How Do I Feel About the Caves & Cliffs Update Split?

5 days ago, it was announced that the Caves & Cliffs update would be getting split into two updates. The first part would coming this summer, and the second part at Christmas. Part 1 (1.17) will include all the blocks, items and mobs we've seen so far (although not all of them will occur in survival), as well as a few generation features. These include geodes, copper ore, the updated mineshafts and dripstone clusters. Deepslate can also occur between y0 and y16. Part 2 (1.18) will now include the world height, new caves, cracks, cave biomes, warden, deep dark and the new mountains. Oh and archaeology has been outright cancelled. F in chat for archaeology.

Why have they done this? Simply because the developers need more time due to the magnitude of the update (and working in a pandemic). It seems they have been crunching to get this update out for the summer, and they need a break and more time to polish the update even more.

It's now been a few days, so I can say what my thoughts are about this announcement.

Now, I go into new snapshots totally blind. I see for myself what is added before I read any changelogs. So when I loaded up 21w15a and saw "extended world height worlds have been disabled", I was a bit puzzled. "No way", I thought. "They have not reverted the caves back to 1.16.... no way... why!?!" I dug down in creative mode, every block along the way thinking "no... they haven't..." My reaction when I got to y4 and hit bedrock was quite something.

I took to reddit to see what the hell happened, and then saw their announcement.

Obviously, the split is to a degree disappointing, because it means we are now going to be in a big content drought. The features of C&C I was looking forward to the most have now been shunted to the autumn. The warden and deep dark was what I was getting hyped for each week now won't be coming probably for 6 months, give or take a couple. I am especially disappointed about archaeology being cancelled, I don't think they've ever completely cancelled an announced feature like that.

But, I can totally see why they have done this and support their decision to do so. And I very much appreciate Mojang's openness. They could've just silently delayed the update, and many companies would've. But Mojang made a 6-minute announcement video explaining thoroughly why they have made these decisions and what content will be coming in each part of the update. Gotta love Mojang! I give them some SERIOUS props for just coming out and saying it how it is. No excuses, no radio silence, just a good and honest "we need more time to make this update the best it can be".

I am of course disappointed we won't be seeing many new features for months, but I am also excited to see some of the 1.17 features get optimised and their features ironed out. Definitely looking forward to some rebalances and little new things such as raw ores (and bEaN bLoCkS).

They were very frank in their announcement - this update is by far the most ambitious update they have ever done. Other updates that seem large, such as the aquatic update, village and pillage, and the Nether update did not entail rewriting the entire world generation. Not even 1.7 made changes anywhere near this drastic. Most of these updates involved a fresh coat of paint. C&C is totally deconstructing an old wall and building a new one from the ground up in its place, plastering it and THEN painting it. And with how big Minecraft has become after its 11+ year history, it's no surprise that deconstructing such an established codebase is extremely hard work.

There are no two ways about it - performance with the 384-block world height really does take a hit. On my mid-range laptop, the difference is stark. And I didn't even realise how poorly the game was running until I loaded up 21w15a and the world was 256 blocks again. I play on a server with a friend, and the server was using a LOT of data with 384 blocks, and frequently crashing. Although that may be because I kept filling over 10,000 blocks with TNT then lighting it. The extra time will allow the developers to optimise and iron out problems such as this, and improve the performance of the game overall. As great as cubic chunks would be, I don't think they will ever implement those. That would probably take over a year of rewrites to implement.

Mojang were also very frank about another reason they are delaying the update, and that is for the mental health of the developers. I am not in any way affiliated with Mojang, nor do I know their day-to-day dynamic in the office, but I think it was becoming clear they were in need of a break. I don't know if they had already been in a crunch for a few weeks (or months), or if this decision was made to prevent one, but it is clear that without this delay, the team could've suffered a bit of a burnout. I follow all of them on twitter and regularly check for updates. And from the fact some developers were putting out many tweets "telling off" of the community for various things, as well as their withdrawal from hyping up features and snapshots, it may have been apparent they were getting a bit stressed. Add on the state of the world and the devs having to work from home (and thus having no separation between home life and work) could add to this stress. It sure has within my job.

Because of this, it is very important they take the time off they need so that they don't have to crunch. Because a crunch is never fun. Members of the team might burn out or leave. And that would be a bit of a sad end to Minecraft. "All the developers left because of an overly ambitious update".

And yes it is sad to see archaeology go, I joked often about it being forgotten or dropped, but if they need to let go of one feature it's going to be the entirely new system that isn't really relevant to the theme of the update. Archaeology was really just a bonus to begin with. But it's also a totally new system which will take a lot of time to develop.

All in all, yes it's disappointing certain features will have to wait.... some of them indefinitely..... but it's definitely necessary. It will overall improve the quality of the update (a slow-cooked update is better than a rushed, half-baked one), and will preserve the health of the team as well. What I don't know is how close to breaking point were the devs pushed in order to make this announcement. I hope they are alright and this isn't a "last resort" change because they're already at breaking point. I just hope they made this change to prevent a crunch.

And who knows maybe 1.19 will be the archaeology update, bringing the system in a more fleshed-out form than it ever could've been had it stayed tacked onto Caves & Cliffs.