Minecraft Beta 1.19.0.20 [Wild Update]

MANGROVE BIOME, ANCIENT CITIES, THE WARDEN, CHEST BOATS, THE ALLAY AND MORE...

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Hold onto your Goat Horns, The Wild Update is one step closer to release! What's new in the first Wild Update 1.19 beta for Minecraft Bedrock Edition?

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Yesterday, on the 7th of April 2022, the first Minecraft 1.19 beta for Minecraft Bedrock Edition was released bringing a host of new features out of experimental mode and into the vanilla game.

Mangrove Swamp

Features include the mangrove swamp biome, which we can't find because there's no Locate Biome command on bedrock edition!

And in this new biome, which you can't find, there are apparently a whole host of new blocks and features!

Features such as Mangrove trees which have new wood, new leaves and a whole new sapling type known as propagules. There are mangrove roots, muddy mangrove roots which can be crafted from mud blocks and mangrove roots, and of course all of the mangrove wood types as you'd expect, including doors, buttons, trapdoors, boats, fences and more.

So why, if this new wood exists, and the new biome exists, are all of the Mangrove trees…. Made out of Oak?

Let's look into the version files and find out…

Well you can see here that for some reason, inside the Mangrove Tree feature file, the Trunk Block type is listed as Oak and not Mangrove. Perhaps this is a mistake or perhaps this is a level of integration that hasn't been developed yet. Regardless, it seems pretty weird to release all of this and then have trees with the wrong wood!

Moving on from trees but staying in the Mangrove Biome, we've now got mud, mud blocks, mud brick blocks and packed mud.

Mud makes you sink like in soul sand but without slowing you down and mud brick blocks also have stairs, slabs and wall variants, which is amazing.

Interestingly, looking at the new Mangrove Swamp biome definition file, there is no "Monster" tag listed, which is usually present on biomes that allow mob spawning. This possibly means that the biome will only allow entities to spawn that specifically have the mangrove biome type listed in their spawn rules. Which I expected to see for the Frog entity, however that's just listed as spawning in regular swamps, so I'm a little confused on this one. Could this be the new mooshroom biome? Who knows…

FROGS

Anyway, speaking of Frogs… of course frogs have made it into the 1.19 beta as well. With three different variants known as Temperate, Cold and Warm, the frogs will have a different variation based on which biome they "hatch" in. And I say hatch, do things, hatch from Frog Eggs? Wait, it's frog spawn! Which are basically eggs.

Anyway, the eggs seem to pop more than they hatch, spewing out a few tadpoles which then grow up into frogs after about 20 minutes.

And as we found out, frogs will spawn in swamps and they are a passive mob with no loot drops if you kill them. But that doesn't mean there's no loot to get from frogs, you just have to get it a bit differently!

Frogs will actually "eat" small slimes which will cause them to drop slime balls, they will also eat small magma cubes if you can get them together. And when they do, they'll drop a new light emitting block known as a frog light in one of three colors depending on which variant the frog is.

The frog light color variants are known as Ochre, which are the yellow ones, Verdant, which are the green ones and Pearlescent, which are the purple ones.

All three of these blocks are pretty much identical to sea lanterns, emitting a light level of 15 and otherwise acting as a full block.

Before moving on to many more new things in the 1.19 beta, I just want to share my thoughts that, joking aside, finding the Mangrove Swamp isn't easy on Bedrock Edition and when you do…. well lets just say, most of the ones that I found were perhaps a little on the small or on the broken side!

I think a little more work needs doing here before the release.

ALLAY

Anyway, moving on from Mangroves, another brand new entity in the 1.19 beta is none other than the biome vote winner of Minecraft Live 2021 and that is the Allay, which is surprisingly fun, cute and helpful.

If you haven't already heard about the Allay, it's basically a cured vex which you can find in woodland mansions and some pillager outposts, that you befriend by giving it an item.

Once you've rescued it and given it an item, it will follow you around while looking for more of that item to pick up and throw to you.

And if you don't want the Allay to constantly clog up your inventory with the litter that its collects, you can activate a note block and assign the allay to drop the items near that, for 30 seconds.

Put that note block on a redstone clock and now your allay will stay hard at work, finding items and throwing them at the note blocks which of course you can put hoppers around and utilize these allays to their full potential inside of your storage systems.

And they don't just pick up stackable items either, they will also pick up and collect non stackable items such as books, potions, weapons, armor, making these cute little entities extremely useful, if you can find any.

