Badlands. Speaking of Badlands, there are also some smaller changes to existing biomes and world features.

Mineshafts can now generate higher up in the world in Badlands, generating anywhere between sea level and the surface of the world. Villages have been tweaked in this version to be slightly more spread out, which means that on average you’ll have to travel a bit further from one village to the next.

A loot change: Buried treasure chests can now contain between 0 and 2 water breathing potions in addition to the loot you already found there. This is an extra item added to the loot table, so you will get it in addition to what was

Previously generated, it doesn’t take away the chance to get the other items. Stony Shores have been changed to include large strip of gravel, and swamps have been changed to let trees grow in two blocks of water instead of just one.

Water springs are more common, leading to more small streams and waterfalls down mountain sides. The water lake feature has been removed – these are the small pools of water you could sometimes find across the world. A new feature called aquifers has been introduced which fills this need instead, and to explain

That we’ll need to get into the new caves. You can find these caves in all terrain and they come in a huge amount of new variety. Noise caves are an entirely new way of generating caves, providing more natural variation.

The name noise caves derives from the mathematical method used to generate them, so don’t worry – they’re no more noisy than any other cave in the game. There are three flavors of noise caves – and flavor is a good word because they’re all named after food.

Apologies in advance to anyone watching this while hungry. The first noise cave type is the cheese cave. These work a bit like the holes in swiss cheese – they often form caverns of various sizes. Then we have spaghetti caves – they’re long squiggly tunnels.

They can be wide or narrow, but are generally large enough to comfortably walk around them. And finally we have the noodle caves. These are thinner, squigglier, and have a more claustrophobic feel than spaghetti caves and there can be parts that are too narrow to walk through.

The old cave carvers and canyons still generate too, combining with the noise caves to form really interesting cave systems. All these types of caves can intersect with the surface of the world, leading to an array of new and interesting cave openings. Another new cave concept is the aquifers we spoke about earlier.

An aquifer is an area with a local water level, independent of the sea level. They’re used during world generation to generate bodies of water inside of caves. This sometimes results in large underground lakes or water-filled cave systems you can swim around in!

Aquifers can also generate inside mountains and on the surface, which generates small mountain lakes – or you can find one on the bottom of the ocean or the bottom of a river, to enter a water filled cave system that way.

Below height 0, some aquifers will also be lava aquifers instead of water aquifers, meaning that you can now find large lava lakes at many different heights – not just around the lava table at the bottom of the world.

The small lava pools that you could previously find are still around, but only exist above height 0 in the world. The special type of ravines that you could previously find in oceans have been removed – now you instead get all types of caves and ravines filled with water on the bottom of

The ocean and rivers as well. There’s more variation underground too, with two new cave biomes. These biomes were previously available only if you created a single-biome world, but now they also exist in normal overworlds. Cave biomes generate in 3D, which means you can have a lush cave biome underneath a different

Biome on the surface. Dripstone caves contain plenty of Pointed Dripstone and Dripstone Blocks on the floors and ceilings, and small pools of water. In some places you’ll find larger stalagmites, stalactites, and columns built from Dripstone Blocks. With this new biome available, dripstone clusters can no longer be found in normal caves, only

In dripstone caves biomes. Lush caves now also generate underground. You’ll find moss covering the cave floor and ceiling here, spore blossoms growing naturally and clay pools with dripleaf plants. You’ll also find azalea bushes here and cave vines with glow berries growing from the ceiling.

Azalea trees grow up from lush caves into the biomes above, so if you find an azalea tree on the surface, you can always follow its roots downward to a lush cave. Underground world features have also changed in this version.

At height 8 and below deepslate gradually replaces all stone down to height 0 where there is no longer any stone, only deepslate. You can no longer find the blobs of deepslate that currently generate above height 0. The size and positioning of diorite, andesite, granite, dirt and gravel has been tweaked

– you now get larger blobs of those blocks but they’re fewer and further apart. Diorite, andesite, granite and dirt don’t generate below height 0 at all, and less of the alternative stone types generate above height 60. The amount of monster spawner rooms has been increased, especially in the new depths below height 0.

