Minecraft – Minecraft 1.19: The Deep Dark – Not So Scary After All! (If You’re The Warden)

Oh you would love to hear some secrets  about ancient cities don’t you?   Hi, I’m Marco. In this video  together with Pouya and Gnembon   we will tell you about all the cool  things that you can find in the deep dark.

The deep dark is a biome that can be  generated much like any other biome,   but to increase the likelihood of finding it you  should look for the tallest mountain that you can   find and dig as far as you can underneath it.   I think the biggest challenge in introducing the deep dark

Dark was the actual placement of that biome. In  the first experimental snapshots that we released there are always other biomes creeping  underneath of it, and it didn’t feel good.   Deep dark should be always at the bottom of the  world. What we’ve done instead was to place the  

Deep dark under the world, under the bedrock layer,  that’s where the center of it is. What you see   in your world when you go to the deep dark, it’s  just the tip of the iceberg. Inspiration-wise we drew a lot from like Lovecraftian horror  because we wanted to to implement and develop  

Something that was quite scary, but not in the  traditional horror sense scary, as in like jump   scares and that, but more of a mysterious  and unknown scary I guess you could say. My favorite feature of the deep dark  I would say is the sculk patches  

That are scattered around the deep  dark, mostly because I feel they   they give off a very organic vibe and add to  the mysterious feeling inside of the biome. In my head the sculk blocks are like organs of  some living entity, so we have the sculk catalyst  

Which is a stomach, which allows it to digest  souls and create a sculk charge. This charge will   move around replacing blocks with sculk if the  charge likes the block, otherwise it will just   wrap them with sculk veins. This charge can  also place sculk sensors and sculk catalysts.  

The sensors are the hearing organ of the sculk as  they allow it to detect what’s going on around it,   whereas the sculk shrieker allows it, when  alerted by sensors, to spawn the mighty warden   which allows the sculk to defend itself. With  the sculk sensor we needed a way for blocks and  

Entities to detect what was happening around them.  Once we got this system right it was a matter of   tackling all the edge cases, like what happens  if the source of a sound disappears before that   sound is able to reach its destination. What  about wool, like wool dampens vibrations so it  

Should obstruct these vibrations. Once we got  all of this right we ended up using this system   in many other different features, like allays use  this to detect note blocks, the warden uses this   to detect the player and even the sculk catalyst  uses this system to detect mobs dying next to it.

The deep dark is very silent because it’s filled  with sensors and shriekers, and you want that   biome experience to be for the players to sneak  around and be really quiet, and if you would have   other mobs that are just movers around they’ll  just be triggering all the sensors and alerting  

The warden, and that’s not fun. We wanted the  deep dark to be creepy without the creepers. So next time you go to the deep dark, maybe instead  of taking a stack of torches – because placing a   torch will actually trigger the warden – maybe  take night vision potions instead. Just a tip!

Yeah the warden is so strong yet you  don’t get much back for fighting it,   and that was very much intentional. You need more  than a stack of hours to pin it down, and it can   one-shot you, it can shoot you through  walls if you’re trying to avoid it, and  

That’s the part of the design – we wanted  basically to send a clear message that that’s   not a mob that you want to fight, it’s a mob that  you want to avoid. The warden is a mob that will  

Only spawn by you triggering it, and if you leave  it be, it will just disappear and that’s fine. The sculk and the warden fit into the deep  dark concept as some kind of living entity that   found itself buried underground. The reason  why the sculk and the deep dark are often found  

Within ancient cities is a mystery that we  are excited for our players to figure out. Do ancient cities hold some sort of a secret? Yes  they do. For the first time ever we have included   redstone rooms with redstone contraptions for  players to observe and learn from them. They are  

Located in the bases of the ancient city centers,  and you can bust your way in. But all of them have   a secret way to get in without breaking anything,  and it was so fun to actually figure that out. Have fun in the deep dark but stay safe!