The Gears & Boats Update

Machines

• Things that turn: shafts, cogs, large cogs, gearboxes, cranks and water wheels
• Power from water wheels (spring water, rivers and the sea), windmills (they follow the weather's wind) and ember engines (fuel or lava)
• Steam engines: set a boiler over a fire, give it water (a water block beside it, or buckets poured in), and put engines against it. The strongest power in the game, twice as strong over lava. A dispenser can keep a boiler topped up
• Overload a line and its weakest part breaks. A storm can tear a windmill apart
• Worked by the wire: clutches, gearshifts and governors
• Millstones, saws, bellows that heat the kiln, fans, and flywheels that keep a line turning after the power stops
• Belts that carry whatever is on them, plus chutes and funnels to get items in and out of machines and chests
• Bearings and mechanical pistons: what you build on them moves, and you can stand on it and ride it. Structures can reach 47 blocks from the bearing, up to 16,000 blocks of them
• Glue decides what a moving structure takes with it. Mark boxes with the glue brush, corner to corner, up to 96 blocks a side
• Drills and saws on moving structures cut their way through what they hit, and what they dig goes into chests carried along with them
• The rope pulley lowers a rig a block at a time as the drills clear the way. That's how you build a quarry
• Automation: depots, mechanical arms (show them where to take from and where to put down) and mechanical crafters (up to 3x3, working together) for fully automatic lines
• Deployers: a mechanical hand that uses whatever it holds on the block in front, like a right click (place blocks, fill and pour buckets, sow seeds, bone meal crops, till soil)
• Dispensers: fire one item each time a wire signal reaches them. Shoots arrows, throws lit TNT, fires cannonballs (with powder), pours or fills buckets, or just tosses the item out
• Harvesters and ploughs for moving structures: reap ripe crops (and resow them) and till the ground as they pass over it
• Creative motor: turns its line at whatever speed you set (16 to 256) and never runs out of strength
• Containers on a moving or turning structure can be opened while it goes
• Placing a turning part shows a ghost of where it will go, and it lines itself up with what's next to it
• Tinker's Glass: a scene viewer showing how each machine part works
• Machines have their own look: riveted casings, brass, steel and oiled timber

Wiring

• Buttons: press one and it powers its wire for a second, then pops back out
• Daylight sensors and weather sensors, switched on by the sun and by rain
• String of Lights: strung between posts like a coil of wire, and it carries a signal like one. When its wire has power its red, amber, green and blue bulbs twinkle and light up their surroundings
• Observers are a full block now, with their face on the side they watch
• Whatever a piston crushes drops as an item instead of vanishing
• Buttons, sensors and the String of Lights are in the Logic tab with the rest of the wiring

