The second part of Minecraft’s Caves and Cliffs update launches today (November 30, 2021) and allows players to mine deeper than ever before, introducing new sub-biomes, and two exciting cave types — totally overhauling the experience of the extremely popular sandbox.
Awesome. Mojang actually chose to split Caves and Cliffs into two separate parts in order to fulfil the studio’s “most ambitious update to date while our team also continues to navigate the challenges of working remotely.” This is completely understandable once you appreciate the sheer size of the update and everything it changes about Minecraft.
There are eight new biomes — grove, meadow, lofty peaks, snowcapped peaks, stony peaks, snowy slopes, dripstone caves and lush caves. Lush caves is where you’ll find Glow Berries, Spore Blossoms, Azalea trees and roots, and dripleaf. This is a new block type which will support a player's weight temporarily before tipping and letting the player fall. On the other hand, dripstone caves hold dripstone blocks that are essentially Minecraft’s version of stalactites and stalagmites.
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The decision to split the update has been divisive amongst the Minecraft community. Because a lot of the new items and mobs arrived in the first half of the update that was released in June, players consider the second half to be lacking in comparison, and that they’re still waiting for The Wild update which took out some of the content of Caves and Cliffs and delayed it to 2022.
“I hope 1.18 is exciting for our players. It really does, and I cannot understate this, rewrite almost every aspect of terrain generation,” said Brandon "kingbdogz" Pearce, one of the developers at Mojang, on Twitter. “3D biomes + terrain and biome distribution are separated, resulting in natural variation I haven't seen since alpha days.”
With the update, players will be able to dig below Y-Level 0, adding the new Deepslate layer, and mountains will now reach Y=255 which is a significant increase on the default level. “The performance improvements required to do this alone were a huge feat, not to mention the immense amount of rewriting needed to make sure everything worked correctly in negative Y coordinates,” continued Pearce.
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He qualified that he isn’t annoyed at those arguing that the split was unnecessary for Caves and Cliffs and that the second half isn’t as exciting as the first half, he was only commenting on the difference of perspective between players and developers. All that I know for definite is that these new biomes are going to be eye-popping once texture packs and shaders are installed.
Featured Image Credit: Mojang
