ASK MOJANG ANYTHING (AMA): MINECRAFT LIVE 2023

Last Friday, we held our first AMA on r/Minecraft, where four members of Mojang Studios answered community questions about the awesome things we revealed at Minecraft Live 2022. In case you were curious about what fun things were shared, we’ve got you covered! You can find a recap here.

Aside from the Deep Dark, what was a feature that went through lots of different iterations/reworks?

N, Bedrock Developer: Piglin was surprisingly the mob that has the most iterations with quite a lot of mechanics being added in each iteration. Did you know that piglins have a small chance of doing a celebration dance if they win the war over hoglin? Or that if the number of hoglins are more than the number of piglins, the hoglins will start chasing the piglins instead? 

Why did you change the snapshots to use data packs instead of hard coding it into the next version like you usually do?

N: It's something we've learned from the experimental toggle in Bedrock. Our goal with this is to allow players to try out new features while we are developing them, so that we can shape that feature together. It also allows us to have more frequent minor releases. We spoke about this in detail in a recent article.

What's a feature that was a tiny change from a player's perspective, but was extremely difficult to implement?

N: Local water levels inside cave systems may seem really simple to a player, but it was super complex to get it right. There were a lot of tweaks we had to make to get the right amount of water and we also had to devote quite a lot of time to fix the perf impact since it's something that each block has to calculate.

One of the cutest announcements at this year’s Minecraft Live was the addition of camels to the game! There were lots of specific questions about the upcoming mob and how their functionality may differ from the existing ridable mobs. 

Will we be able to put chests or something else on the camels for storage?

Ulraf, Gameplay Designer: When adding the camel, we wanted to make sure to be respectful of old features! That means looking at what makes horses, donkeys, llamas unique and making sure they still have a niche of their own in the game. 
After looking at the camel that has the ability to have two players riding at the same time and the unique dash ability - we didn't want it to overshadow the donkeys and llamas by giving it the ability to have storage on it as well! 

Will you change the name of the camel to dromedary? Or add an extra hump?

Ulraf: When we add animals to Minecraft, we try to add something that represents that group of animals, not a specific breed! (There are dozens of goat breeds, yet we only have one goat in Minecraft! Which is the same for cows, pigs etc.) 
When working on the camel we focused on which visual will fit Minecraft the best and also what would be the most recognizable for our players! Seeing as most of the world's camels are dromedary – we chose to use them as our inspiration!

Do you hope the addition of camels will act as a replacement or alternative to horses? By the way, they’re so cute!

Billy, Java Developer: They really are, I love them too! Our take on it is that we can have a world with both lovely horses and cute camels at the same time. 
We actually spent a long time thinking about how to make the camel different from the horse and not simply being a ‘better’ rideable. We think we found a niche for it, while also letting the horse be unique i.e., with the jump.

Several great questions were brought forward about Java Edition, including game optimization and the frequency of the new minor releases. 

Why hasn't there been any focus on optimization, especially for the Java version?

Billy: Performance optimization is definitely one of the tech debts we are currently trying to address in our new way of working. For a long time, we've been very focused on delivering new updates, but especially on Java we've recently changed our internal org to be able to address more tech debts. Another aspect is that perf mods will always be more optimized than vanilla. The fact that mod creators can take our learnings and make them even better after the fact will always make them more performant. 

How frequent will the new Minecraft Java minor releases be?

Yung__Tak, Senior Community Manager: We can't commit to exactly how many minor versions there will be each year as it will vary depending on the team roadmap and scope of the changes we're working on. That said, we would definitely like to have multiple minor versions a year while continuing to release major versions like 1.19 or 1.20 once per year.

If you’re interested in seeing all the responses (including which mob a few of the team members voted for and some not-so-sage advice on wardens from Ulraf), you can check out the full AMA thread on Reddit here.

If there are any functionality or changes you would like to see in Minecraft 1.20, please head over to our Feedback Site and share your thoughts!