My thoughts on the 1.17 Minecraft Update

as always i'm super late with all of the update news recently mojang had a minecon live live stream and they announced 1.17 the next big update for minecraft they announced many new features of which i thought i'd offer my opinion on it seeing as i've been playing this game for 10 years they announced 1.17 would be the caves and cliffs update and they did this whole animation showing how excited all the mobs are and if i had to choose i'd definitely be this guy i'm bouncing up and down but i'm not smiling and you know why it's because it's going to take a year to get to this update it's a very long way away i thought what i'd do is go over each feature individually and give my initial feedback but i think it's worth saying at this point they are not all set in stone if you're this early in development there's no way that these features are going to be exactly as they come but we do get a really good idea of what will be there when we eventually get to 1.17 so let's dive in and talk about the update that's over a year away and some speculation and some opinions so the first one to go over is the lush cave biome which includes all kinds of things including azaleas spore blossom and glowberries and a few things that we'll talk about individually as well they gave us this video showing an azalea tree and they look like new leaves to me with some plants or flowers on top of it now that leads you to the lush cave biome so when you get into the lush caves not only do you see these little azalea bushes and then a normal like lush cave bush you see all of these glow berries hanging from the ceiling which are by all means just a much nicer variation on vines now the name obviously suggests that they glow and they look to be a light source in themselves which is absolutely amazing any light source in minecraft is going to be brilliant because it's always difficult to hide light and this could go a long way in building along with that you can see some mossy carpet in the lush caves and we don't know too much about these blocks but assuming that you can use these in the overworld outside and they're not just limited to caves this is a really big deal for builders you already have quite a variety of plant life but realistically you're limited to flowers and leaves but having those bushes in there as well along with some leaves with flowers in it that's a pretty big deal all in all lush caves very exciting we have limited knowledge about the use but just going on looks i think it's a fantastic move in the right direction however i do worry about the amount of foliage that already sucks up your inventory but we'll come to that later on so they also introduced this the drip leaf plant and they showed a little video of what this is it seems to be growing in lush caves as well and it is specifically a parkour block which seems to act like a floating platform and if you stand on it too long you fall meaning traps and parkour are a really big thing for this so again quite excited but need to play around with that and just going on looks my goodness you can create such an intense atmosphere with all of these different kinds of vines and the drip leaf plant it seems like you can grow it upwards which with a little creativity i'm hoping you can place plants on top of the drip leaf thing and you could essentially make very green trees and there's a lot of things coming our way when it comes to landscaping and gardening in minecraft which i wasn't really expecting for this update so the next big thing is the new cave generation now they showed and quite an extensive example of what the caves might look like now with any generation it probably will change over time but in general i like the way that it's going there's areas completely underwater there is now enough space for you actually to fly so for me new cave generation was always going to happen in an update called caves and cliffs because caves at the moment are just far too narrow and cramped to really do anything and if you've ever built a base underground having to excavate a huge amount of earth in minecraft is just painful so this is a very good move and not a particularly unexpected one so for this one i think we can put our thumbs up and say excellent my dude that's just what we wanted but then they hid us with the drip stone caves and everyone went mind blown what is this if you look you can see this haze in the fog and stuff and that's probably just the settings that they've recorded on but to me it looks like there's been a slight change in the way that the lighting engine works so i'm not entirely sure but it does look different to what i'm used to if they are recording in full vanilla so you can see stalactites and static mites the drip stone cave it looks sharp and dangerous and we see in the videos that the drip stone stalac tights they drip water downwards so you can feel a cauldron but i've got to mention the way that they look they are just so contrasty to everything we know in minecraft so far i really don't like the current look of them but again this is very early in 1.17 update cycles so i imagine this will change but i've got to say they don't quite hit the mark for me on the looks but they do also fall down and cause some damage so this is a hostile biome i think and it'll be very interesting to see what comes out of it now it's very difficult to tell from this clip but if you look there looks to be not only