Geodes have also shifted downwards, so you can now only find them up to height 30, which makes them less likely to generate exposed in oceans. Magma Blocks now sometimes generates at the bottom of any body of water, so you’ll be able to find these not just in ocean ravines.

They make it easier to swim around and find pockets of air to breathe in, both in oceans and in water filled caves. In this version the random pattern of the bedrock layer near the bottom of the world and top of the nether are now dependent on the world seed.

That pattern used to be the same for the same position every world. Large veins of ore now generate in the underground. Above height 0, copper veins generate with granite blocks. You can also sometimes find a rare raw copper block inside these veins.

Under height 0 you can instead find large iron ore veins mixed in with tuff. You can also find rare blocks of raw iron here. One more thing to mention about the world generation is that the distribution of ores has changed dramatically, so where you go when looking for a certain type of material

Needs to change. I’ve included all the details of this in a separate video that is linked on screen here. There are also news in this version for how the game deals with an old world. In order to make it possible to continue playing in old worlds, the game now blends the edge

Between old world generation and new. This means the new terrain will start with a biome and height that matches your existing world, making it very hard to tell what is new and what is old. Previous versions would simply geneate a cutoff or cliff wall when the world generation changed.

The underground is also upgraded. Underneath your old chunks, wherever there was bedrock there will now be deepslate and new caves will generate in the space underneath. In order to determine where to generate new underground content the game first checks if there’s any bedrock at all in the bottom layer of a chunk.

If there isn’t, the entire chunk gets air inserted underneath. If there is, the bottom block for each column in the chunk will determine the result for that column – if there’s air, there will be air all the way down – if there’s anything else, there will be new terrain all the way down.

This is different in superflat worlds, which always get 64 blocks of air inserted underneath. Before we move on from the new world generation, let’s discuss some of the other world types. The amplified world setting has been updated too, to make the functionality fit in with the new world generation.

This means you get all the new biomes and caves, but with the amplified terrain on top of that. The large biomes world type has also been updated, giving you a new type of world with the new terrain but also with much larger biomes.

Two other world types have been removed from this version – the single biome caves and floating islands worlds. You can still upgrade such worlds to this version, but keep in mind that the end result might be buggy.

And with that it is finally time to move on from the amazing new worlds of Minecraft 1.18 to other changes to the game. Before we dive into that, let me take a moment to ask you to please boop the like button

For the video – that makes youtube more likely to show this video to others, so I’d really appreaciate it. Thank you! Now let’s get into changes to mob spawning. Monsters now only spawn in places where the block light level is 0.

If there is any form of block light in a block space, that will prevent the default monster spawning. Sky light still works exactly like it used to. Another change is that the maximum number of monsters spawned is now tracked per player instead of globally.

That means that you won’t get more monsters if more players are online on a server but only one player is around an area where monsters can spawn. There are a number of changes to individual spawning conditions for mobs too.

Drowned can now spawn both in warm ocean biomes and in aquifers inside dripstone caves. Pillagers can now spawn on snow. Animal spawning has changed as well. Goats now only spawn in the new mountain biomes, not in Windswept Hills.

Wolves and rabbits can now spawn on snow blocks and foxes can now spawn on podzol, coarse dirt and snow blocks. Axolotls now only spawn in water, above clay blocks inside lush caves biomes. They also now have their own, separate, mob cap which means they can still spawn even

If there are plenty of glow squids around. Speaking of glow squids, they now only spawn in water under height 30 in the world. Cod, Salmon, Pufferfish, Tropical Fish, Squid and Dolphins now only spawn in water from height 50 to height 64.

The one exception to this is Tropical Fish which can now also spawn in lush caves at any height. Let’s talk about changes to hostile mob behavior in this version. Endermen now take damage when hit by a splash water bottle. Illagers now no longer attack baby villagers.

And withers now target and pursue players in survival and adventure modes, even if that player hasn’t specifically attacked the wither yet. Let’s also mention one change for passive mobs: Horses, donkeys, mules, llamas, and trader llamas now follow players holding their preferred type of food. Of course with a new version comes new Advancements!

