Minecraft 1.21.2 "Bundles of Bravery" Update

"Bundles of Bravery" is Minecraft's third game drop. It reached Java Edition on October 22, 2024, as version 1.21.2, and Bedrock got it the same day as 1.21.40. Its centerpiece is the Bundle. On Realms you can now play Hardcore together with your friends, the oceans have baby Squids, Glow Squids and Dolphins, and Salmon can be small, medium or large.

A Bundle is cheap to make. Spiders drop the String for it, and Cows give the Leather. Into it go seeds, flowers, torches and other small stuff that used to take up a slot each. This article covers the game as of Java Edition 1.21.3. That version came out the next day, October 23, 2024, and fixed two bugs.

Bundle

The Bundle holds one stack, usually 64 items, and that stack can be a mix of different things. It sits in your inventory, and you fill it right there, no chest needed. Mojang first showed the Bundle back in 2020. At the time it never left the experimental stage, and it only joined the regular game with this drop.

You craft a Bundle from 1 String and 1 Leather . The String goes on top, the Leather right below it. The recipe is small enough to fit in your inventory's crafting grid, and it unlocks in the recipe book as soon as you pick up String. The 2020 prototype was much more expensive to craft and used Rabbit Hide .

You can dye a Bundle any of 16 colors. Put it in the crafting grid along with a dye, such as White Dye , and out comes a White Bundle . Everything inside stays put. A colored Bundle can be re-dyed another color, but a dye of the same color won't work on it. There's no going back to the original look, because no recipe for that exists. Each color's recipe unlocks when you pick up the matching dye.

How much it holds

Each item takes up its own share of the stack inside a Bundle. Regular items that stack to 64 fit in a Bundle exactly 64 at a time. Ender Pearls , Eggs and Snowballs stack to 16, so each of them takes four times as much room. A sword or any other item that doesn't stack fills the Bundle all on its own. So 32 Sticks and 8 Ender Pearls fill a Bundle exactly to the brim. An empty Bee Nest or Beehive stacks to 64. But with bees inside, it takes up the whole Bundle.

You can put Bundles inside each other. An empty Bundle inside another one takes as much room as four items that stack to 64, plus whatever it holds itself. A full Bundle won't fit into another one, as Mojang warned in its announcement. In the same post Mojang joked that you can't put a Donkey in your inventory, and that Donkey Spawn Eggs don't count.

Putting items in and taking them out

You put items in with the left mouse button. Either pick up the Bundle and click it on an item in your inventory. Or pick up the items and click them on the Bundle. The right button takes out the selected item, or the top one if nothing is selected. To select an item, hover over the Bundle and scroll the mouse wheel while the tooltip is showing. The selected item peeks out of the opening right on the Bundle's icon. When an item no longer fits, the Bundle refuses it and plays a special sound.

The tooltip lays out what's inside as a grid with four slots per row. A full row slides down, and new items start a row above it. That's why the top row sometimes has empty spaces. As long as there are 12 kinds of items or fewer inside, you see them all. With more kinds, the tooltip shows the top three rows, 8 to 11 kinds, and hides the rest. Below the grid sits a fullness bar, and an empty Bundle shows the label "Empty" there.

You can also hold a Bundle in your hand. Press the right mouse button and it drops one group of items on the ground. Keep the button held and the Bundle empties one group after another. That way you can unload your loot next to a chest without opening your inventory.

Hardcore on Realms

Hardcore is a Survival mode on the highest difficulty where you can't respawn after you die. Java Edition has had it for a long time. With this drop you can turn it on for a Realm too, the paid Mojang server for playing with friends. You pick the mode when you create a new world on a Realm or re-create an old one with the "Reset World" button. The game then warns that this will replace the current world of your Realm. What you still can't do is upload an existing singleplayer Hardcore world to a Realm. You'll start empty-handed, because the "Bonus Chest" option can't be turned on in Hardcore.

Hardcore locks the difficulty to "Hard", and "Allow Commands" won't turn on when you create the world. When a player dies, the "Game Over!" screen appears. From there you can switch to spectator mode and watch the world, or go back to the title screen.

In Java Edition, you create a Realms world on the same screen as a singleplayer one. There you can set game rules and add data packs. The main Realms screen can also show a label with the game mode of a Realm's last active world.

Baby Squids and Dolphins, Salmon in three sizes

The Squid , Glow Squid and Dolphin now have babies. They've been swimming around Bedrock for a long time, but Java Edition gets them only with this drop. Babies appear on their own when these mobs spawn naturally in a group. A Squid or Glow Squid has a 5% chance to be a baby, and a Dolphin a 10% chance. A Squid Spawn Egg , though, always gives an adult Squid. A baby Dolphin grows faster if you feed it fish.

