By: Daniel Kendle

Every year, the game ‘Minecraft’ implements a series of new features into the game as part of a themed update. While we don’t have the name for the newest update, update 1.21, we do have a good amount of features already-showcased in snapshots for the game, where players can test and report feedback on the new additions. Today we’ll be looking at the features that have been announced so far.

The first item of interest is a new block, called the Crafter. It’s a variant of the Crafting Table, a legacy feature that lets players craft items, placing materials in a 3-3 grid. It’s arguably the most useful block in the game, and the crafter promises to be an interesting alternative. The Crafter lets you automatically craft things, having items be input into the machine by means of hand or pipeline.

You first open up the interface of the block and click on any of the 9 gridded squares to let input items not go into the slots. Then, you connect a line of Hoppers (an equivalent of pipes) and send items through them. Just give the crafter a pulse of energy and you’ll have items flying out of its output slot. It’s a fairly-complex system, but one that’s a lot easier to use in game than how I write it here.

The Crafter will be great for automatic farms, since in the past you could only harvest raw materials like pumpkins from a pumpkin farm, eggs from a chicken farm, and sugar from a sugarcane farm. But with the new block, you can combine the 3 into a single Crafter to dispense pumpkin pies, which can speed up the process of manually-crafting. This is just an example of how the block will impact farms in ‘Minecraft,’ and I’m excited to use it in the future.

The next feature is actually a new animal, or “mob,” as the game officially calls creatures in the game. The Armadillo is a passive creature that spawns in the variants of Savannahs and Badlands, and brings with it a new type of armor, not for you, but for your pet wolves or dogs.

Armadillos are very skittish, and will curl up into a ball if you sprint near it, or if hostile mobs are around. They can still be hurt in this state, so it’s not the most effective defense. However, if you use a brush on the animal or just wait for a time, they’ll drop scutes. 6 of these scutes can be combined into Wolf Armor, which gives your pets some extra defense. This is great for adventurers, and I overall really enjoy the Armadillos and the new items they bring.

On the cosmetic front, we now have some cool new decorative blocks. The Tuff block can now be made into bricks, stairs, slabs and chiseled variants of the porous rock, donning a cloudy-gray texture throughout its family. The chiseled pair of blocks especially are interesting, as Tuff is the first stone to have 2 different chiseled variants, which is fun for building.

The family of Copper blocks have been upgraded too. Prior to update 1.21, Copper blocks consisted of stair, slab, and cut variants, as well as Lighting Rods. Now we have some new types such as Copper Grates, a transparent-ish block that looks like a factory catwalk, or copper trapdoors and doors. Alongside Chiseled Tuff is Chiseled Copper, though I think that the latter is far less interesting of a design.

For the last Copper block added, we have another technical feature like the Crafter: the Copper Bulb. The bulb will light up when a Redstone pulse (the ‘Minecraft’ equivalent of electricity) is received. Interestingly, the bulb doesn’t need a constant source of power to remain lit, just a single pulse. This means the block is effectively a T Flip-Flop, a term in the game’s community for a type of Redstone circuit. As someone who’s not super well-versed on Redstone technology, I’m not too keen on what it does, but after some later nerfs from future snapshots the Copper Bulb isn’t as viable as it once was, so there’s something. But to conclude this portion, I think that the new Tuff and Copper blocks are cool, but nothing super exciting.

The largest part of the update so far – and what the bulk of this overview will be about – are the Trial Chambers, a new underground structure being added to the game. They’re sprawling dungeons that are one of the few structures in ‘Minecraft’ that have a replayability factor to them.

When entering a Trial Chamber, the first thing you’ll see are all of the new Copper and Tuff blocks, as the structure’s made of the families. You’ll also eventually find the new Trial Spawner block – one that spawns hostile mobs for you to fight, and a reward from its lid once they’ve been slain. They appear all throughout the chambers, in the corridors and the chambers themselves.

The chambers have spawners, but also some traps, these can range from trapping snow littering the floor of one to buttons on the walls letting arrows or water spew out. These can be hazardous to your pursuit of loot, and help make the Trial Chambers a difficult challenge. The replay factor comes in how the spawners will respawn another set of mobs around 30 minutes after their previous spawning, letting you get infinite loot and infinite battles. The spawners also scale to how many players are around it, letting however many players join the fight to get equal fighting time.

In addition to rewards from the Trial Spawners and various chests, barrels and pots around the chambers, the coolest source of loot to find is from the Vault, a block similar to the spawners in appearance. From the previous 4 sources of loot, you can occasionally find/receive a Trial Key, which can be used to unlock a Vault, giving you even better rewards than you would otherwise. A player can only unlock a Vault block once, which I do hope they change. It would be cool to have an infinite source of loot, with the only caveat being that you’d have to fight for another Trial Key.

Within the chambers are 2 new hostile mobs, which will round out the features introduced in the update so far. The first is called the Bogged, a variant of the normal Skeleton. It can spawn from Trial Spawners and in swamps and mangrove swamps, and has a murky, rotting texture that looks really cool, honestly. They shoot poison-tipped arrows instead of normal ones, and drop them in addition to damaged bows, normal arrows and bones. To compensate, they’re weaker in health and have a slower cooldown between shots.

The more unique mob is called the Breeze. They’re exclusive to the Trial Chambers, also being summoned from their spawners. They’re similar to the Blaze, another hostile mob, and both are manifestations of their respective elements: fire for the Blaze, and wind (or air) for the Breeze. It’s essentially a head floating on top of 3 rods, surrounded by swirling wind. It shoots a projectile called a Wind Charge at players, and can leap and dash around to evade hits. The charge doesn’t hurt the player unless it hits them, but if it misses close enough to the player they’ll be launched, allowing them to be hurt by fall damage. The charges can also activate buttons, levers, doors and trapdoors, letting the traps in the chambers be all-the-more effective in hindering you.

When slain, the Breeze can drop a handful of Wind Charges, which function similar to how the Breeze itself uses them. You can even throw them to the ground mid-jump and propel yourself further into the air, which is really fun.

Overall, the Trial Chambers, Trial Spawners and Vaults, and the Breeze and Bogged are my favorite additions to the update so far. More will be revealed in the future, but for now that’s all the features revealed right now. The update is scheduled to release in mid-2024, and I’m very excited.