Mojang held their Minecraft Live event earlier today and announced the upcoming Caves and Cliffs update for the game. While updates generally go live during the holiday season, because of the sheer size of this update, players won’t be able to get their hands on it until next summer.
That’s definitely a ways away, which is a bummer, but the update looks like it might be totally worth it. Not only will they be expanding the caves and cliffs in the game, but they’re adding an new archaeology system that lets players look for lost artifacts. No time for love, Dr. Jones!
The update will add a slurry of new caves to Minecraft, complete with new types of blocks. The Sculk Sensor will detect nearby players and send out a redstone signal in response. It’s very early to be speculating, but that sounds like it could lead to some cool new mechanisms.
The stalactite and stalagmite blocks will introduce new dangers that the player will have to be on the lookout for when exploring caves. While these definitely aren’t as exciting as the Sculk Sensor blocks, you really can’t have a cave without stalactites and stalagmites, can you?
The new archaeology system will bring all sorts of new geographical content to caves, like massive caverns, narrow tunnels, and waterfalls – things you would expect to find in an actual cave. Then there’s the lost artifacts system that was mentioned above. This involves players uncovering items by brushing dirt away, just like a real archaeologist would.
They didn’t really elaborate on the cliffs portion of the update, so that’s something we’ll know more about in the future. We do know that there will be goats, which are an integral part of cliffs, as anyone who’s been on wildlife Youtube can tell you.
The last major update, which hit just a few months ago, was the Nether Update. This added a host of new content in the Nether, such as Netherite, which can be used to craft the best tools, weapons, and armor in the game.
It’s disappointing that the Cliffs and Caves update is more or less a year away, but that also speaks to the size of it. Updates that are dropped in the normal holiday window are generally very big updates, so this upcoming one is poised to be pretty huge, especially if its bringing a whole new feature with it.
Who’s looking forward to building a cave base?