the stalactites and stalac mites but an actual block that matches them as well which is a pretty cool looking block i must say i don't know what it would be called but it does look pretty awesome and anything that matches with greys will automatically do well in building so we got our caves our lush caves done now we move on to something that no one saw coming and that is the skulks the skulk growth and everything that goes with it now in this clip you can see what the skulk looks like and to me that looks like it belongs in the end in the end biome in the end dimension it does not look like it belongs in a cave and that slightly worries me because i have a feeling that this will end up in a cave biome in the overworld and not in the end you can see even from this image it's got the same color palette as this color here the end portal we've all seen this and it looks almost identical to the end portal itself when you look in i do kind of hope that it ends up in the end just because it's lacking but at the same time this update isn't meant for the end so i can also see why they put it in caves quite a difficult decision to make i think now moving on to the actual use for these things redstone wireless redstone this is a trap makers dream oh my goodness it can detect footsteps no longer will you have to use a tripwire hook or a button or a pressure plate you just walk on by and you just go you whatever it is the trap goes off you are you can't see it coming however that benefit is also in my opinion a little bit of its downfall you see this block looks so useful and if footsteps truly can activate it on its own that tells me that all of those redstone components the pressure plates the tripwire hook in particular almost become useless i would probably never choose to use tripwire hooks pressure plates all of the manual stuff if i had automatic wireless redstone so it may be too good just a little bit of a concern of mine that the wireless redstone will become the only way to use it so i'm curious to see what that will be and what the limitations are and how they're going to balance already pre-existing redstone components but there's about a million traps going through my mind right now this is what i really love about the mojang team they are so good at giving us what we hoped for such as the lush caves and the new generation but then they hit us with the stuff we didn't expect and that is the warden so not only did we get this skulk this very unique block that no one saw coming we get a mob that equally no one saw coming and it is terrifying looking i love the atmosphere that this thing creates i love the look of it i love the way it glows and i like the way that it fights however i will say that i don't really know where this mob will spawn if it just spawns in normal caves then maybe not so good but it seems to me from this footage that it spawns in very special caves so you see this block around it it looks like a more hardened stone brick slash cobblestone which if we're able to use this there is absolutely no confirmation that we can even mine this block it may be a unminable block but that's bedrock's job so i can only assume that we can mine it it looks phenomenal so let's stay on track with the warden for a second it looks tough you can't take it down with several arrows it gets sort of faster as it as it comes towards you to hurt you and it hits like a truck full near the right armor is not enough for even two hits of this thing i love the way its heart looks and i like the mechanic of the whole moving and hearing thing it is overall the highlight for me of the 1.17 update and proves to me that the right people are driving forward this update because it can be so difficult with the amount of mods and stuff that already exists for java minecraft that it can be difficult to come up with something new that fits in the game that hasn't already been done so the warden represents that they've still got that creative flair and i love it but this clip wasn't the only thing for me that caught my attention it was what was in the clip that no one was talking about you see this candles candles in minecraft they appear to be black in color and they resemble pickles now pickles get bigger as you place them so i assume that you can make candles and place them in various quantities and if you look carefully you can see that there are black candles and white candles this may mean that you can dye them now that would be magnificent if you could dye the candles to whatever color you want the options for decorating your interior suddenly explode now you've got to be careful in minecraft not to give the player too much freedom for example lots of people ask for concrete slabs or vertical slabs including myself at some point but rightfully so i think mojang have been very reserved about what they give to the player because i think with limited blocks you get more imaginative and i think that's really important i think too many options can be overwhelming it can clutter your inventory and ultimately stifle creativity so let's move on to the next thing which is amethyst geodes i think out of everything in this update i've got to be honest on all fronts i've given it a very positive review so far but amethyst geodes for me are a step over the line and i'm not a huge fan of them now obviously amethysts exist in real life and there's iron ore in real life and coal and all that kind of stuff but for me the amethyst geodes