Exploring New Cave Generation in Survival! ▫ Minecraft 1.17 Snapshot 21w06a ▫ Caves & Cliffs Update

Hello everyone my name is pixaris and welcome to a brand new minecraft snapshot this is minecraft snapshot 21w06a where we have got our first look at cave and terrain generation and what may be the new look of minecraft as far as stuff below the surface goes and on the

Surface i’m already seeing a few changes look at the terrain formation that i’ve spawned next to this is quite fascinating there seems to be what is now called an aquifer basically a localized water level area that floods a cave and some of these are apparently going to

Change up a little bit there are some caves between certain coordinates usually between sea level and y32 that when they’re formed a certain way they will always be flooded which is not always going to be the case but if i dive down here for a second

Take a look at what we’ve got because if we swim down you’ll notice this has generated unlike basically any other cave generation we have seen before and i’m not going to spend too long in here because i might end up drowning i have loaded this snapshot up in survival mode

Because while obviously we can fly through the landscape in spectator mode or look around in creative mode a little bit i thought one of the big changes to this is obviously going to impact survival players and how you discover caves naturally so i thought i’d spend a little bit of time

In a fresh survival world punching trees doing my thing and then going caving with a few more early game resources to see what the caving experience is going to be like in the caves and cliffs update so i’ve chopped down and replanted a tree got myself my first

Wooden pickaxe we’re probably going to get a little bit of stone from this overhang here and the first thing i’m noticing already is that i’m not sure how easy it’s gonna be to get some of this stone around here but that’s obviously not a factor of cave generation there we go

We should have enough to make a stone pickaxe so we can upgrade from what we’ve got here and let’s get a little bit more stone before we set off what i’m really going to be looking for is surface area caves kind of around planes biomes to see if we can

Really take a look at the differences in terrain generation here but we’ll grab a little bit more stone probably a bit of surface coal as well that’s not too bad i mean we’re only a little way into this cave i don’t think we will see too much of

The new cave generation in here because the old cave generation is largely speaking still intact it’s just being added onto not removed from the game permanently and from what i can tell the point of that is to make sure that these caves kind of intersect and form interesting cave generation because i

Feel like the problem with minecraft cave generation up until this snapshot and we start to see things changing is that it’s a little bit boring and samey and we all know what minecraft cave generation looks like at this point so i think it’s nice that they’re trying to

Take it in a different direction but keep some of the old familiarity for us so i’ve started this world up in normal difficulty and i’ve left cheats enabled just so we can go into creative or spectator mode later on after we’ve done this little survival journey

And see what we can find that we’ve missed in survival because of course we always find that the caves that we’re looking for are just around every corner and that we haven’t encountered them in survival but it does seem like the new cave generation can affect the surface in odd little ways

Look at how uniform the formation of this mountain biome section is here you don’t normally find large sort of open ravines like this and it’s not really a ravine as such it doesn’t go straight down it sort of curves this is quite a common shape that you

Will see in these new caves from my experience this kind of almost like rhombus shaped thing this sort of uh like sideways tilted square shape just kind of carved out of the rock here and i find that a really dynamic cave formation it looks like it’s

Got a lot to do with how they structure these new caves which i’ll get onto in just a second there you go you can see another one there basically carved into the side of this mountain what i’m looking for right now though is food i haven’t actually seen any passive mobs anywhere and

I’m starting to worry that maybe there’s a slight bug with that in the snapshot because a few of the world generation parameters have been changed we’re in a mountain biome right now and apparently the world height limit has now been extended to 320 blocks because of course the world’s depth has been

Increased to accommodate some of these newer caves and so we actually have an additional 60 blocks of height and an additional 60 blocks of depth 128 blocks total have been added to the minecraft world height and so while the negative coordinate actually now goes below zero the world height coordinate now goes up

To 320. ah the tiger biome has come to my temporary salvation with very bushes all right well at least i’m not to starve in this world let me grab a few of these berries and hopefully if we harvest a few of these we should be able to survive long enough

