It’s been a while since Minecraft’s eerie nether dimension has received a full make-over, but the wait is finally over, and boy are we excited!

I’m sorry, what’s going on?

If you cast your mind back to Minecon Live 2019, Mojang treated us to several awesome announcements, not least of which was three brand new biomes: Soulsand Valley, Netherwart Forest Red and Netherwart Forest Blue, and several new mobs: Piglin Beast and Piglins, hinting heavily that we’d be seeing a bunch more content very soon!

Over the last month, these promises have definitely been fulfilled with the introduction of the 20W06A and today’s 20W07A snapshot releases, which has not only given us the ability to go an explore these biomes ourselves but has brought quite a few more features than any of us could of imagined (we’ll admit, we’ve given this topic extensive ‘in-game research’).

What do I need to know about the nether?

We know you don’t have all day to read through the snapshot notes, and the last person writing this fell asleep trying to do so, so we’ll give you our best summary of the two most recent updates:

Big takeaways

Nether Biomes

Biomes such as Crimson forest, Warped forest and Soulsand valley add new and interesting explorable areas to the Nether. These biomes won’t necessarily impact your gameplay all that much (don’t think dungeons, or temples), but will give you plenty to go and explore, and will certainly break up the repetitiveness that the old nether often faced.

Despite this, all three biomes contain some of the brand-new blocks scattered around the place, running into these will rely on your luck of the draw, although we understand that some of friends may call this ‘luck’. Speaking of blocks, let’s get on those.

New Nether Blocks 

With new biomes come new blocks, and there’s plenty of em’. To get straight to the important point, Ancient debris is the most exciting of these and is a new rare ore found at the deepest depths of the nether. The ore drops ‘netherite scraps’ which once mined can then be used to make netherite ingots, and once we’ve got ingots… we can make tools (more on that a little later).

The newly added Crimson and Warped Nylium blocks grow on top of netherrack and are there to make it less boring. If you’ve got time to spare, using bonemeal on Netherrack will spread Nylium. We’ve also got Basalt, Weeping Vines, Soulfire lanterns, Shroomlight and Soulfire torches, although these seem to act in the same way to the quartz pillars of the world… they’re great for sprucing up your base, but not great at doing much else!

Nether Mobs

There are two new mobs, and they’re so important we’ve given them each their own sections:

• Piglins are the gold-loving zombie pigman we always wanted! If you’re looking for a fight, they spawn in groups of 1-3 and linger around the new crimson forest and nether wastes biomes. Although they attack on-sight if you’re looking for a peaceful mining trip for your new ancient debris ore, your best bet is to wear gold armour and they’ll leave you alone (unless you go on a looting spree).

• Hoglins may look cuddly but they’re actually quite aggressive when you get up close. Saying that, they finally bring the source of food we’ve all wanted in the Nether so no need to stack up on food before going on your adventure! Just like Piglins, Hoglins also have a weakness and run away from warped fungi in terror.

Items/Armour

Netherite. That’s all we need to say. This awesome new block allows you to craft pickaxes, swords, shovels hoes and a full set of armour and can be made by combining your everyday diamond armour with netherite ingots. As you would expect being a step up from diamond, netherite is better in every way (weapons do more damage, tools are faster, and armour is tougher).

Let’s wrap it up

We hope this post has given you something to think about, and more importantly, look forward to! We are really excited to get stuck into the Nether Update when it’s released in Java Edition 1.16. In the meantime, why not give this snapshot a go now and let us know what you think by emailing [email protected] or tweeting us @podcrash. You never know, maybe you can find some interesting that we’ve missed!

If you want to read Minecraft’s full patch notes, you can see them here.