they just look a little strange and very modded in my opinion very very modded and i'm not sure what the benefit of these are going to be what the use of these are going to be except for the telescope which we'll come to in a second so for me it's a no-go i guess i would use it as a table decoration for a house but other than that i i think it's a step too far and perhaps potentially an unnecessary addition to the 1.17 update mainly because i think you could make a telescope out of copper which we'll talk about in a minute and just glass just glass which is you know what you use in a real telescope so not my favorite edition i must say but i'm sure it will have its fans and everyone is of course entitled to their opinion on it so despite the fact that i don't really like amethyst geodes that much if we go back to that shot and we take a look at that block on the left so we see that there's the purple amethyst geodes but there's also seems to be this very smooth block right next to it that's kind of gray light gray perhaps pearly white and i think this might be marble in some way i i'm not entirely sure but i think it might be marble now the reason i say this is amethyst geodes are formed by volcanoes and marble is something that's also formed by lots of lava and magma and that sort of thing and you it seems to me to be encasing the amethyst geode and i think it's something to do with that now despite the fact that i don't like the amethyst geodes that block looks extraordinarily useful it looks so good and i'm hoping that that makes it into the game it looks like one of those secret things that they're not really talking about i don't think they revealed every single little detail of 1.17 i think they left a little bit for us to find by ourselves i can see that working as a floor as a wall i think marble in general would be so good along with quartz and i'm very excited to see what that is hidden in there i'm not sure everyone spotted it but i definitely did especially as i wasn't keen on the purple i was like oh what's that so i just mentioned it the telescope now we saw this very briefly and to me it looks like a very unfinished feature but we get an idea of what it might look like so you hold the telescope you right click and it zooms in now for me i use optifine zoom an awful lot so for example if i look around i can zoom in and i it's simply on a hotkey and i zoom in it's instant i don't have to hold anything in my hand and i think this feature is meant to be similar to the optifine zoom in in essence not exactly the same but in essence now i think a zoom is something that should be in vanilla minecraft by a long way but for me on java using optifine would i use the telescope instead of the optifine zoom unfortunately not i will continue to use this zoom especially as i can do this in f5 as well it's a huge feature for a content creator like myself but minecraft isn't just for content creators and that's really important to remember it this feature is great for me but a telescope not so much and but that's not the case for your average player perhaps a telescope is exactly what the doctor ordered and they don't need this zoom which i often use for comedic effect so my judgment on the telescope is this i really think that the circle that you look through needs to be much bigger much much bigger the fact that it's so constricted makes it almost not worthwhile zooming in i think that needs to be wider the aperture needs to be a lot wider and ideally in an ideal world you don't have to hold it you can just put it in a slot like here like where you've got your off hand and stuff i'd like an accessory slot here for your telescope you put it in there and then there's a button you press and you get optifine zoom essentially and the reason i say that is just because i love optifine zoom it's instant it's perfect and i probably wouldn't swap out but like i said different for other people's it's just my opinion on this particular feature so moving on we talked briefly about this there is going to be a new or added copper ore now i don't know whether there's going to end up being copper armor i personally doubt it i doubt there's going to be another layer to the pickaxe hierarchy i think this will particularly be used for blocks and the telescope but i'm not entirely sure i don't think we need another kind of pickaxe to be honest with you so i hope there's a use beyond building blocks and telescopes and obviously lightning rods which we'll come to in a second i hope they can find a use for this that makes it just as valuable as iron ore is for the rest of the game so maybe there'll be some more blocks that involve copper which we will get to but it does produce copper blocks which i have never been a fan of textures that are broken up into squares highlighted like this but the color looks pretty cool and i particularly like the way that it mimics real life and it ages now they haven't worked out exactly how long it takes to age to that state they're actually asking around to see what people thought would be a good amount of time personally i think it needs to be long enough to be realistic for your average player so it needs to be maybe 10 days 10 minecraft days which would be over an hour to get from one state to another so if there's several stages of aging it would take you several hours to get from the copper block to its more bluey prismarine counterpart i think you want to be talking a few hours real