5 best features in Minecraft Bedrock Preview 1.21.0.20

Minecraft 1.21 is presumably right around the corner, with Mojang having recently confirmed that there will be no more major additions announced for the update. This has been confirmed by the most recent Bedrock preview, 1.21.0.20, marking the start of 1.21 betas.

1.21.0.20 is actually bringing with it a ton of exciting content for Bedrock players to mess with via the experimental features option. The five most exciting features that come with this preview are detailed below.

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Minecraft Preview 1.21.0.20's best features

1) Ominous Trials

Ominous keys seem oxidized when compared to regular keys (Image via Mojang)

Ominous trials are a new variant of Minecraft's upcoming trial chamber. They are completely optional and will only activate when a player enters a trial chamber while under the bad-omen status effect. This will convert the bad omen to trial omen, a new effect that is actually what triggers the ominous trial.

Whenever a player with trial omen is detected by a trial spawner, it will convert into an ominous trial spawner instead. These burn blue with the Nether's soulfire rather than orange, spawn more difficult mobs, spit out detrimental lingering potions, and have better drops than regular trial spawners.

The best of these new drops, however, is the ominous key, which is used to open the aptly named ominous vault. These are variants of Minecraft's vault block that also burn soulfire blue. They are the only source of heavy cores needed to make maces, and they also drop other great items like enchanted golden apples, diamonds, and enchanted books for the new Minecraft mace enchantments.

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2) New Potions

Alchemy being expanded on is always nice to see (Image via Mojang)

Four new potions are being added to Bedrock with preview 1.21.0.20. The first is the wind-charged potion, which causes affected mobs to explode into bursts of wind when killed. It is brewed with an awkward potion and a breeze rod.

The weaving potion is similar, also causing mobs to explode when killed. Rather than wind, though, affected entities will explode into cobwebs. Non-player entities affected are also unaffected by cobwebs when walking. It is crafted by combining a cobweb with awkward potions.

The next potion is the oozing potion. It is brewed once again, with awkward potions and a slime block. Similar to the last two potions, the oozing potion causes an effect when a mob dies, this time causing mobs to spawn slimes when killed. If used on enough mobs, this can actually be an effective way to slime farm, as more than a block's worth of slime drops from the mobs.

The final new potion is the infested potion. This is made by combining a regular piece of stone with awkward potions. It causes afflicted entities to have a 5% chance to spawn silverfish, one of Minecraft's weakest mobs, when taking damage.

Outside of being brewed, these effects will also be randomly spit out by ominous trial chambers, just to make those fights even more challenging.

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3) Hardcore Mode

Hardcore games can be quickly identified by their unique heart texture (Image via Mojang)

The much-requested hardcore difficulty is finally being added to Bedrock with 1.21.0.20. Hardcore is the game's hardest difficulty, where a single death means the world is lost forever. It has been a requested feature for more than a decade, even before Bedrock was officially Bedrock and was still known as Pocket Edition.

This makes the addition of hardcore in this snapshot one of the largest and most impactful Minecraft parity updates of recent years, and another huge indication of just how important bringing the two versions together has become for Mojang.

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4) Bad Omen Revamp

This new symbol is much more fitting for bad omen (Image via Mojang)

Bad omen, as mentioned previously, is required to get the trial omen effect needed to activate ominous trials. The bad omen effect also saw a revamp within preview 1.21.0.20. This includes changes as minor as updating the status symbol to be more ominous, as well as updating how players can get the effect.

Rather than being automatically applied when a raid captain is killed outside of a Minecraft village raid, there is now a new item called an ominous bottle. They are dropped by raid captains and vault blocks and come in levels one through five. When consumed, the matching level of bad omen will be applied.

This gives players complete control over when bad omen is applied, meaning there's no longer any worry of accidental raids destroying entire Minecraft villager trading halls.

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5) Blown-up items stack

This change should make using TNT much less impactful on performance (Image via Mojang)

One of the points Mojang lists within the update notes for preview 1.21.0.20 is that similar items will be combined before dropping as items when blown up via explosion. This might seem like a minor change, and it is. However, the effects should be quite exciting.

This will make any farms that use TNT, which is a decent number of Minecraft's most advanced farms, less lag-inducing, as the items produced will spawn as a stack rather than individual item entities. TNT launchers also tend to blow up a lot of blocks, so stacking them up should reduce the non-physical damage they deal.