[MUSIC] >> Our social team
will be tweeting throughout the show and want to know what you think about
everything we announce. Hang out with us
here and also there. Last year, we announced
quite an anticipated update, the Caves and Cliffs update. We've seen all the incredible things you've done
with Caves and Cliffs Part 1 and can't wait to see
what you do with Part 2. Agnes and Henrik are here
to give us a peek into the surprising
development process for Caves and Cliffs Part 2. Hi, Agnes. Hi, Henrik. >> Hello. >> Hello. >> I guess, how
are you feeling? >> I'm super happy to be here. I'm excited, very excited. >> So excited. Henrik, its your first time on
the Minecraft Live stage? >> It is, it's not your
first time though, right? >> It is not my first time. You two are going
to tell us about Caves and Cliffs Part 2. The thing that I think
is the most amazing is how involved and how essential the community
was to making it. >> Yes. This update
changes basically everything about the world
generation in the game. We've added massive
mountains, massive caves. It's been really hard to balance that because we want to add all this
new cool stuff, but when people are
playing the game, we also want them to
build encounter, like the old familiar stuff. This balancing act
is really hard. As designers and developers, when we test the stuff we built, how do we
know if it's any good? How do we know if it's better. We need a lot of help and
we've definitely gotten it. We've been shipping
snapshots, betas every week. The people have
been play testing and giving us feedback. It's just been wonderful. It feels like they're colleagues helping us
build this great game. >> That's amazing. You have an amazing example of someone who took a lot
of time giving notes. >> Yeah. For example,
a player tweeted at me this wonderful big
picture showing in the same location, what changed across
different snapshots, and offer some opinions on
that and some feedback. This stuff takes a
lot of time to do, it's research that the
users are doing for us. We get a lot of this stuff
and it just saves time. That's time that we can use, of course, to make
the game better. >> That's so amazing. >> It truly is. This is the biggest
update we ever done and we couldn't have done it without the community. >> That's incredible. I know you are nervous when you decided
to split the update. Tell everyone about that. >> Yes. It's a
very big decision and we took it
together as a team. But yes, when it was
time to announce it, it was quite scary. But we thought,
the best thing is just to be transparent. Because as we know, Minecraft is crafted
together with the community, and then it's got to be as
honest as we possibly can. Then when we did announce it, everyone was so kind
and understanding. It shows we have the most beautiful
community, so thank you. >> We absolutely do. >> Also nice, as a team, to not rush it. Since the change is so big, to be able to do it properly and take the time and
really do it well. We're super thankful that we
got strong support for it. >> That's awesome.
Sometimes during the development process, things change and you decide you want things
to be bigger and better, which moves them to a
different timeline. I know we have one
of those today. Yeah, we do. We have been working quite a lot
on the Deep Dark, The Warden, and
the Sculk Sensor. We are so excited about this
and we know everyone is. Got to be bigger because we really
want to do this right and do it with
super high quality, but that's also the
reason that we moved it to the next update instead. >> We're going to talk about the next update at the
end of the show, right? >> Yes, we're going to
show both new things from the Deep Dark and some other new things, so that's exciting. >> We'll move the
Deep Dark feature set into the next update, which will be after
Caves and Cliffs Part 2, and we're going to look at
that later in the show. You're going to get to see some really cool stuff from Brandon. Now, Henrik and Agnes, you too are working with an
awesome team of developers. This was quite a
technical challenge, so we have an inside look at a lot that went into
Caves and Cliffs Part 2. >> Yeah, let's watch it. [MUSIC] >> The best part of my job, I think it's just
creating a game. I want to make people happy. In the new update, I've been primarily
focusing on creating the mountains and also putting everything together in the new generation of the world, so that's the caves and the mountains and
everything in between. When I started this
project about a year ago, I knew almost nothing about world generation and
I learned so much. It's really been a team effort, Java and Bedrock together. >> In this update, my role is to bring to life the cave part. Together with our colleagues
who work on the mountains, we present to you the cliffs
and the caves update. One of the inspirations
for the caves is the Son Doong cave systems
in Vietnam because that was one of the largest
cave system in the world. I feel so proud of
it because I came from Vietnam and we get to use this cave systems in my country and put
it into the game. I felt so proud whenever
we think about the caves. >> My job is to find what works slow in Minecraft and
try to optimize it. The new update changes how
the world looks a lot, and it also affects
performance quite a lot. The best part about my job is just finding something
which can give a big benefit and then
just seeing how FPS improves or how frame time graph looks much
better after the change. >> I would say the coolest
part about my job is all of the wonderful colleague that
I get to work with them. They really inspire
me, teach me, and motivate me to be a better versions of
myself every day. >> We put in a lot of time
and effort into this update and I hope that it will inspire and excite our community. >> It feels like it's
a whole new game. [MUSIC] >> What a great team you have. >> The best team. Now, we have been working
on Caves and Cliffs Part 2, it's been so beautiful to
see everyone collaborated, all the different roles. Bedrock developers,
Java developers, designers, artists, sound and
so on. It's been so good. >> When you get a diverse group of people together
