The ‘recovery compass’ guides you in the latest Minecraft beta

Development on The Wild Update for Minecraft is officially in full swing for both versions, and Mojang Studios is showing no signs of slowing down. On Thursday, the studio began releasing a duo of new betas to Minecraft: Bedrock Edition and Minecraft Preview players, which includes a new item, plenty of tweaks and changes to existing features, and even a hint to an upcoming feature.

The “recovery compass” item that debuted with an earlier Minecraft: Java Edition snapshot now appears in this beta, and will lead players to the location of their last death. Mojang Studios also revealed it’s working on the highly-requested “Spectator Mode” for Minecraft, which won’t arrive in time for The Wild Update, but will arrive as an experimental feature in an upcoming beta.

The beta is now available to players enrolled in the Minecraft: Bedrock Edition beta or Minecraft Preview, and is a surprisingly decent step forward toward the development of The Wild Update releasing later in 2022. When the update arrives, it’ll include new mobs like frogs, the Warden, and allays, new biomes like the mangrove swamp and Deep Dark, and more.

Minecraft is hands-down one of the best Xbox games available today, and Mojang Studios is intent on improving it further with The Wild Update later this year. Interested players can get in early with pre-release snapshots and betas.

The full changelog for Minecraft: Bedrock Edition Beta 1.19.0.24 / Minecraft Preview 1.19.0.25 includes:

General

Minecraft Preview on Xbox Series X|S

• Xbox Series X|S players may receive an error message (code 0x8b050033) when launching Minecraft Preview
• Uninstall and reinstall Minecraft Preview to complete the update and resolve the error

Spectator Mode

• Some of our more eagle-eyed players might have noticed that last week’s beta and preview contained early functionality supporting the spectator gamemode, which was accidentally made available in the game
• We know that this is a top feature request for the Bedrock Edition of Minecraft, and our developers have been working hard to bring you this feature
• We are currently working on developing the first iteration of spectator mode to get your feedback to plan for the next iteration. However, we still have a lot of work to do! The first iteration will not be finished in time for 1.19, so we will be moving it to an Experimental Toggle in an upcoming beta
• Until we have a more polished version for you, please consider that any content or maps built on this feature will not be supported as this feature will change and evolve
• We won’t be accepting bug reports related to spectator mode until our first iteration is released, as the feature is likely to change during development

Features & bug fixes

Recovery compass

• A new Recovery Compass can be crafted with Echo Shards which can only be found and are unique to Ancient City chests
  • Unlike a normal Compass, the Recovery Compass will point to the last place you died
  • If you are not in the dimension where you last died, or you haven’t died yet in your world, it will randomly spin
  • It can be crafted with 1 Compass surrounded by 8 Echo Shards
  • Echo Shards will be available as loot in Ancient Cities in a future update

Sculk shrieker

• Tweaked the Shrieking particles of the Sculk Shrieker
• Sculk Shriekers should not be triggered by Redstone activation
• Added can_summonblockstate to Sculk Shriekers that determines whether a Shrieker can trigger a Warden to spawn. Only Sculk Shriekers placed during world generation in the Deep Dark and Ancient Cities will have this state set to true
• Running away from a Sculk Shrieker during shrieking is no longer a viable way of preventing the summoning of a Warden
• The Sculk Shrieker no longer attempts to spawn the Warden in Peaceful mode
• The Sculk Shrieker now spreads the highest threat level amongst players in the vicinity, not the threat level of the closest player

Warden

• Warden now has a hurt animation when taking damage
• Fixed a bug where the Warden’s ribcage UVs were overlapping their right tendril UVs
• Warden will now prioritize players over mobs when angry
• Improved Warden suspect tracking gameplay behavior, and increased the Warden’s ‘sniff’ range
• Spawning a Warden in Creative mode no longer applies the Darkness effect to the player

Reinforced deepslate

• Reinforced Deepslate can no longer be pushed by Pistons

Frog

• Froglight and Frogspawn blocks now have new sounds
• Frog Spawn is now called Frogspawn

Goat horn (Experimental)

• Goat Horn sound is now instant
• Added Goat Horn variations to the Pillager outposts
• Removed Copper Horn
  • Although community feedback was mostly positive, the Copper Horn was a fun experiment that didn’t quite live up to our design goals, so we decided to remove it
  • We understand people might be sad, but to be able to try out new and interesting things we need to be able to remove experimental features sometimes. This leaves space for even better features in the future!

Touch controls

• Player can now change hotbar item slot while in a Boat

Allay

• Fixed a crash that could occur if a non-owner player takes an item from the Allay while it was chasing its owner
• The Allay now regenerates two health each second

Boat with chest

• The group of Boats with Chests now has the correct translation in inventory
• Mangrove Boat with Chest now has a crafting recipe

Mud bricks

• Crafting Mud Bricks now correctly gives four Mud Bricks from one craft

Gameplay

• Set stack limit for brewing station result slot to 1, as to avoid getting input stacks being overwritten when the brew is complete
• Fix crash in block_placer component when the block parameter is an unknown block
• Blocks affected by gravity now fall correctly on replaceable blocks
• Slabs can now be placed continuously

General

• Fixed an issue where clicking on the top row of pixels of a button in the new Create New World screen didn’t properly trigger its action

Graphical

• Fixed a bug causing the fire animation to flicker when the player is standing in a lava Cauldron while in creative mode

Items

• Fixed incorrect names for White Dye, Black Dye, Brown Dye, and Blue Dye

Stability & performance

• Fixed enchantment option on Pocket UI Profile not being displayed

Vanilla parity

• Several improvements to level chunk blending

Command blocks

• When a Command Block clones itself twice with the /clone command, the cloned command block will now activate on the first try

Technical updates

Commands

• Command selectors will now correctly identify players by name instead of their name tag
• Title commands fired before a client was done joining will now show instead of being ignored

Mobs

• The is_moving filter now returns the correct value when an actor is moving

Molang

Avoid crashes on certain devices when parsing Molang expressions with many OR or AND operators

General

Tied ‘consume’ animation to ‘consume’ duration

Known issues

• Interactive blocks (such as Hoppers) cannot be shift-placed continuously without opening the UI