Minecraft Snapshot 20w17a Now Available!

Posted: Apr 27, 2020 in Minecraft Server Updates

By ApexHosting

Mojang has been hammering out so many new features and has brought us another brand new snapshot! This snapshot focuses more on the technical changes and bug fixes to ensure the game is as optimized as possible! Let’s check out what’s new in this latest update!

New Features in 20w17a

• Added an Entity Distance scale option ranging from 50% to 500%
• Difficulty and game rules can now be changed from “Create World” screen

Changes in 20w17a

• Improved Smithing Table UI
• Ruined Portals now spawn less frequently
• Renamed “Soul Fire Torch” and “Soul Fire Lantern” to “Soul Torch” and “Soul Lantern”
• Tweaked Bastion Remnant loot
• Walls now create posts under more things, like pressure plates and banners
• The “Singleplayer” button will jump directly to “Create World” screen if there are no worlds to select

Technical Changes in 20w17a

• Chat component style can now select font
• Block storage format in chunks slightly changed to speed up various tasks (rendering, pathfinding, world generation, etc)
• Full range of Unicode characters is supported (some may know what that means 😉)
• Added the attribute command

World save format

• Saving level.dat now uses randomly-named temporary files (instead of using level.dat_new every time)
• player/*.dat are now saved in a way similar to level.dat (including leaving .dat_old files)

Block storage

BlockStates in Sections elements no longer contain values stretching over multiple 64-bit fields. If number of bits per block is not power of two (i.e. single 64-bit value can’t fill whole number of blockstates) some bits will not be used.

For example, if single block state takes 5 bits, highest 4 bits of every 64-bit field will be unused. That also means slight increase in storage size (in case of 5 bits, from 320 to 342 64-bit fields).

Mojang needs our help!

Mojang is looking for all of your feedback to help make this update the best it could ever be! They want to know what all you like in the new update and what you may not like. So be sure to fill out their survey found here to help improve the game! We covered a lot of the new things in this update but there were even more technical changes and a ton of bug fixes so be sure to also check out the full changelog here! We aren’t sure when the Nether Update will officially be out but we know it’s shaping up to be the biggest and best update yet! Stay tuned for when we have the next news drop from Mojang!

Until next time,

Apex Hosting