First look at the Minecraft 23w13a snapshot

Owing to real-life circumstances, I hadn’t been able to play Minecraft for the 1.17 and 1.18 updates (Cave & Cliffs: Parts 1 & 2) and only briefly played on 1.19 (The Wild Update). I recently had a chance to play the 1.20 snapshot on stream. View the replay.

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Among the new features, quite a few of them were teased during the Minecraft Live 2022 broadcast including the two new mobs: camels, which are rideable by two players, and the sniffer, which won the annual “mob vote.”

The snapshot also includes some new decorative blocks including hanging signs, chiseled bookshelves, and a brand new class of tree, the cherry blossom, which provides new logs, planks, and leaves. Additionally, they can be crafted into stairs, slabs, signs, doors, fences, and more.

Honestly, all of the new mobs and blocks seemed particularly interesting to me, especially the cherry blossoms as that fits in nicely with OhanaCraft and aloha spirit. The additions to the signs and bookshelves also should prove useful on a multiplayer server.

Since my Minecraft skills were a little rusty, I decided to load up a random seed in survival mode to refresh my memory while looking for the new stuff. For those interested in following along, the seed which was randomly generated was 39423091813975466.

Punching Trees

I spawned in a savanna biome, and gathered the obligatory first blocks, logs, by punching some of the nearby trees. After a bit of crafting, and food gathering, I set off to try and find some of the new features.

I headed northwest and ended up needing a boat, which I crafted. I encountered a few sunken ships along the way and an ocean monument which I was tempted to explore (at coordinates -1290 -940 if you’d like to do so), but having raided them countless times in the past, I pressed forward.

After skipping past a few smallish islands without much interesting, I came upon a desert island village. I docked my boat at -3130 -1200 and went ashore. I didn’t get very far when I spotted it: a camel! What luck! I was pretty excited to have found a camel in my first village, until I realized I didn’t have a saddle!

I went looking in the village for any saddles and unfortunately I came up empty. As this was a short stream to try out some snapshot features, and not a world to keep, I decided to simply /give myself a saddle to ride the camel.

I saddled up and took off. When I tried to jump, my camel charged forward. I had completely forgotten about this from the Minecraft Live broadcast — Minecraft camels can’t jump. However, that was just fine. Here, I must admit, I spent far too long simply having the camel charge forward. The village cats were not as amused as I was.

The cherry on top

After a while, I needed to see more new features. I spent maybe 10 more minutes wandering about, and came across 3 more desert villages. Out of those, only 1 more had a camel (so 2 out of 4 total, a 50% rate).

I was hoping to find a cherry grove biome and several chatters in my stream mentioned that the /locate command worked with finding biomes. Apparently, this was added in 1.16 as /locatebiome and merged into /locate in 1.19. So, I used that to teleport directly to the nearest cherry grove ( -4846 1151 ).

After grabbing some cherry wood and crafting it into the variants, I have to say that I will definitely be using that in some of my upcoming builds in survival. The colors are fantastic and overall, cherry is a great addition to the wooden blocks in Minecraft.

I looked at the chiseled bookshelves as well and while I did appreciate their functionality, I noticed that there is not currently a way to visually determine which books are which after they’ve been placed. All the book colors are predetermined for each of the six slots they can occupy. This might not be a huge issue for most people as chances are they will be using the shelves as a purely decorative block, but I would like to see some improvement here.

I then summoned a sniffer into the world and after a brief marvel at its enormity, it started to… well, sniff. Both the animation and noises it makes are quite funny, and I recommend you give it a listen. It seemed a bit distraught when it cannot sniff out any seeds, but it did eventually find a pitcher pod.

Finally, I looked at the hanging signs. Yes, please. I can’t wait to get those into a survival world and as cool as being able to hang signs are, I think I love the fact that you can now write on both sides of a sign even more.

The verdict

I still have yet to play with the archaeology features being added, which I will cover in a future post. I also went past a bamboo forest and completely forgot about the new bamboo wood variants (including the raft, which I was excited for when it was announced on the Minecraft Live broadcast).

That said, while it is still very early in the development cycle of 1.20 (the snapshot I used for this test 23w13a is only the second development snapshot released ahead of 1.20), Trails & Tales seems to be a worthy update.

I look forward to future updates!