A medium Salmon is the size of the old one. A small one is half that size, and a large one is one and a half times bigger. Of all Salmon, 31.6% spawn small, 52.6% medium and 15.8% large. The hitbox changes with the size. If you catch a Salmon with a Water Bucket, you get a Bucket of Salmon , and the fish keeps its size when you let it out.

A new look for the Redstone Torch

The Redstone Torch got a new model and texture so it doesn't get lost among other torches. The torches on the Redstone Repeater and Redstone Comparator got the new model as well. If your resource pack retextures Torches or Redstone Torches, give it a check. The models and UV mapping have changed.

Banner Patterns and Smithing Templates

Java Edition gets two Banner Patterns long familiar from Bedrock. The Field Masoned Banner Pattern is crafted from Paper and Bricks , and the Bordure Indented Banner Pattern from Paper and Vines . The designs themselves were already in the Loom , and you could pick them without any item at all. Now you can't pick them without the pattern. If you've been making banners with Field Masoned or Bordure Indented, craft the pattern first. Like other Banner Patterns, it isn't used up in the Loom.

All Banner Patterns used to share one name, with the design listed in small text below it. Now each pattern has its own icon and is named after its design, such as the Skull Charge Banner Pattern or the Thing Banner Pattern .

Smithing Templates got the same treatment. Instead of the generic "Smithing Template" name, each one is named after its type, such as "Netherite Upgrade" or "Silence Armor Trim" . The words "Smithing Template" moved to the second line of the tooltip.

Slime Block

A sneaking player who lands on a Slime Block no longer takes fall damage. Before, they didn't bounce off the block but still took the damage.

Ender Pearls and portals

A thrown Ender Pearl keeps the chunk it's flying through loaded and ticking, along with the chunks it flies into, even when no players are nearby. It loads chunks when it crosses into another dimension, too. So a pearl always completes its flight, and throwing one through a Nether Portal is more predictable. If its owner leaves the game, their pearl in flight disappears with them and comes back when they return.

Projectiles, Minecarts and Boats used to wait 15 seconds after going through a Nether Portal before they could use a portal again. Now projectiles like Ender Pearls and Arrows only need 2 ticks, or 0.1 seconds, outside the portal. Minecarts and Boats wait half a second.

Performance

At high render distances you get more frames per second, and turning the camera costs noticeably less performance. A server with a high render distance runs faster too, and loading and generating chunks slows it down less. The redundant calculation that doubled lag during explosions is gone as well.

Lower FPS when idle

Video Settings have a new "Reduce FPS when" option. It's set to "AFK" by default. Leave the game alone for a minute and the frame rate drops to 30, then to 10 after 9 more minutes. A minimized window also runs at 10 frames per second in this mode. The "Minimized" value limits the frame rate only while the game window is minimized.

Experimental features

Version 1.21.2 adds three new experiments. You turn them on in the "Experiments" section when you create a world. They aren't part of the regular game and don't work in other worlds. "Winter Drop" adds the Pale Garden, the Pale Oak, the Creaking and the Creaking Heart, and Mojang used it to test the next drop. The "Redstone Experiments" experiment sets a new order in which redstone wire updates. "Minecart Improvements" makes high-speed rides smoother and jumps off the rails more natural. Mojang does warn that these two experiments aren't aimed at any release yet. Contraptions relying on quasi-connectivity or precise rail timings may break with them.

Other gameplay changes

Mobs

• Wolves can be fed Raw Cod , Cooked Cod, Raw Salmon, Cooked Salmon, Tropical Fish, Pufferfish and Rabbit Stew, as in Bedrock.
• Bats spawn at any height as long as it's dark enough. They need Stone, Granite, Diorite, Andesite, Tuff or Deepslate below them.
• Bees wander less after leaving their nest and stay closer to it. They keep trying to get home for much longer, get stuck less often and far more rarely head for flowers they can't reach.
• The Breeze no longer needs to back away from its target to attack. It hits even at point-blank range.
• A raid won't start if the raiders have nowhere to spawn. The game looks for a spot no more than 96 blocks above or below the village center and finds one far more reliably.

Trial Chambers

• Trial Chamber hallways have new variations, including short challenges that lead into a larger chamber.
• Beds at intersections come in different colors.
• The empty Chests at the entrance are replaced with a Hopper and a Barrel . This way Mojang shows that the spot is for dumping junk and sorting your inventory.

