Some thoughts on the Caves and Cliffs Update announcement, Part 1

In the most recent Minecraft Live event, Update 1.17, the Caves and Cliffs Update have been announced. The announcement video is right here:

I’ll be going through the new stuff revealed in the update here. I won’t be going over everything in detail, just the parts that interests me.

Lush caves are absolutely fantastic. The vegetation added in there allows so much more to be done when doing natural builds. One of the styles I really like is to have ruins that are being overtaken by nature, and the moss layers, moss blocks, glow berry vines and drip leaves gives me substantially more options than what we have now, which are vines, mossy cobble, mossy stone bricks, and maybe some leaf blocks.

Oh, and they also added a new tree, the azalea tree. One thing that interests me is there are two different leaf blocks on it.

The leaves with flowers in it adds a nice bit of colour and detail if used with regular azalea leaves. I wonder what azalea wood will end up looking like in-game though, since the azalea tree in the video has the oak wood texture on it.

The lush caves are also the natural home of the axolotl, the newest water mob in the game. You can carry them in a bucket in the same way you capture and release fish, and they can help you in underwater combat. It has the ability to play dead as well, which allows it to regain health when attacked. Also, it comes in three colours and is adorable.

The lush caves provide a lot of new plant-based building materials. The moss layer is especially good since you can use it to cover any light source block. That way, areas can be illuminated while still looking natural. I have some areas that I would like to spawn-proof in my Realms game right now that is supposed to look all natural, and this would’ve been so useful.

The glow berries are a light source as well, and they will be great for fantasy builds. The moss blocks can be used to build thick vines, since it is green with plant textures. All in all, this part of the update gives us a lot of things that can be used in general builds, like the Nether Update’s blackstone blocks.

Mountain goats will also be arriving in this update.  They can jump extremely high (about 3 blocks high based on the video) and headbutt anyone and anything near it.

I wonder if they count as neutral or hostile mobs, considering that the video shows it attacking a cow. If it is a hostile mob, then it may have potential to be farmed due to hostile mob spawn mechanics. At the very least, I am certain that they’ll drop mutton, so there will be a reason to farm it.

The Hoglins from the last update allows us to build ridiculously powerful porkchop and leather farms due to it being a hostile mob. That is because hostile mobs have a significantly higher spawn rate compared to neutral or tame mobs, so if you can set up a good gathering and killing mechanism you can farm drops from them extremely quickly.

It’s quite likely that goats will be a neutral mob with an aggro mechanic, like Endermen. But if they are hostile mobs that follows hostile mob spawn mechanics, there is a potential for a food farm that far surpasses the current Hoglin farm. It’ll be something that can be built in the Overworld, and most likely can be built before even setting foot into the Nether. Hoglin farms require a lot of setup to get it running due to it being in the Nether, so such a goat farm will be far better. It’s unlikely, but technically possible. In the same sense that it is technically possible that I’ll receive $10,000 tomorrow.

Aside for that, there is new terrain generation for mountains, and it looks stunning. I am quite excited for this. With just a bit of terraforming you can build extremely impressive mountain bases, as compared to now where you’ll need to build the mountain from scratch yourself.

I’m just going to stop here for now. I’ll go deeper underground next time and look at the new cave system, which looks like it’ll be changing the game in interesting ways.