life maybe five to ten anything more than that and you might have your average player waiting a little bit too long see for for players like myself on hermitcraft we play so much minecraft as a minecraft content creator i have such a different view of how minecraft is and should be and how i play it is so different to most people so they have a real challenge trying to please everyone and that timing is going to be really telling about how they think about the overall audience of minecraft but you can also use copper to make the lightning rod now this has probably been a long time coming and they explained in the live stream that they want punishments to the player to feel like their fault and at the moment lightning is just a random event and if it strikes your house it burns it down that's not really your fault is it it's just a random act of nature and it sucks and i've never liked that i've never liked that i totally agree with their design philosophy so introducing the lightning rod makes a heck of a lot of sense because it will draw the lightning to the house and then it is on you if you didn't put a lightning rod next to your house it's kind of the same concept in a game called don't starve there's lightning frequently and if you don't have a lightning rod you will lose everything so it's kind of the same concept and i totally agree i think it's a a good addition as a building block it didn't excite me massively but again i kind of need to see how it works i imagine it acts a lot like an end rod and all the other things like chains and how how they work as well so again excited to see it i just think it's a necessary addition so i mentioned earlier about inventory management now as the game has got bigger over the years this inventory space has stayed exactly the same except for a few bits here this space has been the same since the beginning of the game and despite there being some improvements the shulker box being the biggest one you can store a few extra items not just a few a lot you you still have the same problem that your inventory is still not quite big enough so they've introduced something called bundles now bundles are bags they look like bags they look like zelda style bomb bags and they hold various items up to a stack so i can see this being useful in some scenarios for example particularly with foliage you don't carry stacks of flowers around but you often end up just having to chuck them away but i'm not sure that this actually solves the inventory problem i think there's still a little bit of work to do on the whole issue of the inventory because here's my worry you end up with the same amount of space and i think what your inventory will look like goes from something like this which is just full of stuff as you might play minecraft normally to something like this just full of bundles imagine that these shulker boxes are bundles and not boxes some people do play minecraft like this they like to carry everything with them in boxes but my worry is at a glance i have no idea what's in my inventory other than shulker boxes and the amount of digging you have to do in minecraft you have to place down your shulker box you got to take a look what's inside get rid of it put it back in your inventory sort it out inventory management is still a nightmare and i'm not sure that bundles are going to fix that so i will withhold judgment on bundles because it's really really important and good that they're tackling the problem of inventory management but i'm not yet convinced that this is the solution to it and i think they might know that as well so we'll see and i withhold judgment on bundles too hard but it's definitely the right direction but maybe not the absolute right thing just yet but remember we're very early in the development cycle so things could change massively so one of the big reveals and another thing that people weren't necessarily expecting with this update was archaeology archaeological dig sites that you can find this is a structure that you can find in the overworld and it's full of dirt and caves well not caves but like little holes with gravel in and you can take a brush and you can dig down and reveal artifacts within those blocks now this was a huge eye-opener for me because if you look you're brushing away the gravel and oh my goodness it actually makes gravel and dirt into layered snow but then my heart broke when i realized if you stop right clicking that block it doesn't stay the same it doesn't stay a layered place it breaks and my little heart my little builder heart went because there was me thinking we'd finally get some half slabs or something similar to a half slab with dirt and gravel and our paths would look amazing but i'm not sure that's how it works it seems to me that once you begin the process of brushing it down it will always break especially if it's got something in it you need to hold down the brush for the whole time in order to get whatever's inside that piece of dirt or gravel so my opinion of the archaeology is kind of half and half i'm not massively excited by it the pots look quite good for a bit of decoration any kind of decoration is always go good and going to be used it also looks like it's going to use clay which is an underused block in my opinion but at the same time it apart from the whole brushing blocks into a different shape it honestly doesn't excite me all that much but i am hoping that the rewards you can get from them are