Minecraft's next update will "rewrite almost every aspect" of how worlds are built

Minecraft has been determined to make the two-parter Caves & Cliffs update their biggest release in years - arguably the biggest ever.

Introducing new mobs, items and everything in between to the game back in June 2021 with Part I, Mojang had almost six months of experimental testing and community feedback to deliver both the Caves and the Cliffs of the update to their player base, and it’s not been an easy task according to the developers.

OG modder and Aether creator, Brandon "kingbdogz" Pearce took to Twitter to talk about the challenges faced when the team decided to bring Minecraft to its highest highs and lowest lows, literally speaking.

“I hope 1.18 (Part II of the C&C saga) is exciting for our players”, King posted a rant defending the decision to split, reschedule and even postpone content in the original update. 

“3D biomes + terrain and biome distribution are separated, resulting in natural variation I haven't seen since alpha days.”

Alpha terrain generation is often referred to as the chunky days of the blocky video game where it looked like patches were randomly spawned in front of you to keep the game seem endless, whereas the Caves and Cliffs update will not only make these transitions seamless but also turn up the limits to 11, pushing the limits of the infinite sandbox genre.

“Increasing the world height to 320 and lowering to y -64”, compared to the former digits of 264 height and 0 for the floor level, both numbers also being huge upgrades from the Alpha days. 

“The performance improvements required to do this alone were a huge feat, not to mention the immense amount of rewriting needed to make sure everything worked correctly in negative Y coordinates”, concluded the developer.

This combination of world expansion and seamless blending will allow for the craziest world regeneration Vanilla Minecraft has ever seen that will have the current player base excited for the future and former miners wanting to come back for at least one more adventure to see what all the hype is about.

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Feature image courtesy of Mojang.