thebluecrusader – Minecraft 1.17 Snapshot 20w45a Overview & Gameplay (Java Edition PC)

What’s up guys my name is dean aka the blue crusader and welcome back to the channel so in today’s video i’m going to be doing an overview of the first minecraft 1.17 snapshot at this point a lot of people will have already seen this but

It has been released now and this is the first snapshot for java edition so we’re going to be going over the patch notes and then jumping into a little bit of gameplay to show off all the features i will have time stamps on this video so you can

Click on the section which you’re most interested in so if you want to skip over the patch notes on the overview of the update itself then you can jump straight into the gameplay so this is the first 1.17 snapshot for the caves and cliffs update on java edition specifically of minecraft

Now for a little while now bedrock has already had access to this a little bit earlier than us so this is a little bit newer this did come out i think two days ago now but i’ve only just managed to get this covered but this should be interesting so

New features in snapshot 20 w 45a which is the most recent one so we’ve got bundles we’ve got the candle which is a really interesting block i did actually add the candle in one of my mods for minecraft 1.15 so it’s interesting it’s actually coming to the game then we

Have a lava cauldron copper amethyst lightning rod spyglass tinted glass and a shulker hitting a shulker with a shulker bullet can now make a new shulker so these are the main new features and changes briefly summarized by the bullet points so let’s go into amethyst so amethyst blocks come in block form

Inside the geodes in two different ways the block of amethyst and the budding amethyst all types of amethyst blocks which include the clusters can create beautiful sounds when you walk on them break them place them or hit them with a projectile so that’ll be interesting to

Mess around with in game just to see what the sounds are when we mess around with these blocks in survival mode so amethyst clusters grow from budding amethyst which can be found inside the geodes these clusters have four growth stages small amethyst bud medium large and amethyst cluster

These clusters can only grow when they are placed on budding amethyst blocks fully grown amethyst clusters drop four amethyst shards or more with the fortune enchantment when an iron pickaxe or higher is used and they drop nothing otherwise when broken and clusters can be still touched at any stage

So this is interesting amethyst does actually grow naturally just like crystals do so that’s a really nice feature of the crystal growth cycle being implemented into minecraft so then amethyst geodes can be found anywhere underground in the overworld so not just in specific biomes amethyst geodes have an outer layer of a

New stone called tough and they have a second layer of another new block called calcite these geodes have an inner layer of various amethyst blocks around them then under shards the clusters drop four amethyst shards or more with fortune which we’ve gone over and the budding amethyst

On any side of a budding amethyst block where there is air or a water source block a small amethyst bud will eventually grow up on it amethyst buds can only grow when attached to budding amethyst and they will grow until they become amethyst clusters okay so let’s jump onto bundles so

Bundles are items that hold other items a bundle can hold a mixture of items but only one stacks worth for example a bundle could fit 64 dirt 32 dirt and 32 stone 32 dirt and eight ender pearls so basically it can hold one full stack of anything

But it can be a combination of multiple items to make up that stack so it could be 64 individual blocks like wool concrete carpet or anything that’s colored or it could just be half a stack of two different blocks an individual diamond piece of armor for an example or a full stack

You can right click to put an item into a bundle you can right click a bundle to empty it and you can wrap a present in a bundle and give it to your friend so interesting stuff here to mess around with items and storage then we have candles which come in all

16 colors and one uncolored variant up to four can be placed on one block at a time so they don’t actually have the width of one block you can fit four separate ones into one block space they allow you to properly wish someone a happy birthday they’re waterloggable but they can’t

Actually be lit underwater so they’re not fully waterproof which you wouldn’t expect anyway from a candle and you can just mess around with birthday cake and use candles with them which is going to be pretty interesting to see people doing then cauldrons haven’t really changed in

Terms of the look of the blocks but they can now be filled with buckets of lava so these filled cauldrons will give off a redstone signal of strength one so this should be another interesting redstone mechanic along with some of the new stuff they’ve already added to 1.17