To get ourselves into a cave well i spotted a couple of cows just around the corner so thankfully i am saved and we’ll take out these sheep here as well so that hopefully in the near future we can make a bed but in the meantime we can

At least get a little bit of food and it looks like yeah once again one of these aquifers has generated you’ll notice glowing spots in these as well that is mainly down to glow lichen which was added in a recent snapshot along with the glow squid

While my food is cooking up night has fallen but i got myself enough materials for a bed so hopefully we should be okay i’ve been crafting a couple of other things and i’ve got myself a stack or so of torches of course once we get down into these caves

Who knows what we’re going to find there might be some areas that are going to be uh pretty poorly lit and we will need to light up if we want to see them properly but i think there’s no time like the present it’s time to start caving now looks like this cave here

Is mostly going to be what we’ve seen in previous world generations so a lot of caves are going to be like this initially what we really need to do is find a cave that will take us below the surface and join up with some of the newer cave generation

But honestly just floating around in some of these aquifers is pretty impressive because what we’re seeing here is a lot of depth in these areas where you wouldn’t normally see that from the surface before we’re looking at something approximately the height of a ravine but completely flooded and potentially the world extends basically

Twice as deep than that and at least so that’s going to be pretty wild to explore i’m thinking though we do need to find a plane’s biome so we can really get started looking at cave generations so i’m gonna do a bit more exploring and hopefully find you guys in a plane’s biome

Okay across the swamp on some sunflower planes i have found a cave that looks a little bit more promising and for right now in this snapshot it seems like we’re going to have to explore some of the older caves to get to the newer ones because according to the change log there are

Issues with aquifers basically generating everywhere and always being flooded if they’re on the surface so potentially we need to start caving from a different position i’ve already found a geode which is pretty great i just noticed this in the wall and if we carve through this of course

We’ll get through the tuff to some calcite and find ourselves inside an amethyst geode but that’s uh obviously something we’ve seen in previous snapshots i’ve got videos on these there is a little patch of tunnels heading out in this direction but none of them really lead anywhere super significant there’s a bunch of

Copper around and once again all generation is still not tweaked in this update so we are still getting vanilla or generation that we’ve been used to in the past we might end up getting something a little bit different by the time the caves and cliffs update actually

Releases just so that they can adjust for terrain height and all kinds of other stuff besides i think they were planning on making mining a little bit more strategic especially as that related to veins of copper so maybe we’ll see those changing in some of the upcoming snapshots as

Terrain generation gets a little bit of fixing up so having explored these tunnels a little more i think probably what i’m going to end up doing is digging down from my current location we’re at why 54 right now and if i start to staircase down on one of these sides we should

Hopefully find ourselves digging towards a cave and this is obviously the way we’re going to be exploring in survival anyway if you don’t find a cave on the surface more often than not you just start digging down looking for stuff so potentially we could be digging for a

While but hopefully we’ll break out into something that looks a little new okay so if anything is going to illustrate how exciting this update is it’s this because i continued my staircase down i ended up exploring into a couple of side caves that weren’t really anything

Different to what i was used to from vanilla terrain generation i picked up a little bit more iron i’ve made myself a chest plate you know just picking up bits and pieces i even got low down enough in one of those caves that i found some redstone ore but i

Decided to press on with the staircase and i have found this and this opens out into what seems to be a pretty massive cave and once again we’re seeing that sort of slice generation that we’ve seen on the surface when we were looking at those mountains earlier

The difference being that if i press f3 right now i’m standing at y7 so a few more blocks down we would normally in a vanilla survival world be hitting bedrock but no longer we are hitting caves and that is so so cool i need to get myself a bucket of

Water this is where one of those aquifers might have come in handy but if i pop down the water source here on the edge there we go we see a couple of zombies running towards me already we should hopefully be able to descend into this cave and