in a room like that, even if it's a
digital room like [inaudible] and all focus
on one thing like this. It feels like there's no
problem you can't solve. Plus, it's fun. >> That's amazing. Then
you add our community, they're doing bug tracking. They're just
everywhere giving us notes and feedback and
telling us what's working. You add that to an amazing team and it's really incredible. >> We really want actually
to highlight everyone that helps us with the public
bug tracker we have, so many players report bugs. Then we also have the
moderators and helpers. They help us so much
with categorizing, finding duplicates, asking
for additional information. It's extraordinary helpful. >> We have a really
amazing community. >> Now, you two have been, and actually the whole team, has been just sharing images and scenes as
you're finding things. You put together some really awesome
worlds for us to look at. [MUSIC] >> Wow, they're beautiful. >> Yeah. What's
interesting about this is when you
look at that video, initially the plan was
just big mountains or natural looking cool
mountains on caves. But as we started
working on it, the scope grew
because we realized that we need to change all the terrain to make
this all fit together. But once we started
seeing that work, and it was so fun to see
how the team started realizing that we're really on to something, this
is going to be great. Seeing that inspiration
spread and then also spread out to our community through the snapshots has
been really fun. >> We have been
play testing a lot, then we're like, we
couldn't stop playing. >> We're just distracted
all the time. >> [inaudible] so
many cool places and it feels so inspiring. That's what we want
to do with Minecraft, we want to inspire everyone to play Minecraft in
their own way. We really feel that this
new world generation inspires you like
going on an adventure, building, telling
stories, very exciting. >> That's amazing. You make all these changes, but then obviously we have so many players who've
been playing for so long. The two of you have worlds
that are like 10 years old. I just love the approach you
took to keeping everything really safe for players
who have existing worlds. >> Yes. It's very important for us to be respectful
to play as worlds. Minecraft should be
a game you can trust because we know that it works and it will work
for many, many years. Then you can spend
all this love and time on your
Minecraft world. [inaudible] we have actually
done two things mainly. To make sure that
everything works well, and the first
thing is blending. As you can see in
the picture here, to the left, with
don't have blending. When you update your old world to the new
world generation, it would just be
like an ugly edge. But now with blending, it's actually all
smooth and pretty. >> That's beautiful, that
makes a huge difference. Henrik, I know the other part you want to
show us with your own world. >> Yeah. What happens if you open your old world with a new version
of Minecraft. I took a look at what
happens in my old world, which I've had for
10 years playing with friends and family. Let's take a look. There it is, all that old
stuff we built 10 years ago. But that's what happens when you open the world in 1.18. It basically generates new
caves beneath the old areas. The idea is to
create the illusion that that was there
the whole time, we just didn't go
there until now. Wow, look what I found. >> Don't look, Henrik. There's so many spoilers
there under your world, so many cool things. >> I was squinting. >> Okay, good. >> That's the first
thing I'm going to do when I update, just digging straight down. Well, not straight
down, actually. But I'm going to see
what's under my base. >> That's so cool. I just love that
it adds so much to the existing worlds
that our players have, so you're keeping them safe
and adding a lot to it. >> That's also an
important thing. We don't want to
force players to have to pick between just
the new or just the old, so we want them to be
able to experience both things in the same world. >> That's amazing.
Throughout the show, we're going to have
creator questions and you two get to
have the first one. >> All right. >> Will Java and Bedrock get
Part 2 at the same time? >> Yes, the plan
is to release this on Java and Bedrock
at the same time, and also to ship it
with what we call seed parity. What
does that mean? Seed is this name for the magic number
that is used to determine how your
whole world looks like. Every world is unique and
that's driven by the seed. When you create a new world, it gets a randomly
generated seed. But if you dig that seed up, if you really like
what you see, you're like, "Wow, this
world is wonderful. I want to share it
with my friends." You can dig up that number
and share it with others. Then if they open a new
world with that seed, they'll see the same thing. But what's new for this
update is that that also works between
Bedrock and Java. >> That's amazing. >> If you create a
world in Java and you think it's beautiful, you
want to share with others. Anyone who opens their
world with that seed, regardless of which
edition they're playing, will see essentially it's almost exactly the same thing. >> It's almost identical. Then it's the thing
in the community, you find a [inaudible] location
and you share it like, "Look at this world I found." Before, you couldn't do that with players
on the other addition. But now everyone can just share cool places together.
I think that's really nice. >> It's really amazing. When you find these
amazing and big things in Caves and Cliffs Part 2, you obviously want to
be able to share them. Seed parity is huge, I think everyone's going to
be so excited about that. >> We're not 100 percent
there yet, but close. >> Getting close. >> Very similar, same
details will be different. >> Seed almost parities. >> Seed almost
parities, that's it >> That's very cool. I know
everyone is anxiously, including myself,
waiting for this update. When do we get it? >> It's actually almost done, we're going to release
it in a month or two. >> That is amazing, thank you so much Agnes and Henrik. >> Thank you. >> Caves and Cliffs Part
2 will be coming to a screen near you
in 1-2 months.
