This week's snapshot brings you some tweaks, bugfixes, and technical changes!
We also have a survey up so that you can tell us what you think about the Nether Update. You can find it by clicking here. We would very much appreciate if you could take the time and fill it out.
New Features in 20w17a
Added an Entity Distance scale option ranging from 50% to 500%
Difficulty and game rules can now be changed from "Create World" screen
Changes in 20w17a
Improved Smithing Table UI
Ruined portals now spawn less frequently
Renamed "Soul Fire Torch" and "Soul Fire Lantern" to "Soul Torch" and "Soul Lantern"
Tweaked Bastion Remnant loot
Walls now create posts under more things, like pressure plates and banners
The "Singleplayer" button will jump directly to "Create World" screen if there are no worlds to select
Technical Changes in 20w17a
Block storage format in chunks slightly changed to speed up various tasks (rendering, pathfinding, world generation, etc).
Chat component style can now select font.
Full range of Unicode characters is supported (some may know what that means 😉)
Added the attribute command
World save format
Saving level.dat now uses randomly-named temporary files (instead of using level.dat_new every time)
player/*.dat are now saved in a way similar to level.dat (including leaving .dat_old files)
Block storage
BlockStates in Sections elements no longer contain values stretching over multiple 64-bit fields. If number of bits per block is not power of two (i.e. single 64-bit value can't fill whole number of blockstates) some bits will not be used.
For example, if single block state takes 5 bits, highest 4 bits of every 64-bit field will be unused. That also means slight increase in storage size (in case of 5 bits, from 320 to 342 64-bit fields).
Commands
attribute
Adds modifies attribute on single entity. Possible syntax:
Parameters:
attribute <target> <attribute> get [<scale>] - get total value of attribute
attribute <target> <attribute> base set <value> - sets base valye
attribute <target> <attribute> base get [<scale>] - get base value
attribute <target> <attribute> modifier add <uuid> <name> <value> add|multiply|multiply_base - adds modifier (fails if modifier is already present)
MC-126244 '/locate', explorer maps, and treasure maps can cause extreme TPS lag, even leading to a complete server freeze if structure generation is turned off
MC-149704 Sneaking / crouching twice makes player sprint
MC-169514 Tamed parrots cannot be renamed unless they are flying
MC-171561 Only one player can access shulker box at a time
MC-174359 Piglins prefer using an unenchanted gold item instead of an enchanted gold item
MC-175113 Rain prevents entities from burning in fire
MC-175186 Respawning doesn't check if the "respawn block" is the correct one for the dimension
MC-175998 Striders are moving very fast between two blocks or when diagonally running into blocks
MC-176029 Right clicking a lodestone with a stack of compasses converts the whole stack
MC-176060 Recipe book doesn't load the entire empty map recipe anymore