Items and blocks

• A Carved Pumpkin on your head hides your marker on other players' maps.
• The Monster Spawner has its own sounds for breaking, falling, hitting, placing and stepping.
• An enchanted Shield glints more faintly, the same way enchanted armor does.
• When a player is killed by a Mace smash attack, a separate chat message appears with the wording "was smashed by". The "Over-Overkill" advancement only counts a Mace smash attack that deals 50 hearts of damage.
• In Creative mode, items no longer leave other items behind after use. For example, drinking a Honey Bottle doesn't give you back an empty Glass Bottle.
• Mojang reworked rarity, the name color that hints at how hard an item is to get. The Enchanted Golden Apple and the Trident went down from Epic to Rare, and Elytra became Epic.

World and odds and ends

• Arrows, Tridents and Fishing Bobbers bounce off the world border.
• The game adds Tzotzil, Belarusian (Latin) and High Norwegian.
• Skin reports have a new reason, "Sexually inappropriate", and the "Defamation" and "Threat of harm to others" reasons were removed for skins.
• Mojang slipped a joking question into the changelog, wondering whether it should have stuffed all of this into a Bundle.

Interface and accessibility in Java Edition

Interface

• Air bubbles on screen now pop with a sound. When you run out of air, the empty bubbles stay in place and wobble.
• The highlight on the slot under your cursor was redrawn so the item in it is easier to see. The old highlight lives on in the "Programmer Art" resource pack.
• The recipe book repeats the last selected recipe when you press Space or Enter. It also gained recipes for Suspicious Stew and for dyeing Shulker Boxes .

Accessibility

• The "High Contrast Block Outlines" option makes the outline around the block you're looking at easier to see.
• The "High Contrast" resource pack recolors the tooltip border and background, along with the slots in the Bundle tooltip.

Game rules

The new "Disable player movement check" rule (disablePlayerMovementCheck) lifts the server's limit on player speed. It's off by default. The "Minecart Improvements" experiment also has a "Minecart max speed" rule (minecartMaxSpeed). By default a Minecart tops out at 8 blocks per second, and with this rule the cap goes as high as 1000.

For servers, data packs and map makers

Versions and servers

• The data pack version went up to 57, and the resource pack version to 42. The game still needs Java 21.
• The server.properties file has a new pause-when-empty-seconds setting, 60 by default. A server that goes that many seconds without a single player pauses. The spawn-animals and spawn-npcs settings were removed.

Data packs and commands

• With the new glider component, any worn item works like Elytra; with death_protection, any item saves you from death like a Totem of Undying; and with equippable and camera_overlay, anything can be worn with a screen overlay, like a pumpkin.
• The food component only holds the food stats, and the new consumable component is what makes an item edible. Older data packs with food need updating.
• The /rotate command turns an entity by a given angle or to face a point or another entity.
• The new crafting_transmute recipe type turns one item into another while keeping its data, and Bundle and Shulker Box dyeing is built on it. Recipe ingredients are written more compactly, as a plain item id or tag.
• Boats of each wood type became separate entity types, such as oak_boat, and attribute ids lost their generic, player and zombie prefixes.

Resource packs

Equipment models are defined in the new models/equipment folder, and equipment textures moved to textures/entity/equipment. The tooltip background and frame and the slot highlight can now be retextured. The light_emission value from 0 to 15 on block model elements sets the minimum light level the element is drawn with. Post effects moved to a separate post_effect folder. Overriding core shaders, Mojang warns, is not officially supported.

Update 1.21.3

Java Edition 1.21.3 came out on October 23, 2024, a day after the drop. It's a hotfix with no new features, and it fixes 2 bugs. The first kept players out of a Realm if they had a resource pack enabled. The second shrank Salmon from 1.21.1 and earlier worlds when such a world was opened in 1.21.2. After the fix, every small Salmon from earlier versions becomes medium, including ones that spawned small in 1.21.2. The data pack and resource pack versions didn't change, and a 1.21.3 client connects to 1.21.2 servers.

How development went

Test versions of the drop came out for Java Edition from August 15 to October 21, 2024. Over that time Mojang released 8 snapshots, 5 pre-releases and 2 release candidates. The Bundle came back as an experiment in the very first snapshot and joined the regular game in 24w39a, a month before release. Pre-releases didn't come out on Wednesdays like snapshots, because the team was focused on fixing bugs.

