Minecraft’s latest update adds crawling, a new dying screen, and more

Another Minecraft update has arrived, and although it’s not one of the massive landmark ones, it still has a surprisingly large amount of fresh content. There are a few big features included, but the most exciting one of all is that crawling is now an official fully functional feature rather than a sort of glitch that could only be activated with a trapdoor.

With today’s 1.20.30 update, you can now crawl under any one block gap with ease and you can do so without the aid of a trapdoor. Since crawling was a weird sort of glitch before, this update has also improved its stability and reliability now that it is an official game feature.

Your dying experience will always look a bit different now as this update has introduced a new dying screen system. When you have an untimely death at the hands of a lurking creeper or plummet to your death in a ravine, the camera will now zoom out to give a more complete visual of the situation.

Regardless of how you die, you’ll always be able to see exactly why you died with a more expansive view, your hotbar will consistently remain visible on screen, and you can choose to edit some settings before respawning.

The recipe system has undergone a refresh as two previously experimental features are now fully functional additions. You can turn on and off recipe unlocking as desired and searching for a specific recipe is now much more efficient with an updated search system designed to work well both for beginners and experienced players.

Outside of these major changes and additions, there are several smaller ones like wandering traders now selling cherry saplings so you can grow your own cherry blossom grove biome, a fix that changes the block breaking time to match up with what it was intended to be, and officially allowing Pillager Outposts to spawn in cherry blossom grove biomes.

The 1.20.30 update also has two new experimental features you can turn on to test out. With this feature on, librarian villagers will choose the books they have for sale based on the biome they reside within and you will have to work up to getting the best trade possible rather than it being a randomly assigned process. The other experimental feature is that the wandering trader’s prices are lower than ever, they have many new items for sale, have many more of each item available for purchase, and can purchase some items from you too.

There are many other changes and a ton of bug fixes listed in the official article by Mojang covering the update, so you can read about them or jump right into the game to test them yourself. This update is currently only live for the Bedrock version of Minecraft, so you can expect to see a similar update deployed for Java in the near future.