The next Minecraft update is rarely a secret, thanks to how Mojang Studios works with the community to develop new features and improvements, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting.
Today, a couple of months of development are nearing a close with the long-awaited announcement of a name. “The Copper Age” is the next official Minecraft update (and the third of the year), and it’s bringing a ton of interesting new content to the legendary survival game.
The Copper Age update is all about copper, the much-maligned ore that Mojang added to the game years ago to nearly no fanfare — mainly because there was very little you could actually do with copper.
That’s finally changing, and dropping the name means Minecraft’s next update is imminent. We don’t have an exact date yet, but you can bet Mojang is intending to close out the summer with a coppery bang.
What can we expect from The Copper Age update?
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Mojang’s new update strategy for Minecraft means more frequent but ultimately more modest updates, and The Copper Age update mostly falls into that category. There’s still quite a lot here, though, so I’ll summarize what we know so far.
- Copper Golem & chests. The headlining feature for this update is the Copper Golem, a friendly mob that sadly lost a past Minecraft Live Mob Vote. Thankfully, Mojang is reviving our metallic friend.
- A single block of copper and a carved pumpkin is all you need to make a Copper Golem, which will seek out nearby copper chests (also new) and take items out of them.
- Copper Golems will then seek out nearby regular chests with the same items, and deposit what they’re holding (in the case no matching chest can be found, they’ll seek out an empty chest).
- Yes, that means automatic chest sorting, and it’s with cute friends!
- Like other copper items, Copper Golems will oxidize over time and change in color. You can still halt or reverse that process with wax or an axe.
- Copper armor, weapons, & tools. A first in a while, Mojang also added a brand-new set of armor, weapons, and tools. As you probably already guessed, it’s all copper.
- Copper armor, weapons, and tools sit somewhere in between stone and iron in terms of durability and effectiveness.
- There’s also new copper horse armor, which has a chance of appearing in the same loot chests as other horse armor.
- It likely won’t be used for long, but copper should help bridge the gap between stone and iron gear.
- Decorative copper blocks. You could already make a ton of building blocks out of copper, but the ore just got a whole lot more interesting.
- Mojang is also adding copper torches and lanterns, which also oxidize over time. Oh, and you can change the color of the copper torches. Yeah, you heard what I said.
- There’s also the new copper bars and chains, giving a nice alternative to the iron variants (with, once again, varying hues due to oxidization). Bees just became a lot more important with this update, too.
- Oh, Copper Golems will turn into decorative statues if they become completely oxidized, too!
- You can change their oxidization level like other copper blocks, and hitting a completely clean Copper Golem will revive it.
- Shelves & more. One of the most interesting features of the new update, for me at least, are shelves.
- Shelves can display up to three item stacks at a time, and interacting with those items will swap whatever you’re holding with that stack.
- You can connect up to three shelves in a row to display nine items in a line.
- Power those shelves with redstone, and interacting with the shelves will immediately swap your hotbar with those item blocks.
- Yes, Minecraft effectively has loadouts now, letting you create hot-swappable loadouts for mining, exploring, farming, or anything else you want to do.
- As a random side note, Mojang also gave each dye color a unique look. Cool.
Okay, Mojang, I think you added enough features to make copper a worthwhile addition to the game. It only took around four years, but who’s counting? Jokes aside, I think The Copper Age looks like a great update, and is arguably the most exciting of the year (so far, we may get one more holiday update).
There’s a good mix of content for all kinds of players, although I am curious when we’ll next get a truly new hostile mob for the more adventurous types. How long has it been since Mojang added a boss-style mob to the game?
I’m happy with what we’re getting this time around, though. It took humanity thousands of years to reach the Copper Age; it only took Minecraft a little over 16. Next stop: space travel?
