Minecraft Caves & Cliffs update is being released in two parts

Mojang has given an update on the state of the Minecraft Caves & Cliffs update, which is being split into two parts across summer and winter. 

“The Caves & Cliffs update will be released in two different parts,” Agnes Larsson, vanilla Minecraft game director announced, “one is a summer release and the other is a holiday release so that one will be released end of this year.” 

“There are three main reasons for us to split the update in two” She went on to say “The first one is quality, the second one is technical complexity and the third one is super important, and it’s team health.” 

“To ensure quality, we have decided to release some of the features in the Caves & Cliffs in the holiday instead” Larrson continued, stating that the most important thing for the team is to deliver the most player delight as possible. 

The team at Mojang realised that if they don’t push some of the more technically complex features later in the year around the holiday season, there’s a risk that they wouldn’t be of good enough quality. 

With this update set to touch the core components of how the world is generated, including an extended world height limit, it’s brought in technical challenges that are taking time to fix.

“So, we’ve decided that we don’t want to rush this. We want to make sure that we give this the time it deserves.” Henrik Kniberg, vanilla gameplay designer explained in the video “at the same time we realise that there are a bunch of features that don’t involve changing the way the world is generated, so we decided to split it, and put those parts in the summer update.”

The additional time provided to this split in the update allows Mojang not to have to go into a period of crunch, which they vehemently didn’t want to have to do. “We don’t want to force anyone to work overtime” Larsson stated. 

The first update as part of the Caves and Cliffs update will focus on the blocks and the mobs, not so much world generation. This will bring in plenty of new biome blocks, as well as a few building blocks such as deep slate. 

The summer update is also set to bring in the new axolottle and goat mobs, alongside the glow squid. There will also be a touch of world generation around ores and geodes, but no sweeping changes. 

The holiday portion of the update is set to include the actual caves and cliffs as the update title might suggest, with changes to the world generation. 

There’s no set date yet beyond the seasons for when these updates are set to appear, but more updates on these updates will be revealed later.