Highlights

  • Minecraft's Tricky Trials update adds underground chambers with mobs, loot, and challenges like illager raids and powerful maces.
  • The neglected badlands biome, similar to Utah's landscape, is in need of a long-teased update.
  • Mojang plans upgrades for badlands, with potential features like vultures and tumbleweeds.

Minecraft recently received its most massive update yet in the form of Tricky Trials. In Tricky Tials, players can find hidden underground, copper-coated trial chambers filled with challenges, mobs, and special items to loot. Some of these include trial keys to unlock treasure-filled vaults, ominous bottles that can trigger illager raids or difficult ominous trials in trial chambers, and the rare but powerful mace. While Tricky Trials is a welcome, bountiful update to Minecraft, Mojang should commit to updating one other biome next: the badlands.

First introduced in Minecraft Java Edition update 1.7.2 in 2013, the badlands is a rocky, red-sand-filled biome similar to Utah’s Colorado Plateau, home to the awe-inspiring Grand Canyon. Much like its real-life counterparts, the badlands is a desolate biome home to very few animals and plants save for the occasional bat, cacti, or dead bushes. Once night falls, herds of hostile mobs overtake the landscape, making the biome a treacherous one to traverse.

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The Desert Badlands of Minecraft

While the badlands may be absent of mobs and plants, it’s rich in unique blocks and ores. The badlands are coated with red sand, red sandstone, and various red shades of terracotta blocks as far as a player’s render distance is set. Like normal sand blocks, red sand can be used to plant cacti and sugar cane or be crafted into raw sandstone, cut sandstone, and chiseled sandstone for players to build structures with. Swaths of terracotta blocks can be found naturally in the badlands, including red, orange, yellow, brown, white, light gray, and uncolored terracotta. Beneath these terracotta and sand-covered lands lie rich veins of gold ore ripe for plundering.

The Badlands Variants

Players can come across three distinct variants of badlands biomes on their travels. These include the hill-filled common badlands, the sparse, oak-tree-residing wooded badlands, and the eroded badlands covered with towering hoodoo sand and terracotta formations. Unlike the common or wooded badlands, passive mobs such as sheep or chickens can spawn in the eroded badlands. Abandoned mineshafts can be more easily discovered near the surface in all three badland variants.

The badlands biome was originally called the mesa biome before it was renamed in 2018’s Update Aquatic.

The Eventual Badlands Update

At MineCon Live 2019, Mojang unveiled that the mountains, swamp, and badlands biomes would all receive expanded updates filled with new blocks, items, and mobs. Additionally, two other biomes lost votes in 2018 to be updated but still may receive updates in the future, including the savanna and desert biomes. Both the mountains and swamp biomes were updated in 2021’s Caves & Cliffs, and 2022’s Wild Updates, but the badlands have still not received their own expanded update. In 2019, Mojang divulged a few features that would be included in the badlands’ update, such as roaming tumbleweeds, harvestable prickly pear cacti, and item-circling vultures.

If the badlands are the primary subject in Minecraft’s next big update, Mojang could lump in the savanna and desert updates alongside the badlands. Desert and savanna biomes are usually found near the badlands so this could be an effective way to attract players more towards Minecraft’s more arid environments. Alongside the new plants and vultures in the badlands, the desert update was planned to feature palm trees and meerkats, while the savanna update was planned to feature baobab trees, termite mounds, and ostriches. This could be an arid-themed update and could be released around summer to coincide with the intense heat found in these biomes.

Badlands Update Speculation

Not much else is officially known about when the badlands will be updated or what else this update will feature. Despite this lack of communication over the badlands update, players have begun to hypothesize what else may be included in the badlands update, ranging from possible concepts such as badlands villages to more unlikely ideas such as a bull bison mob boss. Regardless of what the badlands may hold in the future, Mojang should begin to inform players of their plans for the badlands soon, at the very least. It’s been nearly five years since the badlands update was first introduced and Minecraft’s unique red biome deserves to have its time in the spotlight.