There are four of them added in this version – “Star Trader” for trading with a villager at the build height limit. “Caves & Cliffs” for falling from the top of the world to the bottom of the world and not dying.

The “Sound of Music” advancement is awarded for playing a music disc on a jukebox in a Meadow biome. And finally the “Feels Like Home” advancement is for riding 50 blocks on a strider, in lava, in the overworld.

In addition to this a change has been made to the “Light as a rabbit” advancement which is now placed after the “Sweet Dreams” advancement in the adventure tab. The Adventuring time advancement has also been updated to now require all overworld

Biomes, including all ocean biomes, all the new mountain biomes and both cave biomes. Let’s quickly go through new functionality for blocks and items. Enchanting tables now emit a low level of light – light level 7 to be precise.

You can now use shears on the tip of a Cave Vine, Twisting Vine, Weeping Wine or Kelp to stop it from growing further. There’s now a correct tool for mining a conduit – the pickaxe. Flowering azalea leaves used to have two correct tools – the axe and the hoe.

This has been changed so the only correct tool is the hoe. Copper ore now drops more raw copper when mined without silk touch – up from between 2 and 3 items to between 2 and 5 items without Fortune, and even more with a Fortune tool.

Another change to copper is that if you use a stone cutter to cut copper, you’ll now get 4 blocks of cut copper for each copper block you put in. Big dripleaves have been changed – they can now only be placed on Clay, Grass, Dirt, Rooted Dirt, Coarse Dirt, Podzol, Mycelium, Farmland and Moss.

In gameplay changes, the algorithm the game uses to select where the world spawn should be in a world has been changed. It now spawns you according to climate parameters, which is more likley to place you in a location where the basic resources of the game are available.

Sleeping has changed so it now only resets the weather in the world if it is already raining or storming. This means you will now be able to get rain or thunder even if you sleep every night. When you sprint alongside a wall of blocks, you now keep sprinting even if you gently

Brush up against those blocks. As long as your angle is less than around 7 degrees toward the blocks, you now keep your sprint active. And the world border functionality is now aware of coordinate differences between dimensions. If you create a portal in the Nether that would connect to a location outside of the

World border in the overworld, the portal position in the overworld is now adjusted to be just inside the world border. Visual changes in this version – view distance now causes chunks to load in a cylinder shape around players instead of in a square.

This generally shouldn’t be visible since the distance fog normally prevents you from seeing anything outside this cylinder anyway, but this change is also combined with a fix for a bug where the game client would ignore the server render distance.

The cloud layer has been raised up in the world from height 128 to height 192. In addition to this a large number of small texture fixes have been made that I won’t include here – check the linked video if you want all the tiny details.

There are also some significant changes and fixes to the user interface. If you’re sleeping and typing a message into chat, that message will now stay around when the night passes and you’ll still have the chat screen open. A redesign has been made to the way your effects show up in the inventory screen.

Effects like potion and beacon effects now show up on the right-hand side of the inventory instead of on the left. When the inventory is open, the regular effects list in the top-right corner of the screen is now hidden.

In addition to simply moving to the right side, the display now has a compact version which is used whenever there isn’t enough space for the full display and which only shows the icon for each effect. This mode is switched on automatically when there isn’t enough space available, for instance

When you open your recipe book. You can now also hover your mouse cursor over one of the effects to get the full details. The main menu backdrop is now a sunset over a new mountain range, and the splash text

That used to say [this splash text has been delayed until part 2] now says [this splash text is now available]. Another splash text that has been changed is “Now Java 16!”, which now says “Java 16 + 1 = 17!”

If you got disconnected while connecting to a server then the server’s IP address would show on screen, that is no longer the case in this version. Two new languages have been added to the game Lombard and Toki Pona.

And the game now has an autosave indicator in the bottom right side of the screen. In options changes, that autosave indicator can now be turned off inside the Video Settings screen. The same screen also has a new Simulation distance setting.

Setting this to lower than your view distance allows you to see further in the world without having to use up performance to simulate the entire visible area. The minimum value for this setting is 5. The default brightness is now 50, which is now labelled Default.

