Minecraft The Wild Update Interview

June 8, 2022 at 4:15pm
By Jason Stettner

Interview with Agnes Larsson, Minecraft Game Director, and Ulraf Vakninthe, Mojang Studios Gameplay Developer

Leaping right into things could you give us a brief idea of your history working on Minecraft, and the general just of what the Wild update will bring to the game?

Agnes: I would say that the wild update has like two main focuses. So one is you know to deepen the mystery of Minecraft which is you know with the Warden and the deep dark and like with the ancient cities in the deep dark and we hope the players will be like who lived in this ancient cities, who built and what does all these things means and that can inspire storytelling.

Of course these features also add like a lot of adventure scariness challenge which is really exciting for many players. The skulk block family is really interesting for tech players and then the other side of the Wild Update is more like the nature and the wilderness so we for example have the new mangrove swamp biome.

We have frogs and boats with chest which is really useful when you explore the world and bring back things with you. Those are like the two main parts of the wild update for me. I played it for maybe twelve years and it's been my favorite game since i started to play and then I worked on it for almost six years as a designer and programmer and now a game director so it's like it's my biggest hobby and my job.

Ulraf: For me my journey started by a friend telling me about Minecraft. I opened the game and started a new world. I spawned on a mountain with no trees. I spent like a minute trying to break stone with my fist, nothing dropped and I closed this game so this is a stupid game and I’m never going to play it again.

That's my first experience with Minecraft, after that I played with a friend and together with like the friendship and learning together and developing together that was what made it so much more amazing for me and it became my favorite game.

I joined Mojang two and a half years ago. It's been a crazy ride moving to Sweden and meeting all these people. I’m really happy to be able to contribute back to something that has been really meaningful for me and uh working with so many amazing people that's been my like superstars before so it's really exciting.

Coming from Caves and Cliffs, what were some of the general development goals when working on The Wild and do you find this to be an expansion to what was started with that update?

Agnes: I mean of course like the deep dark package was originally part of caves and cliffs but then we felt in order to really make it a good quality which is important for us we wanted more time so therefore we moved it into the wild update. Quality is something we always try to have focus on because we have a very long-term perspective on Minecraft.

We want to keep involved with it for fifty years or more or like for a lifetime as we often say and therefore it's so important for us to focus on long-term quality to ensure long-term player delights. Otherwise I think we were really wanting to add of course the mob vote winner the Allay and then we were so excited also to be able to add the things from like the mangrove swamp and the frogs and the boat with chest.

Which actually is from a biome vote we had many years ago so it's not the winner it ended up on second place but we saw that so many players were excited about it so we were very happy to be able to add something that players have been asking for a long time.

It’s always fantastic to see the overworld get some additions, could you tell us a bit about the “Deep Dark” and “Mangrove Swamp” biomes that have been added?

Ulraf: Deep dark is a deep and dark scary biome that's going to show up mainly in the deepest parts of the world and in it you can find this family of blocks which is the sculk catalyst and sculk sensor and sort of very interesting blocks that sort of interact with.

They interact with vibration and sort of events that happen around them and also you can find of course the ancient cities which is a very big new structure you can find that is really interesting filled with mysteries. Filled with a lot of different structures and riddles that you can sort of play around with and filled with this whole new sneaking kind of play style that's really a new thing for the game.

Agnes: Then we have the mangrove swamp which I think is. I really love it so you know it's lots of mangrove trees which have this you know huge mangrove roots. It's always fun to Minecraftify things from the real world so for example with mango then okay the roots are a big deal, let's make them out of multiple blocks.

See you as a player almost be like tiny under all these big roots. I think that adds a really nice feeling and it's really good for immersion and then of course I like that it comes with a new wood type. It's great for us builders, it comes with mud and like mud bricks which also is really good for building and clay renewability.

You shouldn't forget the clear and the ability so with mount mod you can actually get renewable clay and place something that's been quite expensive in survival before. It's really nice to use it to get bricks, terracotta glaze terracotta so that's something for example.

The mud block, what sort of fun things can the community get up to with this addition ?

Ulraf: I mean it's really up to the player, you can make mud houses basically they got them out in the mangrove swamps and build mud houses with them. I don't know how stable they're gonna be but it's gonna be really nice and sort of different. The classic dirt house and if you want you can spend a bit more time and make mud bricks and then they really. I think bring a whole new look to Minecraft that you didn't really have before with houses. I'm really excited to see how players use them.

