The Minecraft Cliffs & Caves update has been delayed, but only partially.
Mojang announced in a video that the upcoming update - which it has described as the largest ever in Minecraft's history - has been split into two pieces. The part that influences world generation, as in the actual cliffs and caves, will now arrive in holiday 2021 instead of this summer. But the new blocks and creatures (like goats and axolotls) which were originally set to arrive alongside those world changes will still be ready to roll out in the summer.
"This update is huge - we are changing the very shape of the world in Minecraft, adding massive mountains, epic caves, and changing the height of the world in order to fit these things," gameplay designer Henrik Kniberg explains. "This is tricky, it touches the core of how the world is generated. It's also tricky for performance reasons, because there's just more going on when the world is higher.
"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. While at the same time, we realize that there's 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 and then put the world generation parts in the holiday update."
Some smaller changes to world generation will still make their way into the summer update, including copper deposits and geodes. And don't worry about your old worlds getting left behind; Mojang is promising that you'll be able to update existing worlds in the summer and then again in the winter without running into any problems. The one promised new feature that won't arrive this year at all is the new Archaeology system, which has been delayed to make sure it's fun and "Minecraft-y."
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