The other values on the slider no longer have a percentage sign. There’s a new setting called Chunk Builder. This is a fairly technical setting that controls a trade off between rendering performance and visual glitches. It has three settings, starting with the default Threaded.

This means all chunk rendering is done on threads which is the fastest but could also in rare cases lead to visual glitches. Semi Blocking means some actions cause the chunk to render immediately, which is slower than threaded but could avoid glitches when blocks are placed or destroyed.

The final option is Fully Blocking, which means any nearby chunks are always rendered immediately. This is how the game used to always render and avoids glitches but is also the slowest. If lots of blocks are being changed in nearby chunks, this setting can have a large impact on performance.

The controls options have also changed with the keybinds moving to their own sub-menu. Sprint and Sneak toggles can now be found both in the accessibility menu and in the controls menu. Speaking of accessibility, there’s now a new option to disable the sky flashing during thunderstorms. There’s a new Online options screen.

You can find it in the top right slot where you used to find the realms notification switch or the difficulty option. When you’re in the main menu or playing on a server, you’ll now instead see Online options. This new Online options screen contains both the Realms notifications option and if you’re

Online on a server also the game difficulty, which is now clearly labeled as the server difficulty. This menu also has a new option labelled Allow Server Listings, which when switched off will make your name not show up when inspecting a server in the server list.

Once on a server you will still show up in game and on the tab screen as usual, this only affects the names returned in the server list tooltips for a server. Another new option is for sound, allowing you to specify which audio device should be used by the game.

Speaking of sounds, there are new sounds in this version for bundles, if you have them available through a data pack. There are sounds for dropping contents out of a bundle. For inserting items into a bundle. And for removing one item from a bundle. There’s also a new soundtrack!

8 new tracks of background music have been added, playing when you are in the main menu and when you play survival in some of the new biomes. There are three tracks called “An Ordinary Day”, “Comforting Memories” and “Floating

Dream” by Kumi Tanioka, who is also known for composing music for some of the Final Fantasy games. Another five tracks are by Lena Raine who also composed the music to the Nether Update and for some other games like Celeste. Her tracks are called “Stand Tall”, “Left to Bloom”, “Infinite Amethyst”, “Wending”

And “One More Day”. The entire sountrack also available on Spotify and other streaming services, and that track list also contains one more song: “Ancestry” by Lena Raine, which is currently not used in the game. There’s also one more track – a new music disc from Lena Raine titled ‘otherside’.

It can be found in corridor chests in Strongholds and spawner chests in dungeons. In dungeon chests, you have between 1 and 3 draws from the list of items that contains music disc, and for each such draw you have a 1% chance of it being the otherside music disc.

This is as likely as you are to find an Enchanted Golden Apple in a dungeon chest. In the Stronghold Corridor chests you have between 2 and 3 draws from the list of items with the music disc, and for each such draw you have a 2 out of 129 chance to get it.

This is as likely as you are to find a golden apple here, or one tenth as likely as you are to find an ender pearl. Just like Pigstep, the otherside music disc doesn’t drop from creepers, it can only be aquired as loot from a chest.

The new music tracks are also distributed over the new biomes, so different tracks will play when playing the game at different locations. Together with the new tracks, some of the pre-existing tracks can also play at these locations. Finally in terms of perforance and stabiliy there are many bug fixes and optimizations

In this version. I won’t mention all of them here, check out the description for a link to the full list, but let’s mention some of the most important ones. The first time you or someone else wrote something in chat after starting the game, you’d get

A big lag spike – that is fixed in this version. When flying around quickly you could see how the world would glitch in lines behind chunks that hadn’t rendered in yet, which has also been improved a lot in this version.

One more thing I’ll mention is that the java version used to run the game is now Java 17. This java version update is handled automatically if you run the Minecraft Launcher and you don’t have a customised setting for it, but otherwise you might need to download and install a newer java version.

There are also technical changes in this version for things like commands and other map making things – I’ll be making a separate video for those, so keep an eye out for that if you’re interested. Thank you for watching to the end of this video – I hope you found it useful.

And if you did, maybe you’ll also like this one?