more exciting than the blocks that you see so i hope it's not too overpowered and i hope it offers something a little more or something different but overall it's an interesting concept and i am excited to see what happens with it but it doesn't have me nearly as excited as say the warden or the lush caves or anything like that so i'm kind of 50 50 on it i'm neither first nor overly excited so now we need to move on to some of the new mobs that they were adding in and the big one is the axolotl this was a reveal for a water friendly pet it's kind of like the wolf of water in minecraft so you can find them in lush caves you can pop them in a bucket and you can befriend them i'm not entirely sure how i actually had axolotls in real life they were called professor nibbles and caroline they were excellent little pets and they were dum-dums they were absolute dum-dums they uh kind of didn't recognize me they were pretty slow eating so i will really enjoy seeing what a minecraft axolotl looks like compared to in behavior that is to a real axolotl because they're pretty lazy they don't swim around having fun they kind of just loll around walking around every now and again but they are kind of weird looking but also kind of cute cute ugly as they described it and i agree they are definitely cute ugly so i have an opinion about axolotls not as a animal themselves but as a mob introduced to the game so in minecraft we've got loads of different kinds of creatures now it seems to me that the ethos of mob development in minecraft is this if it is friendly then it's something that seems to exist in real life whether it's a rabbit or a parrot then it seems to me that these creatures the friendly ones tend to be real animals now i've never really been a fan of that per se like i said earlier the warden is my favorite thing that they've added to 1.17 because it's different because it's so special and that's kind of what i might have hoped for a neutral mob such as the axolotl why my question is why did it have to be an axolotl why why did it have to be something that exists in reality when i kind of play minecraft to escape reality and having strange creatures that only exist in minecraft is something that i can get more attached to however that may not be true because rabbits are cute parrots are cute so i may just be completely wrong but i just guess that i was hoping and looking for that flair of creativity that the warden represents instead of it's super cute let's add it to minecraft so i kind of wish the axolotl was something new and exciting and innovative and a brand new creature from one of the minds of the amazing dev team and game designers so part of me is like oh my goodness it's an axolotl it's super cute another part of me is do we really want another real life animal in the game why can't we have something that's a little different now the mushroom is the only other mob that obviously doesn't exist in real life it's a mushroom cow why can't we have more weird creatures now obviously this is just a re-skinned cow but it's the only friendly mob i can think of that is actually you know doesn't exist in real life there's there there isn't a cow with mushrooms on its head so i guess i was hoping for something a little more weird like this one and a little less normal like this one there's no denying that they're absolutely adorable so a little bit split on that one it's just my thoughts and feelings about the general ethos of like which kind of mob goes in the game and i guess that also applies to the next one and the one after which is the goat and the glow squid so we'll go over the goat next the goat is something they're adding to minecraft which actually looks pretty fun now obviously ignoring everything i just said about real life animals and how they integrate into minecraft i've had that conversation now let's just talk about the goat in general it looks super fun it looks like it's nice and warm wrapped in its coat it jumps around which is awesome and it most importantly headbutt stuff which gets me very excited because if it is slightly aggressive to players i can think of a million things mini games traps that you could use the goat for imagine parkouring with goats that are trying to knock you off or or mini games where you've got to go through a quick dungeon run but there's goats that are trying to push you off the platforms everywhere you go or even a trap where you you have to go up something just to find there's a goat at the top and it it sends you all the way back down it is a tool for much hilarity and i like the way that it behaves an awful lot so that's a thumbs up from me ignoring the whole thing about real life animals now the glow squid the glow squid was something that you the audience voted to go into minecraft now my opinion of the glow squid is kind of my opinion of the uh moo bloom and the ice oligar which i believe should have been called the chillager and that is that i'm not that fussed again all three of the options for this mob vote they didn't seem to me to come from a place of creativity at all if i'm honest they look to me to be mobs that exist in the wider minecraft universe if you might call it that so some of these mobs came from dungeons like the chileja some of them came from minecraft earth now the question is do they need to be in java minecraft and i'm not sure that they do i'm not sure that they do i would have probably preferred three different ideas for the