On the 17th of November, Minecraft’s Sofia Dankis announced that Minecraft Caves and Cliffs Part 2 would be releasing November 30th. The update has been a long awaited continuation of the originally scheduled June release of 1.17’s “Caves and Cliffs.”
The Main Attraction – Caves and Cliffs
The most key feature being added in this update will be a complete overhaul to world generation, both above and below ground. Mountains will now come in 6 varieties, Meadows, Groves, Snow Slopes, Jagged Peaks, Frozen Peaks, and Stony Peaks.
Changes to caves have also been extremely interesting, with new types of generation including aquifers at different height levels, and “cheese caves,” which will be large enough to allow for save Elytra flight. There are also sprawling underground lush caves that can generate randomly underground. Giving off not only light, but also a food source for long expeditions.
Part 2 of the update heavily focuses on fixing the fact the original 1.17 update included neither caves nor cliffs in what was called the Caves and Cliffs Update. Online memes started to spread calling it the “and” update, because the rest of the title didn’t apply. People were happy to see an end to “strip mining,” which 1.17 didn’t provide.
The Death of Strip Mining
For years, the most efficient way to find metal ores in the game was to “strip mine,” a technique that was tedious and boring. The technique involves mining long strips 2 blocks apart from each other to maximize your likelihood of seeing ores. This was the most efficient way of finding resources, but is very boring to have to do. With the new cave generations, the need or ability to strip mine is basically gone. Now, there are sprawling caves that can be explored for hours. There were also massive change to how ores spawn in the world, with a popular chart going around to explain the changes.
We can see that you are now rewarded with more ores at different height levels, so the further down you dig, the more diamonds there will be generated, as opposed to the old generation on the right, where the number of diamonds stays the same all the way down.
Changes were also made to compensate for the new mountain meta, with emeralds being exponentially more available at higher altitudes, along with iron and coal.
Lighting Changes
Another major change to the game is how hostile mobs will spawn. While the old system in Minecraft only allowed spawns in light levels of 7 or lower, the system in 1.18 will only allow them to spawn in 0 lighting. This means you will no longer have to fear a dark spot in your house, or put unpleasing torches all over the ground.
This update has been long awaited by fans after burn out from the same old world generation made people criticize the last update. But with a new Minecraft version comes new Minecraft servers, including the JoJo News sponsored 1.18 server that will be launching in early December.
My fav bit is about the mobs only spawning in 0 light level, I might start playing survival again because of it, great article!
Thank you! And I am super excited about it too! I prefer making large open structures like castle squares, now I don’t need to place random torches in the middle of them!