See what it’s got to offer let’s put some leggings on i’ll try and get a helmet in a second as well but i’m more excited about this than anything else i really want to go exploring so let’s hop down here and let’s see what this cave has for us and

Oh yes caves below the surface are you kidding me this is incredible and while the zombies and skeletons fight it out we can take in the majesty of what is around us there is glow lichen up there on the ceiling and on the walls and it seems like

It generates a little bit more frequently down here look at this we found a diamond almost instantly thanks to how big this cave is are you kidding me let’s let’s take a look around let’s let’s gather this diamond first obviously priorities right but then let’s take a look around

So that is absolutely awesome we found one diamond but it is our first diamond and this looks phenomenal let’s put f3 on for a second we are at y negative eight right now and still encountering cave terrain this is wild and in theory it extends all the

Way down to a new bedrock level at y64 so this my friends this is going to mean dwarf fortresses as far as the eye can see this is going to mean cave bases the likes of which we have never seen before this is going to be the new

Cave generation for minecraft and oh my days the caverns you normally have to dig out something like this on regular minecraft right now that does not generate naturally in any stretch and now look at it part of the world generating like this is absolutely awesome and from the looks of things i’ve run

Into an abandoned mine shaft that goes even further down oh my gosh this is wild okay let’s let’s regroup a little bit here let’s explore a little bit more of the cave surface first and i i want to say surface even though this cave is miles underground it feels like because

Yes there are a lot of creepers around i’m going to ignore most of them for now we actually have supporting pillars of stone generating in these caves now you can look at it and see that there are a few pillars that have formed from ceiling to floor here and

That is presumably to prop up some of the drip stone cave generation that we’re going to be seeing in upcoming snapshots but already we’re getting a look at how those caves could be formed imagine coating these pillars with drip stone and having stalagmites and stalactites coming down

From the ceiling and up from the floor i think those are going to be phenomenally cool and i just want to explore this entire thing there are so many creepers though hello once again i think the new deeper terrain generation has led to more mobs spawning underground thanks to the fact that they’re

Always within radius of the player judging by the amount of mobs that can see me in this kind of open area we have you’re gonna have to come prepared for a cave like this you are gonna need to gear up before you start to take on an area like

This because mobs are just spawning pretty much everywhere and there are offshoots of course into other terrain generation we have some more classic looking caves here and those go down into a bunch of different situations as well but we can come around here there’s a lot of lapis and gold there’s some

Copper around here as well and wow it looks like an abandoned mine shaft has generated through here with new support pillars and this is actually an especially smart move on mojang’s part you can see that those pillars they’re actually made out of oak logs those are new for this terrain generation they

Actually haven’t generated like this in minecraft before and that means a source of wood underground for people who have forgotten to bring any logs with them they can make anything they want out of those because of course as long as you’ve got logs on you can make a crafting table and with a

Crafting table you should be able to craft basically anything you want from there it’s something that we’re used to salvaging wood from the floors and support pillars of abandoned mine shafts before but i really think that adds a lot to the way abandoned mineshafts feel to have these giant logs everywhere

Obviously food is going to be another story but look at this we can explore this abandoned mine shaft and it’s almost acting as a walkway for us to look at the rest of the terrain that’s so crazy alright let’s pop on down here and see

How deep this cave goes i want to find the lowest point of this cave because we’re already in the negative y coordinate and it looks like we can go down even further there’s a few more diamonds in the floor as well well one more diamond oh no there is another patch

Underneath here great stuff we will mine out this patch of diamonds maybe make myself a diamond pickaxe and then we’ll be set for a good little while of exploring here i really want to make some diamond armor because i’m very scared of some of the stuff that’s down here

But you know what yeah diamond boots let’s swap the iron boots for some diamond now and once again it cannot be stated enough that all distribution in this snapshot is temporary it is going to be changing so i don’t know where we’re going to be finding diamonds but

What how how far down are we we’re at negative 16 right now and that goes so so much further down oh my days that’s that’s unbelievable whoa yep okay i’m glad i made some new boots because that was a bad block to take out never never digged straight down kids but hello what

