This year's sandbox game has been revealed. Minecraft: Caves & Cliffs will give players some mountainous regions and mysterious caverns to explore, and plenty of new blocks and biomes to build with when it arrives next year.
Per the Minecraft subreddit, a number of the features were listed during the livestream. Everything here is based around three pillars: spectacular mountains, more strategic mining, and making the underground a little cooler to explore. The new mountains will have height-dependent generation, and may now come with ice and snow. Caves are coming in all sorts of shapes and sizes, from lush and green, to water, to crevasse-shaped, to spaghetti and swiss cheese, and dripstone caves full of stalactites and stalagmites. You can go cave rafting, or go down into the deep dark, if you dare.
Glowberry leafy vines have been added to the grassy blocks, along with new water lilies, and all-sided grass. The new blossom flower generates spores as particles, and some of these additions are inter-connected, like the Azalea trees which mark lush caves. You can now add a brush to your inventory, which will come in handy for clearly away rubble layer-by-layer on the archaeological digs. Potential artefacts range from historical prizes, to useful items. In among the caves are crystals, which must be farmed as their material is unobtainable, and you can can craft them into a telescope.
Goats that can jump and headbutt live on snowy mountains, and axolotl will be swimming around in lush caves. mobs that dwell in caves.
You can watch the full preview and discussion of the update below:
Big week for Minecraft news, since best Minecraft seeds to keep yourself occupied.