New Minecraft 1.20 Preview brings shield customization and dozens of changes

With the Trails & Tales update, you’ll be able to customize your shield with a banner.

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What you need to know

What you need to know

The next major Minecraft content update isn’t too far off, now, with Mojang Studios officially leaving the 1.19 “The Wild Update” branch behind. The latest Minecraft Preview build contains a mighty changelog filled with changes, improvements, and even some new features, and it’s available now to players.

Minecraft Preview 1.20.0.20 is rolling out across Xbox, Windows PC, iOS, and Android platforms, and it’s an impressive release with a lot to discuss. There is a notable new feature in the preview build that adds on Mojang Studios' recent focus on player customization inMinecraft. Now, players can test full shield customization, with the helpful tools now able to be combined with colorful banners.

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This is a feature carried over from Minecraft: Java Edition, and should pair very well with customizable armor trims to ensure that your Minecraft character is truly unique. The preview goes much farther than that, though, with dozens of tweaks to theMinecraft 1.20 “Trails & Tales” updatearriving later this year. This includes new accessibility changes, alterations to archaeology, increased character limits for hanging signs, and so much more.

Sniffers are also no longer considered experimental features and are available in normal gameplay, which means Sniffers can now breed and lay Sniffer Eggs. Sniffers can also now sniff up the Pitcher Pod, which can grow into the new, decorative Pitcher Plant. There’s no shortage of improvements in this build, all of which will come to one of thebest Xbox gameswhen the Trails & Tales update arrives later this year.

You don’t have to wait even that long for new Minecraft, however. In case you missed it,Minecraft Legends releases on April 18, 2023. You can read Windows Central’sMinecraft Legends previewto learn exactly why you should be excited for this upcoming action-strategy game.

The changelog forMinecraft Preview 1.20.0.20includes:

Experimental features

Experimental features

Accessibility

Archaeology

Armor trims

Brush

Bamboo

Blocks

Boats

Camels

Cherry grove

Hanging signs

Features & bug fixes

General

Accessibility

Blocks

Gameplay

Graphical

Item rendering

Mobs

Multiplayer

Pitcher Plants

Player

Shield customization

Sniffers

Torchflowers

User interface

Vanilla parity

Minecraft Minecoins is the currency of choice for the Minecraft Marketplace, which includes hundreds of professional and user-created content, such as adventure DLCs, maps, texture packs, skins, and much more.

Minecraft is included in Xbox Game Pass Ultimate on Xbox and Windows PCs, making Microsoft’s flagship, value-driven gaming subscription the best place to experience Minecraft’s latest and greatest updates.

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Zachary Boddy (They / Them) is a Staff Writer for Windows Central, primarily focused on covering the latest news in tech and gaming, the best Xbox and PC games, and the most interesting Windows and Xbox hardware. They have been gaming and writing for most of their life starting with the original Xbox, and started out as a freelancer for Windows Central and its sister sites in 2019. Now a full-fledged Staff Writer, Zachary has expanded from only writing about all things Minecraft to covering practically everything on which Windows Central is an expert, especially when it comes to Microsoft. You can find Zachary on Twitter@BoddyZachary.