On earth and it’s there’s even some some water in there that i can probably get to to get my way back up so that’s not a problem we’ve got a little eight vein of diamonds here smooth i will take it i’m not not gonna turn my nose up at diamonds

Right now i gotta say the cave lichen on some of these walls has occasionally faked me out and made me think it was diamonds it’s got that kind of bluish glow to it but look at this this is at what are we at right now negative 51 under the world and we are

Still standing in a cave a negative 53. i think that might be the lowest point in this cave so far and i have a feeling that this water is actually coming from a lot of sources up here which means we might have found one of the aquifers that generates below ground

And that is really quite a cool find yes this is a flooded section of cave all of those water blocks there are water sources and if this generated without the overhang without the roof over the top of it then you’d be able to boat around on

These which is one of the reasons i wanted to bring a boat down here with me and didn’t just leave that on the surface this isn’t the best example of course because it’s got this stone overhang to it but we might be able to find some other examples and of course

These generate so that they can potentially come up in other areas i don’t want to explore too far just in case i end up drowning but man if you had some water breathing equipment a respiration helmet or some water breathing potions you could swim around these cave systems and find

New places to explore but seriously we have stood at negative 53 in this world and still been in a cave that is absolutely wild i’m actually going to dig down a little bit more here just so we can see where bedrock generates now because i’m fairly certain it will do what it’s

Done in previous worlds start to generate at the bottom of the world which is now y negative 64. and just kind of generate in clusters around there so i’m gonna dig down a little bit here just to see what happens if we pop out from the bottom of the world or not

There it is yes okay we found our first chunk of bedrock and right now we’re standing at negative negative 60 negative 60 and right here we have a negative 62 so yeah it looks like the bedrock floor is at negative 63 or 64 roughly i know that the

Negative coordinates are a little bit weird because you can go through zero and out the other side but man we are in the deepest cave i have ever been in for obvious reasons and this is absolutely fantastic so i’m gonna use the uh water bucket trick to get myself back

Up the side of this wall here and we’re gonna head back into that cave because there is definitely more to explore and i would love to find some more localized water levels around here i’m immediately getting rushed by skeletons but that’s fine i’ve got my shield on me i should

Be all right and yeah in the meantime a lot of mobs have been able to generate in these caves so this is really something we’re going to have to watch out for there’s going to be a lot more mobs roaming around in environments like this but wow

Just wow it’s so weird being able to explore caves like this naturally generated in minecraft you guys have no idea how weird this feels to me i got a carrot i just picked up a carrot from a zombie that’s absolutely wild we could farm carrots down here now that’s that’s

Pretty cool oh there’s an amethyst geode right over here let’s see if we can pop into this geode and craft a couple of torches looks like there’s a zombie or two guarding it but that’s fine we can take those out and yeah let’s let’s back up against a wall here in

Amongst the jingles and tinkles and let’s get another bunch of torches on the go there we go all right now i feel a little bit safer so now we’ve experienced these caves for the first time in survival now we’ve got ourselves a decent amount of resources and everything i think it’s probably time

To take a look at what we’re seeing overall let’s take a look at the bigger picture let’s go into spectator mode and let’s actually see what these caves look like from the outside and what we’ve missed in the process of coming down here because i know there’s going to be some

Pretty exciting stuff out there in the world there’s massive abandoned mine shafts everywhere where do we come in we actually probably came through into this cave over here somewhere yes here is the staircase down and obviously as you look around you can see that there are already some really interesting looking cave formations

There are more chaotic caves than we have seen before and the mojang team has actually identified a couple of different types of cave generation that they’ve implemented in the form of noise caves these come in two different varieties which are spaghetti caves which are more like these

Long squiggly tunnels and then what they call cheese caves which are effectively made out of holes in the landscape and those often join together to form giant caverns and now of course all of this terrain generation is going to intersect so you’ll find that we actually have a whole bunch of