In the caves okay so copper we have copper blocks which require nine copper and guts to craft very similar to iron blocks craft cut copper cut copper stairs and cut copper slabs by using copper blocks you can use honeycomb to craft waxed copper blocks and copper can be found in all blobs

Across the overworld similar to how iron and coal generates but this is not going to be the final generation settings for copper so this may change so interesting i’m really curious about the rarity of this metal but it seems to currently spawn a similar rarity level to both iron and coal

And you can smelt cop raw to get a copper and got from it of course so the lightning rod is crafted from three copper ingots you can use this to keep your build safe as long as the closest area around the lightning rod is fireproof during thunderstorms interesting this lightning rod will

Protect an area of 4 by 16 blocks around it from devastating lightning strikes lightning rods give off a redstone signal when struck by lightning so this is interesting stuff so we’re having things to protect our base with and so many uses are coming from the new copper or blocks

Then oxidization or oxidation is something which happens naturally over time to copper for an example the statue of liberty believe it or not is actually made out of copper but it appears green because of oxidation so copper will oxidize over time there are four stages copper lightly weathered copper semi-weathered copper and weathered

Copper this takes 50 to 82 minecraft days in load of chunks for a copper block to oxidize one stage waxed copper blocks will not oxidize so when we mix together the i believe it was honey as you can see it says use honeycomb to craft the wax

Copper block so if you don’t want it to oxidate or oxidize over time you can protect it by using honeycomb to wax it and you can wax at any oxidation stage so that means that you can keep the pretty lightly weathered copper block in its current state forever so whenever you apply the

Honeycomb to wax the copper it will stay in the current form it’s in so if it’s already started oxidizing and turning green it will stay in that current stages then or if it hasn’t done that yet then you can keep it in this first stage so that’s

Interesting that’s how you can keep the block to stay in the same state that it currently is if you want to retain its look so if you like being a pirate there’s also the spyglass you can use this to see far away things into the distance and you can pretend to be a

Sea captain or catch your neighbor in the axe as they die your sheep lime green so that’s a little bit of a joke there but if you’re messing around with boats with a pirate map you could use a spy glass now which is pretty cool and you craft

This from two copper and gots and one amethyst shard so using both elements from the update here not just copper so that’s interesting i’m not sure what place amethyst has in that crafting recipe or its appearance but it’ll be really interesting to see tinted glass is a type of glass that

Does not allow light to pass through it it’s crafted by putting a glass block in the middle of four amethyst shards tinted glass can be obtained without silt touch and it does not shatter like normal glass okay experienced orbs also now sometimes emerge when in large quantities to improve

Performance this does not change the rate at which the player can absorb them it simply limits the amount of separate orbs floating around in the world so they will merge the same but this is just a performance fix to prevent lag of them all being scattered around particles now appear when pistons break

Blocks simple firework rockets with one gun powder can now be crafted on the recipe book and dirt paths can now be made by using a shovel on dirt podzol mycelium or coaster as well as grass minecarts and rails also now work in water that’s actually a huge thing

So if people are making theme park builds or messing around with underwater minecart rails they won’t have to make complex tunnels to make that possible so that’s a really interesting upgrade and all rails can be waterlogged which work with a dispenser and water bucket too flowing water doesn’t break rails which

Is pretty huge and minecarts can pass through water but gets slowed down more than usual so there is still some effect on gravity and certain laws which are applied to the minecart when it is underwater but it’s really interesting we can actually do that now so technical changes servers can now require custom

Resource packs to be accepted and the pack formats in the version.json in resource packs has been split into both data and resource versions there’s also a loot table set banner pattern and entities are now saved separately from terrain chunks so if you set require resource pack in the service properties file

Which you should be aware of if you run a server before then players can be prompted for a response and they’ll be disconnected if they decline downloading the custom pack so you can actually kick people if they don’t use the resource pack now which is interesting so we’re just going to jump

Over these more complex features and i’m also going to slowly scroll down so you can pause the video at any point to show some of these bug fixes that have now been fixed in the game as well if you want to stop by and read some of these different fixes

As you can see there’s an absolutely gigantic list of small changes and patches which have improved a lot of bugs and breakages in the game so that’s the patch notes so let’s actually jump into game now and have a look at some of the brand new content

