You made Better Together better than ever!

We’ve received so much awesome feedback and suggestions from everyone through this process – thank you so much for helping us make the best game that we can! The Better Together Update is the biggest update that Minecraft has ever had, with 34 new features being implemented. That’s a lot of new things all at once, so we’re extremely grateful for everyone who’s shared their thoughts and poked around to help us find and squash bugs.

So far we’ve had millions of beta testers on Android, Xbox One and Windows 10 helping us find bugs and give feedback. Thanks to the beta so far, we’ve fixed over 3000 bugs so far – that’s a lot! And of course you’ve told us that you’re super happy with what you’re seeing in the Better Together Update so far – beta participants have rated the update a 4.1 out of 5 score, which is pretty good considering that we are just in beta!

We’re getting closer to the final release, so here’s an overview of what you can expect when the Better Together Update goes live, and beyond, based on what you’ve told us and what we’ve learned:

GAMEPLAY

• You asked for coordinates to be added to the Bedrock Engine to help you find your way. We think folks who want to use them should be able to, but also want the vanilla Survival experience to have the added challenge of needing to rely on other things for navigation. So, we’ve made it so that you can enable visible coordinates via a cheat. Using this in Survival is possible, but it will disable achievements. We think this is a good compromise because it makes the feature available, but doesn’t make Survival too easy.
• Some of you prefer to use Classic Crafting and want to be able to hide the Recipe Book, so we’ve made this possible!
• We heard that some of you would like the ability to make copies of your worlds, so that if something goes awry while building you can have a backup available. We’ve added that ability!

REDSTONE

There’ll be some differences between the Redstone that you may have used in the legacy Console Edition and the new Minecraft built with the Bedrock Engine. We’re trying to make things as painless as possible, but due to design differences in the codebases, Redstone machines may require some work to restore functionality after they’re converted.

• Quasi-connectivity is a bug found in some Java and Console Edition builds. Players have nonetheless found it very useful, exploiting it to create clever trigger mechanisms. Because it’s a bug, we don’t intend on implementing it - but we will do our best to give players other tools to replicate the same sorts of mechanisms in non-bug-reliant ways!
• Pistons in Bedrock have different timing from other versions of the game and this can mess with redstone machines imported from the legacy Console Edition. Somebody’s going to be changing something no matter which timing we decided to go with in this case, so we opted to go with the choice that felt right to us and causes the least amount of players to have to redo their creations. TL;DR- redstone machines that rely on piston timing and are in worlds imported from Xbox legacy Console Edition will likely need reworking.

MOVEMENT

• We found out that there were three totally different types of drift while flying in Creative Mode across the three codebases of Minecraft. In the end we decided to adjust the flying drift for the Bedrock Engine to match that of the legacy Console Edition.
• You told us that the speed for flying down in Creative Mode was too slow, and we increased it! Also, you’ll remain flying even if you’re at ground level until you disable flying.
• You asked for the ability to bind sprint to a button, and we added that to the options.

BUILDING

• You asked for a clear hot bar when starting up Creative Mode, and you got it!
• You noticed that the HUD wasn’t opaque after changing the item in-hand – we’ve fixed that!

THINGS WE ARE STILL WORKING ON

There are other pieces of feedback you’ve given us that we are looking to implement, but due to time and resource constraints we’ll need to look to add these in future updates:

• Amplified and custom super-flat world types are awesome and we love them! But they’re a bit tricky since they’d be new to the Bedrock Engine, so we’ll look to add these features later on. As a workaround in the meantime, it is possible to create one of these world types in the legacy Console Edition and import that map into Minecraft. It’ll retain the same terrain it had when it was generated, but new chunks will generate as Superflat chunks. Not ideal, we know, but we’re working to get it fully implemented soon!
• We heard from folks that the block placement speed in Bedrock wouldn’t allow for a player moving at a constant velocity to place an unbroken line of blocks in any direction, and this is quite a bummer for avid builders. We consider this to be a bug, and are working on fixing it, but the fix for this will come in a patch after the Better Together Update releases.
• We’ll be adding an easier way to clear the Creative Mode hotbar, and we’re working on adding a cursor that you can use in your inventory and recipe book.
• We keep adding more and more content to the Minecraft Marketplace, and you asked for more tools to help decide if you should spend your money on that content, which is totally fair! We’re planning on adding the ability for you to rate content in the Minecraft Marketplace and share what you think with other folks.
• Custom skins are awesome, and we know you love them! Getting them to work on consoles requires some work on the platform holders’ side to enable things like this. We’re working with them to get everything in place to enable this in a future update.

So, thanks again! We hope you enjoy the Better Together Update even more knowing that you helped shape it!