edition kind of like with the the phantom and the the mob vote we had last year or maybe even the year before but then again i voted for phantoms and i hate them so i revoke the right to have an opinion on the glow squid because i voted for phantoms and everyone else that also voted for phantoms i'm sure you understand what i mean we voted for possibly the worst idea ever just something that haunts your nightmares why did we do this to ourselves so the glow squid is different to that it seems to be friendly from this little animation it seems to be putting the mojang team into a trance and i don't know if that is something it's going to do put other mobs into a bit of a glowy trance and it they might follow the glow squid in some way which could be interesting but i think that's just for the animation i'm not sure it will do those things it may end up being just a glowing squid and my opinion kind of falls with that sentence it may be just a glowing squid and there may not be much to say around it however there is the potential for something big depending on what they do with it if the glow squid drops something magical that can change the color of lights such as the redstone lamp imagine for a second mixing the redstone lamp with a glow squid ink sac and a dye and it creates a blue light that would make it so much more worth it so much more worth it to the point where i will take back every bad thing i've ever said about all of this uh mob vote stuff because if we had different lights colors in minecraft the atmospheres we could create with that as builders is magnificent and i kind of hope wishful thinking i think that the glow squid will enable that it would make it so useful however real talk and reality check the lighting engine in minecraft is design is very old and i'm not sure how easy it is to change something like that so we're on to our last couple of things and that is the mountains and snowier snow so we saw last year last september actually that we all voted for the mountains which introduced the goat and all we have is this screenshot of mountains now to me this doesn't look minecrafty enough and remember this is very early in development so i think this will change the fact that we all we see is just a screenshot kind of tells us that they are still messing with it so i think it's a step in the right direction but the generation isn't quite minecrafty enough for me at this stage and i hope for beautiful landscapes that i would like to summit and put a house right on the top and i hope that it will invigorate people's creativity to really use the landscape in their buildings because i don't feel like people do that enough but i do hope that it works out and feels minecrafty at the same time so i've got a lot more to say on it than that but snowier snow now i do have a thing to say on that we haven't got any assets or sort of showcases on this but i think we can assume that snowier snow is you sinking in snow or the snow will avalanche in some way perhaps if you get stuck in the snow again trap maker's dream and i'm all for anything that interacts with the player in that way slows their movement it gives map makers so much ability and it also gives trap makers more ways to mess with your friends which is what to me minecraft is all about so those were my opinions on all the 1.17 features that i could remember and were in that video in minecon live and i have to say a huge thank you to mojang not only for this update and putting on a magnificent show but also showcasing mumbo and eyes upcoming road trip video it's going to be really cool i think mumbo's still editing it so hopefully it will come out on my channel soon hopefully you guys saw the trailer it was awesome thank you mumbo for editing that and i need to say thank you for sending me a load of minecon live goodies but unfortunately it arrived after the livestream so it wasn't actually a very good promotional tool so i guess my bad not really though it arrived late but thank you anyway for sending me some swag so that's been my rather long opinion on all of the features what do you think do you agree with some of my points and remember everyone is entitled to an opinion not everything in this update looks magnificent but the vast majority of it does i would say 90 percent of this update is on point and i'm very very excited for the whole thing i think it's a big deal possibly one of the biggest updates of all time and i'm very excited to see where it goes and this is just the tip of the iceberg over the course of the next year they're going to develop more there's going to be more features there inevitably has to be so with all that i think i'll say thank you very much for listening to my ramblings this has actually been quite fun and refreshing to talk about the new minecraft stuff and i have no idea if this interests any of you but i'd just like to say thank you very much for listening and i'll see you in the next video i can't wait to get my hands on this stuff and start making some building tricks and tips and build hacks and all that good stuff with it so i'll see you in the next video thanks for watching goodbye

Channel: Grian

Views: 3,791,719

Rating: 4.9188676 out of 5

Keywords: Minecraft, minecraft, 1.17, caves and cliffs, minecraft warden, grian, grian 1.17, axolotl minecraft, lush caves minecraft, new minecraft update

Id: cLrFvnHVV-w

Length: 37min 9sec (2229 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 18 2020