Boats

• Canoe, rowboat, sailboat and the galleon, all crafted and put on the water
• The galleon is bigger: 28 blocks long with a gun deck below, reached by a wide stair, plus painted sides, stern and quarter galleries, a top on each mast, shrouds with ratlines, and a ladder up from the water
• Sails go by the wind. You can't sail straight into it, but you can sail close to it and tack your way upwind. Paddled boats don't care about wind
• The wind holds steady for minutes at a time and shifts slowly, so you can keep a course
• Your sails show how far they're set: a galleon's sails let down from their yards, a sailboat's goes up the mast
• Sit in them, walk their decks, bump into each other, all of it in multiplayer
• Sail and rudder stay where you set them, with a readout at the helm that tells you your point of sail (and warns you when you're too close to the wind)
• Fit chests into boats. The galleon has a hold of up to 12 chests behind a hatch on her deck
• Galleon cannons: sixteen of them, four a side on the main deck and four a side below on raised platforms so you can see out of the port, run out through gunports (closed where no gun is fitted). The barrels are round and open at the muzzle. Man a gun, aim it with the mouse (the barrel turns for everyone to see), load it with shot and black powder and fire. A sight shows where the shot will land. Shots break blocks, damage boats and hurt players
• Paint your galleon: use a dye on her side, the band between her wales, the inside of her bulwarks or her stern galleries to paint that part
• Dress your ship: dye each sail its own colour; add a figurehead, flags and pennants that stream in the wind, rail lanterns that light up the deck at night, gold trim, a crow's nest you can climb and a ship's bell you can ring
• Boats are about three times as tough (a galleon takes seven or eight direct hits)
• Boats get holed where they're hit, and you can see each hole. Hold planks to a hole to patch it, from outside or from inside
• Spyglass: hold right click to zoom in 5x. That's what the crow's nest is for
• The galleon's gun deck is furnished: bunks you can sleep in (you wake in your bunk wherever she has sailed), a working crafting table, a galley stove that smelts like a kiln, a chart table, a mess table, crates and barrels of stores, and lanterns that light it at night
• You bump into everything on the galleon as it's drawn: furniture, rails, guns and decks
• Anything dropped on a ship lands on her deck and sails with her
• Figureheads: a gilt lion, a green serpent or a white-and-gold maiden
• A broken boat lists over and sinks, spilling her cargo, chests and cannons
• Fire ships: pack TNT into a canoe, rowboat or sailboat, light it with a tinderbox and it rows itself off. It blows up on whatever it hits, or when the fuse runs out, and ramming a ship tears into her (four charges nearly halve a galleon). Shoot one and it goes up too, lit or not

Guns

• Cannons can be placed on land for castles and forts. Man one to aim it with the mouse, load it and fire, or wire it up and fire it with a signal
• Flintlock pistol and rifle, loaded with lead shot and black powder. Hold right click to load (you'll see the ramrod), left click to fire, and hold right click on a loaded gun to aim down the sights. The pistol loads in three seconds, the rifle in five, but the rifle is more accurate and hits harder
• Guns are held properly: a pistol out at arm's length, a rifle at the shoulder, both pointing where you look, in first and third person. Other players see you load: the gun tipped up and the ramrod driven home
• Guns hit hard: a rifle ball drops a player with no armour on in one shot, and a cannonball that hits someone square does heavy damage before it bursts
• Land cannons have to be swabbed out after firing before they can be loaded again, just like ships' guns
• TNT blows land cannons off their walls

Building

• Saplings: leaves sometimes drop one. Plant it on dirt or grass and it grows into its tree (bone meal speeds it up)
• New coloured blocks in all seven dye colours: painted plaster, terracotta (fire mud brick in a kiln) and painted planks. Terracotta and plaster also come as slabs and stairs
• Creative mode has its own inventory in the middle of the screen, with tabs: Nature, Plants, Blocks, Shapes, Decor, Utility, Machines, Logic, Tools, Food, Sea and Supplies, plus your bag. Search covers every tab, and there's a bin and a CLEAR ALL button
• The survival recipe list uses the same tabs
• Sit on chairs, stools and benches
• Crates hold items now
• Middle click on a crop gives you its seed, and on a wire gives you that wire
• The selection outline wraps the shape of what you're looking at instead of the whole block, and you can aim past a thin wire at what's behind it
• Ctrl plus the drop key throws the whole stack

Exploring

• Much bigger oceans: most of the world is sea now, with open water thousands of blocks across between continents, and islands near the coasts
• New games start on land with trees and animals nearby
• Compass: hold it to see your heading, where the wind is coming from, and the way home
• F3 opens a new info panel: position, facing, biome, day and time, weather and wind (and speed and sail when you're on a boat). The old debug screen is now Shift+F3

Rules

• Days are three times as long: 45 minutes
• Crops grow on a timer and take longer: a growth stage every five minutes on watered ground, about a third of a day to ripen
• /gamerule: doMobSpawning, doDaylightCycle, doWeatherCycle, keepInventory, cropGrowth and dayLength, saved with the world

Commands and cheats

• Choose ALLOW CHEATS when you make a world (on with creative unless you change it). With cheats off, commands like /give, /gamemode, /tp and /time can't be used. Worlds made before this update keep cheats on
• Operators: when you host, /op <name> lets a friend use those commands too, /deop takes it away and /ops lists them. They're saved with the world in ops.txt, and on a dedicated server you can edit that file while it runs
• /tp to a player, or send a player to another player or to coordinates
• TNT blows chests, barrels and kilns open and throws out what was in them
• No limit on how many dropped items can lie around

Pirate armour

A new armour set (tricorn, coat, breeches and sea boots), as strong as iron. The full set swims 35% faster.