Different terrain generations as we fly around here and it’s all going to combine to form a much more organic landscape it’s not going to be like set pieces it’s going to be a lot more organic than that but the phenomenal thing to me right now is just looking up at where

The surface is compared to the lowest point in the world and looking in this amethyst geode right now we are at why 55 56 so as you look up the surface being 120 or so blocks away is absolutely phenomenal this is minecraft unlike i have ever seen it before although i

Know some world generation like this has been attempted in mods in the past i think it is absolutely bonkers to see this in vanilla minecraft for the first time and here is something else that’s a little bit mind-blowing underneath all of this we actually have a flooded

Cave underneath a swamp and so as you swim through here the water is this odd kind of murky but clear texture and you can see some of the new stuff that they have planned there are actually going to be magma blocks underneath the surface in some of these flooded caves the implication

Being that we’re so close to the bottom of the world that there are geothermal vents and magma activity happening beneath the floor what i really wanted to find though is a cave like this because the aquifers that i was talking about earlier let’s quickly go back into survival mode for a second here

The aquifers actually generate floor level water in some of these caves so you’re actually going to find that there are areas in which you can explore a cave by boat you can just get into one of these underground lakes and boat yourself around and find diamonds in the walls and

Cave spiders dropping from abandoned mine shafts oh my days this is absolutely wild and they actually step down in some places so here we have a completely separate underground lake which can be connected by waterfall sometimes so you can actually boat down from one lake to the other but you’ll find

A bunch of these generating in caves at different heights and once again that’s right next to a geode that’s so cool and again some of the wildest part of this is the fact that abandoned mine shafts can now generate so far down i think over here this corner

Is the lowest part of this abandoned mine shaft and again look up at where the surface of the swamp is so far away there’s some diamonds in the walls something you always want to see in an abandoned mine shaft but here i am at the bottom of this mine shaft and we

Are at y 58 negative 58 so that’s actually generating as close to the to the bottom of the world as i think it feasibly can unbelievable minecraft this is so so fascinating and of course it feels like such an obvious change but the technical aspect of this

Has been thought over and thought over until they have hopefully perfected what they have in mind for terrain generation and yes spawners are still going to be part of all of this of course you will still be finding dungeons throughout the world we’ve got a zombie

Spawner in there i’m sure there are many more out here in the world but man stumbling into one of those in one of these giant caves is going to be such a different experience and i cannot wait to see what this stuff is going to look like once it has

All of the new biomes applied to it in fact i might end up making a project out of that at some point and this is an image i want to leave you all with this is a cave that reaches all the way to bedrock level we actually see bedrock generating

In the floor here so that right there is at hawaii 60 and yet there is an abandoned mine shaft peeking out into this cave and with those support pillars coming down from the abandoned mine shelf platform to where it meets the floor the abandoned mine shaft peeks out in a

Bunch of different places around this cave and then just disappears into the rock so we can explore it some more this is the kind of thing that you could spend days in and of course converting something like this into a base using a nether portal to get back to the

Surface and then flying around from there is potentially going to be how we see people build bases in the caves and cliffs update but that is absolutely phenomenal now one more quick thing to note here is that mojang doesn’t know how they’re going to convert old worlds into this

New world format yet because of course you’re looking at generating stuff above and below where players have loaded any chunks and so there might be some areas of the world that traditionally if they were left alone you would find enormous holes out into the void which mojang doesn’t

Necessarily want you to run into but they also want you to be able to explore some of the new stuff so potentially that could be a bit of a weird transition but they are looking into ways to make this as smooth as possible as of this snapshot though you’re just not able to

Load up any old worlds in the snapshot you might break a whole lot of stuff and frankly i think it is better that they have a solid plan for how they’re going to do this before they start giving people something that can completely convert one of their old worlds over to the new

Terrain now to illustrate the other amazing point about this snapshot and something which is probably going to play second fiddle to cave generation but is also pretty incredible in itself is i’ve come out to a shattered savannah plateau basically one of these areas that is the wildest terrain generation