One of the new mobs is the Warden, I understand this one is quite a challenge. Could you take us through the setup for how one will come across this being, alongside a possible strategy for handling it?

Ulraf: I’m sure our players are gonna find better strategies to deal with it over time which is part of the cool thing about exploring this update but the basics of it is that you find an ancient city or a deep dark and sort of movements and noise and vibration you make in the environment which is walking; jumping, taking damage, breaking blocks, eating.

So many of these actions create vibration that's going to trigger a sculk sensor that might pass that trigger to a skulk shrieker in the area and if you do that too often that's gonna summon a warden there to try to silence you in some way. Then it's up to you to decide how to deal with it but I think the sort of most fun way that we sort of seen in play testing is this sort of sneaking mechanic so if you shift you're going to make a lot less vibrations.

Most of the actions you make will not make vibrations anymore and also if you walk on wool or carpet it also will stop those obviously from happening so those two mechanics I think are something players can really play around with and see how they can still move around the city to get the loot from chest without aggravating the warden basically.

The other two mobs seem somewhat friendlier. Could you tell us a bit about the allay which was the mob vote, and also the frog which I believe has a bit of a double offering to it?

Agnes: Yeah I can talk about the frogs, they’re derpy and I would say they have like two main systems that also connect with each other. So one of them is that they are cold blooded and we wanted to like interpret them all being called blooded in a Minecrafty way so the way we do it in Minecraft is that when the tadpole grows up it will pick a variant depending on the temperature of the biome so we have three different variants like we have a cold frog, a tempered frog and a warm frog.

I mentioned the tadpoles it's also that's quite unique that a mob has a baby that isn't just a tiny version of the mob. It's actually tadpoles, they are really cute and you can scoop the tadpoles up and bring them with you so then you can go on you know an adventure with your tadpole to find another biome with another temperature to get another frogberry and so that is one of these adventures players can go on if they want to.

You can also get frog light blocks from the frogs so this is also like a kind of fun goal to have if you manage to get a frog to eat a tiny magma cube it will drop a frog light and then each variant has a different kind of frog light so those are really like reward blocks. I would say they are like pretty decorative and light sources kind of tricky to get. It's cool.

Ulraf: The Allay is this sort of fantasy weird wispy little creature that flies around. It's very magical and you're gonna be able to find it in pillager outposts and pillager mansions and they're sort of locked there for some reason in those cages and it's up to the player to sort of come in and save them and fight the mobs and get them out of there and when you do that if you give the Allay an item it's going to follow you and really sort of chirp and be happy around you and collect that item and bring it back to the player.

So you can have sort of a companion that helps you collect things around you when you when you go on adventures and also you can bring them back home and create sort of like maybe like a sorting system because the Allay really likes note blocks so if they play a note block next to it they're going to bring the item to the note block instead of the player.

They like music even more than they like the player so they're gonna bring the items there and with just a bit of redstone and making those notes make cool music you're gonna be able to make a bunch of Allay sort of bring different items collect them and put them in the right places

From what I understand the community was a bit disappointed with the note that fireflies won’t be part of this update, is this something the team is interested in adding in down the road?

Agnes: So what we have said is that we put it in our ideas library and if we, you know believe that yes this is going to add a lot of value then we can add it but we can't like promise that at this point but it is in our ideas libraries. It's not like we used to throw it away because, yes so maybe.

For those looking to revisit Minecraft with The Wild update, what aspect of this update do you feel will be the most appealing to players wanting something that mixes things up?

Ulraf: Deep dark is a big one of this and I think for people who've sort of spent a long time with the game and they feel like maybe the challenges are sort of they know them already and know how to deal with them. Deep dark is a whole new challenge in a totally different sort of access than before getting the best gear, the best enchantments that's not necessarily going to save you.

It's more about looking around you at the environment; learning from it, looking at the different locations, the sensors and really learning the way the warden works and how to play around it. That's what's going to really let you deal with this challenge so I think that's a huge change that people are really going to enjoy.


Lastly I would like to leave a spot for you to say something or go over anything I might have missed during the interview?

Agnes: I think it's nice to mention that the boats with chests so those like are maybe not like the most sparkling feature but they are so useful like you know when you are out exploring and you get a lot of materials and if you go with a boat and have a signature kind of double.

You can bring the double amount of things with you, that's quite huge so I think that adds so much quality of life and something like players actually going to use a lot so that's a yeah I feature I’m really excited about.

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