Okay so we’re in game now so what i’m going to do is i’m going to scroll through creative mode and we’re going to take a look at some of the brand new blocks and spawn them of course a lot of these blocks will generate naturally in caves

Hence the name of the update but i just want to kind of take a look at what’s actually new so the first one is tinted glass so this is normal glass the standard original glass blocks not the glass panes and here is the tinted glass block which you will create using amethyst as

You can see the bottom of the block has this weird black shadow undertone to it so i’m not sure if that’s going to be removed in the later versions and if that’s some kind of texture glitch or if that’s just because this tinted glass doesn’t allow light through it i’m

Not sure if that’s supposed to happen but this is how it looks differently so you can see that we have tinted glass which looks a lot darker to the normal glass exactly like if people have cars and they don’t want you to see inside them i’m sure you’ve seen tinted glass before

Exactly the same thing it behaves the same way in this minecraft update too okay so another thing i’m going to show you are the brand new candles as you can see like what they said on the patch notes you can fit up to four different candles in one area

Now this is one area meaning one block so basically you can just put one in and it’ll center it and then the the more you put it in it will change the order of where the candles are placed and also the sizes of each candle will vary as they connect together

So basically each candle candle one candle two three and four are all a different block type so these are all different blocks which change based on how many candles you place so i’m just going to show you the different colors of the candles which are in a lot of different varieties i’m pretty

Sure they’re exactly the same as all the wall colors in game so as you can see every one of these colors are basically the same ones which support wall blocks and if you regularly die sheep then you’ll be aware of this so another thing was that they joked about

On the blog on the update is that you can now simulate a birthday party in game so we’re gonna place a birthday cake down and we’re gonna get the pink birthday candles and if you right click now it will actually place a candle directly on top of the birthday cake

And then obviously if you right click more than once when placing it it will actually eat the cake so you need to be careful i believe you can only place one candle on a cake at once otherwise you just eat it so you can’t put multiple candles on a cake so

Unfortunately you can only be one years old right now but you can actually make birthday cakes now which is super cool so that’s all the colors of the candles so let’s set the time to night time and you can see by default the candles are not

Lit so we’re gonna get flint and tinder and then we can right click and we can actually light these candles now as you can see when we do this the candles don’t actually have any type of flame on them they do illuminate the area around us just a little bit

So you can see they are actually a really weak light source but right now they have no particles or flames or smoke or anything coming from the top of it which actually gives it some kind of an effect this actually lit and on so currently this is just a

Snapshot so i would guess they’re going to change this in the future and of course there’s the black candle which i also missed as well so let’s now move on to the amethyst blocks which we can get in game so first of all we have the amethyst

Shards which we get from mining the blocks then we have the block of amethyst we have the budding amethyst which we said before that the amethyst crystals can grow on if we right click on them what’s interesting is these crystals can grow on all sides or faces of the blocks as

You can see all around and on top and on the sides we actually have the crystals so now if we go underneath you can also put the crystals meaning the amethyst buds on the bottom side top side and all the side faces of the budding amethyst block so remember

You need to grow the crystals on the budding amethyst if you want them to form now there’s a few different stages i’ve spawned them all in creative mode just to show you so the first one is the small amethyst bud and then this is the medium one

And then the large amethyst bud and the amethyst cluster which is absolutely huge so i will place them on the ground just to show you the natural progression of their actual size and this is what they look like when they’re actually growing even though they don’t exclusively actually grow on

Stone blocks i’m just going to show you on the stone blocks just to make it seem more like you’re inside a cave and of course like we said before if we place down a block of amethyst and let’s get a pickaxe now you could hear a

Few of those sounds when we placed it right because what we said in the patch notes is they had some pretty interesting sounds which play when we mine all of the different amethyst blocks so i’m going to put put down some amethyst buds as well and all these different blocks

And some budding amethyst and normal amethyst blocks and then we’re going to go into survival mode and actually mine some of them and i’ll show you some of the sounds that it creates and you’ll see they only drop the shards sometimes when you mine them and not always