• 24w33a, August 15. The Bundle returned with its String and Leather recipe, and with it came baby sea mobs, Salmon in three sizes, the new Redstone Torch and two experiments. Mojang joked that over the summer someone changed the password and wouldn't share it until the team fixed 200 bugs.
• 24w34a, August 21. The Bundle tooltip got a third row. Projectiles started bouncing off the world border, and the frame rate at high render distances went up.
• 24w35a, August 28. Items in a Bundle could now be selected only with the mouse wheel. The number keys were removed because they got in the way of expert players.
• 24w36a, September 4. A Bundle in the hotbar started dropping one group of items at a time. A Squid that spawns naturally in a group has a 5% chance to be a baby, and from then on the Squid Spawn Egg gives only adults.
• 24w37a, September 11. Ender Pearls started loading chunks. The snapshot also fixed a bug from the previous one that sent the player somewhere other than where the pearl landed. High Norwegian joined the language list.
• 24w38a, September 18. Bundles could now be dyed in 16 colors. Realms got Hardcore and the new world creation screen.
• 24w39a, September 25. The Bundle left the experiment, the Carved Pumpkin started hiding your map marker, and the slot highlight was redrawn.
• 24w40a, October 2. The game got the "Winter Drop" experiment with the Pale Garden, the Creaking and the Creaking Heart, plus "High Contrast Block Outlines" and the /rotate command.
• Pre-Release 1, October 8. Air bubbles started popping and wobbling. The Creaking stopped noticing players in Creative mode.
• Pre-Release 2, October 10. Sneaking players stopped taking damage when falling onto a Slime Block, and several bugs with pearls in portals were fixed.
• Pre-Release 3, October 11. The resource pack version went up to 42. The "High Contrast" pack got textures for tooltips and Bundle slots.
• Pre-Release 4, October 15. Mojang fixed the Compass and Clock in the off hand and the way arrows land.
• Pre-Release 5, October 16. Recipe book updates and the tilt of arrows were fixed.
• Release Candidate 1, October 17. A bug with chests at Trial Chamber intersections was fixed.
• Release Candidate 2, October 21. Minecarts stopped behaving the new way in worlds without the experiment.
• 1.21.2, October 22. The drop went live.
• 1.21.3, October 23. A hotfix for two bugs.

Bug fixes

Mojang says it fixed over 300 bugs, but the 1.21.2 changelog lists 463 of them. Some had been in the game for years, others first appeared in this drop's snapshots. Add up the lists from every snapshot, pre-release and release candidate and you get about 560 entries, which only partly match the release list.

About thirty fixes deal with interface textures whose translucent pixels rendered as opaque. They cover toasts, buttons, advancement frames, the recipe book and the statistics screen. Bee Nests and Beehives show their honey level and bee count in the tooltip. In the Creative inventory, items no longer vanish if you throw them out quickly on the Survival Inventory tab, and throwing items too quickly gets throttled.

Squids and Glow Squids collide with blocks, swim without rubberbanding, don't break free of a Lead when hit, and react to the Knockback enchantment. When the "Allow destructive mob actions" rule is off, Goats, Ravagers, Creepers and Breeze Wind Charges don't push or break Armor Stands and vehicles. Mobs that turn into other mobs keep their team and armor.

The Breeze doesn't jump onto Honey Blocks, and Jump Boost affects its jumps. The Mace's fall damage multiplier now applies to mobs too. Trial Chamber structure pieces and traps were fixed, and spawners stopped trying to release Breezes on Peaceful difficulty.

Ender Pearls are no longer lost after the player dies, and fast projectiles go through portals. Projectiles collide with the world border, and a player in Creative mode no longer flies straight through a portal with Elytra or Riptide. Clouds lost their seams and offset, and horse armor shows the enchantment glint for the first time. The String duplication trick with Tripwire Hooks no longer works, and the Anvil stopped eating two identical items when you rename them.

Bedrock Edition 1.21.40

Bedrock Edition 1.21.40 came out on October 22, 2024, the same day as Java Edition 1.21.2. It has the same Bundles with the same recipe, plus Hardcore on Realms. Mojang fixed over 140 bugs in Bedrock.

• Hardcore came to Bedrock for the first time, and not only on Realms. You can't turn it off after creating a world. The difficulty is locked to the highest setting, and after death a player comes back only as a spectator.
• Mojang warned about two Hardcore bugs in Bedrock. One shows up on a slow internet connection, and the other can corrupt settings if you replace a Realm's Creative world with a Hardcore one or the other way around. Mojang advises backing up your worlds regularly and, on a Realm, replacing only a Survival world with a Hardcore one.
• You select an item in a Bundle with the mouse wheel, the right stick on a controller or a tap on a touch screen. A non-empty Bundle inside another Bundle shows its own fullness bar.
• Mobs in Bedrock can perform Mace smash attacks.
• As in Java Edition, the Enchanted Golden Apple gives Regeneration II instead of V, and identical Lodestone Compasses stack to 64.
• Minecraft came out on PlayStation 5. Mojang will end VR and MR support after March 2025.

The next Java Edition version, 1.21.4 "The Garden Awakens", came out on December 3, 2024.