5 best changes in Minecraft Bedrock 1.21.10.20 beta and preview

Minecraft 1.21, also known as Tricky Trials, is right around the corner. The fact that the preview is 1.21.10.20 implies that Mojang already has a 1.21.0 release candidate ready to go, and the next minor update for 1.21 is currently being worked on. This is quite evident since much of the content of the 1.21.10.20 beta is focused more on bug fixes and smoothing out gameplay.

Detailed below are the five best features and changes from Preview 1.21.10.20, along with what makes those changes and features important to the game.

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Minecraft Bedrock Preview 1.21.10.20's 5 best features and changes

1) Witch drop buff

Witches are a much better mob to seek out in Preview 1.21.10.20 (Image via Mojang)

Witch farms, one of Minecraft's best loot farms, received an unexpected, but very welcome, buff in preview 1.21.10.20. This buff is to witches, which will now consistently drop between four and eight redstone dust when killed. For comparison, witches currently drop between zero and two redstone dust.

This is a huge efficiency boost to what was already one of the best expert-level farms in the game and is sure to make larger survival redstone projects much more feasible.

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2) Bogged fixes

A bogged in a swamp (Image via Mojang)

Bedrock Preview 1.21.10.20 is also bringing with it two major fixes centered around the new bogged skeleton variant. The first of these fixes removes the mob's strange ability to inflict the slowness debuff when hitting a player with a melee attack while underwater. The odds of this happening were low, but it's nice to see the erroneous behavior removed.

The other change is an update to parrots, one of Minecraft's tameable pet mobs, that allows them to accurately mimic nearby bogged. This allows the bird to act as a sort of proximity alarm, mimicking nearby bogged, alerting keen-eared players to their presence.

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3) New tips

Powdered snow is another area where they've implemented better gameplay tips (Image via Mojang)

There are also a few new gameplay tips coming with Preview 1.21.10.20. There's now a swimming tip for players on touch-screen devices. This will mostly apply to those on mobile devices, which makes sense as the control schemes for that game are much less intuitive than on a regular controller. Additionally, touch devices using the D-pad control scheme will have a new movement tip.

Mojang also redid the priority system for gameplay tips. This should help ensure that the most important and relevant tip is displayed first. The example Mojang gave is that it doesn't make a lot of sense for the game to give an inventory tip when the player just fell into lava.

Another example they gave was that being near any of Minecraft's hostile mobs will ensure that relevant combat tips appear over anything else. They also only set the previously mentioned swimming tip to appear whenever the player is actually in water, as being told how to swim on land doesn't make much sense.

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4) Trial chambers distinct from the deep dark

Trial chambers should now almost never be found in deep dark biomes (Image via Mojang)

This change makes it so that trial chambers will generate less frequently in deep dark biomes. This is good for two main reasons.

The first of these is that it helps keep the two environments separated. This leads to distinct adventures that can help keep worlds from becoming boring too quickly. Rather than finding a trial chamber linked to the deep dark and being done after a single journey, two adventures will most likely need to be made.

The second reason is that Minecraft trial chambers are deadly enough already. There's not really a need to make them even worse by adding the potential for a warden, the single deadliest mob in the game outside of the Wither boss, to show up.

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5) Petrified Oak Slabs

The only way to get petrified oak slabs is through commands (Image via Mojang)

Petrified oak slabs are an interesting item. They are a remnant of older versions of the game, making them unobtainable outside of Minecraft commands and upgrading worlds. Mojang could use this as an excuse to not mess with them, as there are not a lot of players out there who have any of this item.

However, they did update and make some changes to the item in Minecraft Preview 1.21.10.20. They flattened the item into its own type, helping to ensure that it functions more like stone slabs than wooden ones. It's nice to see such a niche item getting attention from Mojang. It goes to show just how thorough they can be when working on one of Minecraft's many updates.