Then let’s look at the spyglass so as you can see the spyglass is exactly like you’d expect it to be like what you’ve seen from pirates movies like pirates the caribbean basically we just hold it out here this is what it looks like in third person view and then if we go

On the shoreline or maybe we walk up the hill for an example we can right click but we have to hold right click and it will actually zoom in and we can see what’s in this distance like these horses grazing over on the field which is super cool so a lot of

People who use optifine to have a zoom lens to zoom straight into things you can now alternatively craft or spawn the spyglass in creative mode for example without mods and have some kind of a zoom so this is actually really good for videos and it’s also really good if you have a

Really far away base or a lighthouse that you’ve built on a hill and need to see what’s in the distance so this is a really cool piece of kit and remember this is crafted out of copper and also amethyst to craft this we’d go in the crafting bench and

We’d use two copper and golds and then an amethyst shard and we craft the spyglass using this crafting recipe and then we have our brand new spyglass so let’s move on to the copper blocks as you can see every single type of copper has its own block which is a variant

Based on its weathering so you can see the standard copper block appears like normal copper and then it goes into the slightly weathered state the semi-weathered state and the weathered fully weathered state so as you can see we’ll just place them down just to show you the difference

And this is progressively how the copper will oxidize and completely change color and as you can see we have cut copper which is a different variant of the block which looks really nice and it doesn’t matter what type of block it is they’re all set up to blend together

Perfectly now i’ll also show you the copper stairs for anybody who wants to decorate with copper stairs or make roofs this is what the copper looks like and then we have the cut copper slabs which are all in the same variants as well so as you can see the blocks

Actually look really nice to decorate with even the oxidized variants look like they’d be really nice to build something with now remember we can actually turn one of these copper blocks into a wax copper block and as you can see the honeycomb is what we use to make the waxed

Versions like i touched on earlier but the reason why i’m not going to show you the waxed version specifically is because they look exactly the same as each life cycle stage of the copper because the wax version just is applied to keep the current state of the block so it doesn’t progress

Onto a further oxidized version so if you want to keep the normal copper before it starts to turn green you would wax the copper with honeycomb and that’s how you would retain a state and as you can see we now have the waxed copper variants and who could forget the lightning rod

Which is the final piece of the puzzle or the final main element at least although i haven’t really showed you every single feature this is the last final edition and this is placed to ward off lightning storms so remember there is also the new copper ingots

Which i didn’t show you when i made the blocks and we’re just going to make a crafting bench and three copper and gots in a small tower shape creates the lightning rod so if you want to know how to craft that that’s exactly which recipe you use

And this basically keeps your build safe as long as the area surrounding the lightning rod is fireproof during thunderstorms and this will protect a 4×16 a block radius around it from the lightning strikes but one feature which i wanted to cover like i said i haven’t featured

Every single feature in this video in terms of bug fixes and small changes to old elements but one big older change that isn’t a new thing being added to the game is the addition of underwater minecart rails how could i seriously cap off this video if i didn’t feature this

So basically it lets you use minecart rails underwater to create underwater tracks okay now one thing to know that won’t work is i’m not sure if they plan to change this but you can’t place redstone torches underwater okay so if you’re trying to power up these redstone based minecart rails aka the powered

Rail you can’t currently do it just by play placing it straight on the water so you so you’re gonna have to be creative in terms of figuring that out but as you can see the minecart will drift slower so you’re gonna have to try and find a

Solution to figure out how to get more power in your rail so you keep on moving because as you go underwater you drift very slowly and then you’re gonna have to figure out how to fix the powered rail problem but that’s the overview for the minecraft snapshot 20w 45a which is the

First minecraft 1.17 caves and cliffs update for the java edition in snapshot form so i hope you enjoyed all the features on the showcase if there’s anything which i missed showcasing or any crafting recipe or process from the update which i didn’t cover make sure to tell me below in the comments below

Because when there’s another snapshot or another update i will probably make another video on that as well so make sure to like the video and subscribe for more minecraft mods videos and updates like this thanks for watching and i’ll see you next time Is foreign