And that's the main problem.. These little guys are incredibly rare and you're going to have to go a long way to find one, or two if you're lucky.

THE DEEP DARK

Speaking of things that are ridiculously rare and hard to find, The Deep Dark Biome and the Ancient Cities that lie within are also part of this beta. The deep dark is a new biome that you might find near the bottom of your worlds and it's generally made out of sculk and sculk block variants.

It's also where the Warden lives and the only place that Ancient Cities will generate.

Now I'm not going to go into too much detail on these features as they're relatively well known by now and there is already a lot of info out there that I'm sure you can find if you look hard enough. One thing of note however, is that the new Darkness effect that is given when you're close to the warden, now has a slider added into the accessibility section allowing you to tweak how dark it actually gets, which is fantastic news for people with visual impairments or people with dimly lit screens and for content creators like me who like their viewers to be able to see what they're doing on screen!

In this beta the sculk sensors got a major buff, allowing them to detect a much larger range of vibrations including players sneaking on top of them, players falling in lava, players sneaking in water, projectiles landing, containers being opened and closed, candles being placed, lit and unlit, players eating food or drinking potions, goat horns being played and big drip leaves changing their state. Additionally, they'll no longer detect players shooting arrows while sneaking either.

And it's great that the sculk sensor is getting some love on bedrock, but it's still way behind the feature set it has on Java edition. On JAVA edition there are over 40 different events that will trigger the sculk sensor to actually activate, however on Bedrock, there are a whole lot less, which is probably due to how the Bedrock Engine is limited in terms of detecting certain game events so let's hope these get some parity love over the next few betas.

PARITY

Speaking of Parity, as has been the case over the last few Bedrock Betas, there is some more focus on Bedrock and JAVA parity in this update. Villagers will no longer fall asleep in something they're riding near a bed and the wandering trader now has the same drinking sounds as you'll hear on JAVA edition.

Speaking of wandering traders, they've had a few additional tweaks including that they will now randomly move around, they can no longer open or close doors, they have sound effects when they turn invisible and visible again and they can be name tagged. However I wouldn't waste your name tags on them, as that will not stop them despawning.

OTHER UPDATES

In this beta there were a whole host of additional fixes and changes. There were some graphical fixes including entity model tweaks and texture changes, as well as a whole host of technical tweaks, fixes and additions which I'm not going to go into for this video.

CHEST BOATS

One thingthat's not listed in the changelogs however are chest boats, which are new in 1.19 but have been in the 1.18 betas under the experimental feature toggles.

These are just boats, with chests in, which allow you to transport your items over the water. They also interact with hoppers from all directions allowing for fully automated loading and unloading as well as some really interesting benefits for land based redstone contraptions as well.

That being said, with this being Bedrock Edition, good luck trying to get your hoppers pointing into your boat, without your boat falling through the floor!

ENTITIES

And, according to a wonderful comparison system available from foxynotail.com, a bunch of other entities also got updated in this beta.

The axolotl had an attackable target tweak, Spiders had some geometry tweaks, Frog croaking animations were tweaked, llama's hit boxes were tweaked, mooshrooms had interaction changes, parrots had a bunch of tweaks to their behaviors, sheep had interaction changes, snow golems had interaction changes, wardens digging, sniffing and anger level behaviors were tweaked, and the wolf had some model changes.

If you want to learn more about what changed between versions and what entities have been affected, you can get access to all of that data for free, from foxynotail.com. The link is in the description below.

Article Author: FoxyNoTail

Foxy is a Minecraft player, content creator and official Marketplace Partner. He's been playing the game for over 13 years, delving into the code creating datapacks, add-ons, resource packs and other tools for the Minecraft player base and communities to use and enjoy. He also hosts The Minecraft Update weekly podcast. You can find Foxy on Twitter @foxynotail

Publisher: Minecraft Update News

The Minecraft Update News is produced and published by author FoxyNoTail as part of the foxynotail.com website. Sourced directly from working as a content creator, player and officially partnered producer, FoxyNoTail has the facts and figures at his disposal to ensure news articles are current, relevant and factual. Foxy has 13+ years experience in not just playing Minecraft, but creating content, videos, streams, data packs, servers, add-ons, packs, podcasts, licensed content and now news. Revered by the community as a trust worthy, reliable and honest source of news and opinion, Foxy's data is trusted and acknowledged regularly.