That you’ll see in vanilla minecraft it comes up to at this point why 211 is the highest point in this entire biome and i want to talk about terrain height as well as terrain depth because once again as i mentioned earlier in this video it is now possible to build up to a

Build limit of 320 and i’m in creative mode just so i can fly up and show you exactly how high why 320 is because the shattered savannah is currently the tallest vanilla terrain generation we have and it could potentially go up to about here and so as that disappears into the fog

Below us let’s see if i can run a quick set block command let’s place a block of stone right there and that right there is now the height limit for buildings so the highest block we could build on is that y 319 but wow we can build up here that’s that’s

Pretty wild and once again that’s going to allow you to potentially build mob farms super high up in the sky if you need to it’s going to allow you to get away from the surface where we’re going to find a lot of mobs generating and once again this

Is going to account for the newer mountain terrain generation which is planned for the caves and cliffs update the cliffs part refers to new mountain terrain generation but if you look at where that could possibly go compared to where we have mountains right now it is frankly unbelievable

That minecraft has got this far from a technical standpoint alone i think that’s really really interesting and the fact that players now have the choice of building up to y 320 is really quite impressive if you want an illustration of that from ground level i’m here in a desert biome

At y72 and if you look up i’ve generated a column of stone all the way to the new build height and it actually disappears into the render fog that’s how high this goes as we climb this of course you’ll see the uh top of it coming into view a

Little bit closer but that is a pillar all the way up to y320 and it’s just unbelievably tall that is incredible looking and we might end up seeing builds this high in fact we probably will i know a couple of people who really wanted to build something incredibly tall in minecraft

And now they are getting their wish because if you take into account the bottom of the world all the way up to the top we’re looking at 384 blocks now instead of 256. but picks you might be wondering what’s that done to the nether and the end well as

Of right now not much honestly having looked around the nether for a little bit here i haven’t seen a great deal of stuff that looks like the new terrain generation at all so i’m fairly certain that they have not touched anything about nether terrain generation as it stands there might be

A couple of bits and pieces here and there that’ll be odd just because the snapshot has messed around with a couple of things like for example a couple of caves here and there a few odd generated portals but that may just be quirks of this world

And as we know the netherlandscape has a lot of ravines in it now on java edition on bedrock condition it still has some rather pleasant caves but in java edition we mostly get ravine generation here and there and a bunch of pockets of lava underneath

The surface of course but as far as near the terrain goes it once again bottoms out at y zero and i’m trying to click right now i cannot build anything below that level in the nether likewise if i teleport myself up to the nether roof i’m at y258 right now

And i try and set a block of stone i cannot place a block up here so unfortunately the nether dimension height isn’t affected or perhaps fortunately because the nether is already a scary enough place without having caves that go down to below bedrock one last thing because i’m sure some people will

Be wondering about this in the overworld or any dimension really if you go down below a certain level in the void you would start to automatically take damage no matter what game mode you were in so even in creative mode you could actually die if you went down into the void below

Y 64 in the negative axis now we are currently looking at a bedrock generating at y 64 meaning that potentially uh we could see ourselves dying as soon as we got below bedrock level but now they’ve actually changed that so it is still a 64 block drop below bedrock until you

Start to take damage from the void if i dip into y128 on the negative there we go that is where i start to take damage and can potentially die whereas of course previous to this if you got below negative 64 that was when you started to take

Void damage so now if you fall out of the world you’re going to start falling out of the world at negative one two eight and so that’s gonna be it for this little first look at minecraft 21w06a and our first look at new terrain generation once again i

Cannot wait to see where this goes what happens when we get more cave biomes added into the mix and all of the stuff that we’re going to be able to do in the caves and cliffs update i hope you enjoyed the video thank you so much for watching my name has been pixel

Riffs don’t forget to leave a like on this video if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and i’ll see you guys soon take care bye for now You