Multiplayer

• Friends can join from anywhere with a room code, no port forwarding needed
• Your arrows and shots hurt animals when you're not the host, and everyone hears and sees other players' flintlocks fire
• Ember gates are remembered, including the way home, and clients see gates lit while they were away

Settings

• The settings menu is reorganised: Graphics, Display, Look, Shaderpack, Audio, Controls and Player, all in one place with the same menu down the side, and long pages scroll instead of shrinking
• Escape leaves the settings back to where you opened them from
• The Graphics page shows your frame rate as you change things
• New options for slower PCs: render scale (draw the world at 50% to 150% of the window), shadows off, plain shadow edges instead of soft ones, and coloured lighting off (every lamp gives the same warm white, and chunks light up faster)
• Lamp shadows now work by distance: every lamp within the range you set casts shadows, up to 32 at once
• The shadow resolution setting actually changes the shadow quality now

Graphics

• Soft shadows that sharpen near what casts them, warm light bounced into shade, greener grass
• New water: a calm swell running with the wind, reflections, foam, and wakes behind boats
• Running water no longer flickers
• Explosions look like explosions: a fireball, embers, sparks and rolling smoke, all made of little cubes
• Sounds come from where they were made, getting quieter as you walk away and shifting as you turn
• Sun shafts no longer shine through distant hills or into caves
• Clouds drift with the wind instead of being thrown across the sky

Fixes

• Friends joining a hosted world see everything you built in it, including what you built playing alone
• Graphics cards with 4 GB or less no longer run out of memory at long view distances and turn the world into a void. The game uses less video memory, and if the card still runs out it lowers the view distance and tells you
• Glass panes, iron bars, fences and walls are as solid as they look: no more walking through gaps in a pane or fence line
• Fences join up with gates, and gates are made of the same wood as their fence
• Signs can be written on again
• A blast straight above or below you no longer launches you to the top of the world
• Logs no longer contain your computer's username
• Chests in buried and hard-to-reach places now roll better loot, and treasure maps can finally turn up
• Items no longer vanish or duplicate when using chests or the kiln in multiplayer
• Stairs, gates, doors, signs and logic gates face the right way whichever way you place them
• The UI scale setting works, and chat wraps long lines
• Sneaking on a ladder holds you in place, and letting go you slide down
• Recipes that take any planks show the planks instead of an empty slot
• A barrel's screen says BARREL
• Skulls are skull-shaped, and metal blocks' icons look like the blocks
• Animals can swim to shore, and jumping into water feels less like tar
• You can no longer die on the title screen
• Rubble and other decorations no longer float in the air at structures
• The shader packs are included in the download
• The Barrow dies properly, his shard is used up, and he lies down again if left alone
• Village guards keep watch, hunt the night's mobs, leave wolves alone and can actually land a hit
• Crawlers spawn in caves, and climb walls to get at you instead of pacing at the bottom
• Mobs no longer spawn where you can see them appear
• Tool wear is no longer lost (or repaired) when a stack is moved, dropped or put in a chest
• Items no longer vanish when picked up with a full bag in multiplayer
• Chests broken and replaced no longer show their old contents to late joiners
• The kiln no longer stacks items past its limit
• Water no longer leaks away at the edge of the simulated area or drains itself out of a full cell
• A bucket no longer empties before checking there's room
• Crouching no longer jiggles
• Tornadoes and embers draw again