Technical News in Minecraft 1.18 Pre-release 1

Ladies and gentlemen the first pre-release for Minecraft 1.18 has arrived and it does so with a chunk of world border bug fixes and a fairly large change for feature placements in custom worlds. If you want to know what gameplay changes are in this version then check out my other update video right here.

My name is slicedlime – let’s dive into the technical changes in the pre-release and let’s start with commands and in particular world borders. The world borders of the end and nether dimensions weren’t properly initialized, so you would sometimes get weird effects like the world border in the End being invisible – that is

Fixed in this version. This also means the world border is now aware of nether coordinates properly, so making a portal that would land you outside of the world border in the overworld will now cause the portal to end up right inside the world border but as close as possible to where it

Would otherwise have ended up. Let’s move on to some other command fixes! If you used the locate command to locate a desert pyramid in a desert style superflat world the game would freeze, that is fixed in this pre-release.

And if you used the jfr command to get profile reports on a dedicated server and then clicked the link to the report, you would get the full local path to the folder on the server – that is fixed in this version too.

Using commands to get ambient effects would cause other effects to stop rendering as ambient, that is fixed in this version. Let’s move on to advancements. The play_jukebox_in_meadows and ride_strider_in_overworld_lava advancements were located in the wrong folders and have been moved. Another one has been renamed – caves_and_cliffs is now called fall_from_world_height.

A tag change in this version: mineable/pickaxe now contains conduits by default Next up we’re going to talk about a fairly major change to how feature placement is done in custom worlds. First though I’d love it if you could place that mouse cursor feature over the like button

And click it – that helps the video spread to more people so I really would appreciate it. Thank you! Let’s talk custom worlds and let’s start with data definitions. The built-in data report generator now has new functionality. It no longer writes the biome information, and instead creates a worldgen folder with

A minecraft folder inside of it. This in turn contains the entire vanilla world generation definitions – the same stuff that you would previously need to download as a separate zip file. The actual changes inside that file include extensive changes to the formats of features.

Configured features can no longer be decorated – the decorated feature type has been removed. Instead, feature placement has been split up into two distinct types. The configured features still exist, but they no longer include the placement of features. Instead, Decorators have been changed into Placement Modifiers and there’s now a new

Folder called worldgen/placed_feature. A placed feature is a configured feature paired with a list of placement modifiers. In contrast to the decorators from before, these placement modifiers are specified in a list, which makes it much easier to add or remove one to change the placement of a feature.

All the vanilla configured features are specified separately, but it is also possible to simply specify the full configured feature directly inside a placed feature much like was the case for the decorated features before. Note that for the future there will be benefits to having your configured features separated out and named.

The format of placement modifiers is somewhat different to those of decorators as well – the configuration is streamlined and exists on the same level as the type, so there’s no longer any need for a separate configuration field. The set of decorators have changed a fair bit too when turning into placement modifiers.

First, a number of very specific hard-coded decorators have simply been removed. The removed decorators are decorated, dark_oak_tree, iceberg, count_extra, lava_lake, cave_surface, end_gateway and nope. A number of the remaining decorators have also been renamed. The count_multilayer decorator is now the count_on_every_layer placement modifier. The square decorator is now the in_square placement modifier.

Scatter is now called random_offset. Range is now called height_range. count_noise has turned into noise_threshold_count and count_noise_biased is now noise_based_count. There are also a number of placement filters that consist of the decorators that don’t modify the positioning of a feature but simply allow or disallow it – they are now all called filter.

Chance is now called rarity_filter. surface_relative_threshold now has a filter suffix. water_depth_threshold is now surface_water_depth_filter and block_filter is now called block_predicate_filter. There is also a new placement filter in this version which is the biome filter – it checks that the target position is in a biome which allows this feature to be placed.

The environment_scan placement modifier has new functionality too. It now has an allowed_search_condition field which is a block predicate. This predicate is checked before the search even starts, and if it fails the whole placement is aborted. Otherwise, it will be checked every step of the search, and the scan stops when the predicate

Turns false, at which point one final check is done for the target predicate to see if the placement should be done or not. There are some changes to block predicates too. The offset of block predicates is now limited to 16 blocks maximum on each axis.

There are two new block predicate types: solid which tests if the block material is solid. It has one optional field which is the offset. The other new block predicate is inside_world_bounds which tests if the placement position is inside the world height bounds. It also has the optional offset field.

Finally there are some changes to surface rules in this version. The run_depth_multiplier field has changed names, it is now surface_depth_multiplier. And the stone_depth condition has been expanded – the add_run_depth field is now called add_surface_depth and it now has an add_surface_secondary_depth boolean field and an offset integer field.

And that’s that for custom worlds in this pre-release. My thanks to all of you who watched through the entire video – I really appreciate it. And while you’re here, why don’t you also check out this video?