Minecraft Goes Deeper

With the brand new 21w06a snapshot, part of the Caves & Cliffs Update, here is one of the biggest changes the Minecraft developers have made in years.  Check out the Y coordinate on this screenshot:

Yup.  -12.

They extended the full height of the world from the old 0 to 256 out to -64 to 320.  Their new vast caves can go as deep as -64, and after a lot of digging, this is my first glimpse of one of these deep worlds.  It looks a lot more impressive when youtubers like xisumavoid have Night Vision and fly through them on elytras.  It's actually pretty daunting on foot, with only so many torches.  But there are new blocks to see, new biomes to explore.  So far, I have only seen about 10 copper ores and 3 glow lichens along the way.  But after dinner, I head back to see what else is lurking.

I don't care as much about raising the world height, since you can barely see the ground from up there, but when the new, taller mountains appear, then we'll see what that was meant to achieve.

They will almost certainly have to adjust all the algorithms that do the ore generation.  Diamonds are no longer rare if their range has been extended from the old 1-16 all the way down to -64.  In fact, there is room to add whole new layers, whole new ores and metals.  I know the modding community could fill in this space with gloriously creative new stuff in just a few weeks time.  Lets hope the core developers can keep this update interesting.

Feb 17 update:

So now we have snapshot 20w07a.  The developers were hard at work trying to fix the ore generation to match the new depths.  Out of the blue, they introduced a new block called grimstone, to act as the default stone for the depths below y=0.  I just had to tunnel my way through to some new chunks, and there it was.  The new caves are much more widely separated, and lined with grimstone.  Here is the first such cave I found, and of course I tested to see if trees could sprout down there:

The darker base color of the blocks does make the deep world feel a bit more moody, but it also looks like an artificial brick texture, like these caves were bricked in by some ancient builders.  The blocks also come in polished and brick versions (and a new tile kind of stone variant), with walls, slabs and stairs.  Not all of the recipes to make all these blocks are available yet.  And, unfortunately, after finding the new blocks, the world is still incredibly empty.  It needs new mobs more than once or twice a year.  This much new space needs something new to outwit.