It Creaks in the Night… – All New Minecraft “Winter Drop”

Shhh, do you hear that?

The snapping of dry twigs, the rustling of dead leaves, and the sound of incoming trouble.

That’s right! The recent Minecraft Live 2024 has brought us Minecraft lovers a whole new biome, complete with its ambient music, new wood type, and even a terrifying new mob. So much for saying that the snapshot will be revealed to us in the coming months when it’s already out now!

Ready or Not, let’s dive right into this new adventure!

1. Minecraft “Winter Drop” – The Pale Garden Snapshot

Welcome to Minecraft’s latest new snapshot called the “Winter Drop,” where players are introduced to an all-new biome, “The Pale Garden.”

• Explore the new biome and encounter the creepy Creaking mob and the Creaking Heart block.
• Build with the Pale Oak woodset. Decorate with Pale Moss blocks, carpets, and hanging moss.
• Summon the Creaking with its exclusive Spawn Egg.

Bright blue skies turn somber grey as you walk into this too-quiet, eerie place, and an unsettling atmosphere takes hold when dusk descends.

Something strange is lurking in the shadows – blink, and you’ll miss it; look away, and it’ll catch you. There’s more to the Pale Garden than its disturbingly peaceful façade, waiting to be discovered by you.

Watch the full video clip from Minecraft Live 2024 here:

Minecraft Live 2024: Pale Garden & Creaking

I. The Pale Garden

The Pale Garden is a haunting variation of the Dark Forest biome. Passive mobs do not spawn naturally here, adding to the sense of desolation this biome hopes to evoke. Towering Pale Oaks surround you as far as your sight can reach, and Pale Moss blocks and carpets blanket the ground. The willowy hanging Pale Moss adds to the dreary atmosphere along with the unsettling ambient sounds of this biome.

II. The Pale Moss

The Pale Garden biome is characterized by its unique moss elements. Pale Moss Blocks and Carpets generate naturally throughout the biome, with the carpet spreading upto two blocks on adjacent solid faces. Applying bonemeal accelerates the carpet’s growth to cover all surrounding solid faces. Pale Hanging Moss cascades down the Pale Oaks, growing when you use bonemeal.

III. The Pale Oak

Pale Oak Saplings are dropped from Pale Oak Leaves. These trees bring a game-changing new white wood set to the Minecraft inventory. Yes, you heard it right – We finally have white wood!

I’m sure the builders will have a field day with this one! This biome seems perfect for a haunted house build, and what better palette to use than the pale white woodset? Here’s all you can craft with the pale oak wood:

• Door, Trapdoor, and Stair.
• Fence and Fence Gate.
• Planks and Slabs.
• Sign & Hanging Sign.
• Wood, Stripped Log & Stripped Wood.
• Buttons, Pressure Plates.
• Boat and Boat with Chest.

IV. The Creaking

The new mob, The Creaking, comes out at night to play, and its favorite game seems to be red-light green-light. No, this isn’t a joke. It freezes in place when a player looks at it and stalks after you when you look away.

• Attacking it is futile; It displays a particle trail connecting it to its linked Creaking Heart block when hit. Destroying the heart is the only way to unalive the Creaking.
• Immune to light levels, it spawns and despawns with the day/night cycle. Additionally, the Creaking cannot enter boats or pass through portals.
• The Creaking Spawn Egg produces a standalone Creaking mob, unaffected by day/night cycles and vulnerable to damage, with a single health point.
• Creaking mobs connected to Creaking Hearts cannot be spawned via eggs or commands.
• As of the current snapshot, the Creaking mob does half a heart damage on a player wearing iron armor – that’s hardly any damage, especially if switch to full Diamond or Netherite armor – but whether this will be tweaked by the time this biome is fully released remains to be seen.

V. The Creaking Heart

As the name suggests, this block is literally the heart of the Creaking mob. Destroy it, and you destroy the Creaking linked to this heart.

• The Creaking Heart is a unique living block generated within Pale Oak trees encased in Pale Oak wood logs.
• When the moon emerges in the Pale Garden, a creaking heart situated perfectly between two pale oak woods (one above and one below) spawns the Creaking mob.
• This block has distinct properties: it’s active at night and dormant during the day. When a player hits its connected Creaking, the Creaking Heart emits a trail of particles.
• This block can be collected using a silk touch axe. Placing this block anywhere outside of the biome still spawns a Creaking at night, given that the block is placed between two pale oak woods.

VI. Ambient Block Sounds

The Pale Garden biome introduces a unique ambient sound system, where sounds originate from specific blocks rather than biome settings. Two key blocks contribute to this immersive experience: Pale Hanging Moss and Creaking Heart.

Pale Hanging Moss attached to Pale Oak Logs and Leaves emits subtle atmospheric sounds, creating an unsettling ambiance. Meanwhile, the Creaking Heart block produces creepy sounds when active at night and fully surrounded by Logs, intensifying the biome’s mysterious atmosphere.

(And yes, that means collecting these blocks and placing them outside of the biome still allows the blocks to emit these ambient sounds at night. Talk about spooky~)

2. Accessing the Snapshot

To experience the Pale Garden biome’s experimental features, create a new world, navigate to the Experiments screen, and then enable the “Winter Drop” experiment.

Note that:

• Experimental features have no effect unless explicitly enabled.
• Snapshots are exclusively available for Minecraft: Java Edition. To install Snapshots:
  • Open the Minecraft Launcher.
  • Enable snapshots in the “Installations” tab.
• Testing versions may corrupt your world. Make backups of your worlds and run experimental versions in a separate folder to avoid issues.

Minecraft’s newest snapshot has arrived perfectly in time for the spooky season, and if all goes well, it may be fully launched by Halloween. Fingers crossed!

Until then, Gamers, have fun mining and crafting!

3. About Minecraft

Minecraft is a sandbox video game developed by Mojang Studios and was created by Markus “Notch” Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early test versions, it was released as a paid public alpha for personal computers in 2009 before releasing in November 2011, with Jens Bergensten taking over development. Minecraft has since been ported to several other platforms and is the best-selling video game of all time, with 200 million copies sold and 126 million monthly active users as of 2020.