Minecraft 1.12: The World of Color Update

Released on June 7, 2017, Minecraft 1.12 was officially named "The World of Color Update" — and for good reason. This update fundamentally shifted the game's aesthetic potential, bringing vibrant new blocks, significant crafting advancements, and powerful tools for mapmakers and command creators. It wasn't just about looks, though; 1.12 also polished core gameplay mechanics and introduced a more guided, intuitive experience, particularly beneficial for new players finding their footing in the blocky world. It laid the groundwork for future creative possibilities and made existing ones far more accessible.

New Blocks

The most visually striking aspect of 1.12 was undoubtedly the introduction of entirely new block types centered around vibrant color and intricate patterns.

Concrete & Concrete Powder

• Concrete Powder: Comes in all 16 dye colors. Crafted relatively cheaply using 4 Sand, 4 Gravel, and 1 Dye of the desired color, yielding 8 Concrete Powder blocks. This makes it resource-efficient for large-scale projects.
  • Physics: Behaves like Sand and Gravel, meaning it is affected by gravity. This is crucial to remember during construction – placing it requires a supporting block underneath, otherwise it will fall. This property can also be cleverly used for traps or controlled collapses.
  • Texture: Has a soft, grainy texture similar to sand but with vibrant, saturated color.
• Concrete: Formed instantly when Concrete Powder comes into contact with a water block (source or flowing). It does not form if adjacent to water, it must touch it directly or fall into it. Once solidified, it becomes a permanent Concrete block.
  • Texture & Appearance: This is the star feature. Concrete offers a completely solid, smooth, vibrant color with almost no visible texture noise or variation. This makes it unique compared to Terracotta or Wool.
  • Durability: Has the same hardness and blast resistance as Stone, making it a viable and colorful construction material, not just decorative. It requires a pickaxe to mine effectively.
• Uses: The smooth, uniform appearance makes Concrete incredibly popular for modern architectural builds, clean lines, large-scale pixel art where individual block textures would be distracting, creating bold signage, pathways, and flooring. Its gravity-affected powder form also allows for interesting construction techniques and landscaping possibilities before solidification. Imagine creating colorful waterfalls that harden as they flow!

Glazed Terracotta

• Crafted From: Smelting any of the 16 colors of regular (Hardened) Terracotta in a furnace. Each dyed Terracotta block yields one Glazed Terracotta block of the corresponding color. Remember, regular Terracotta itself is obtained by smelting Clay blocks.
• Design: Each of the 16 colors features a unique, intricate, and often symmetrical pattern. These patterns are complex and visually striking, offering much more detail than most other decorative blocks. Examples include arrows (Orange), stylized suns (Yellow), floral motifs (Pink), diamond shapes (Blue), and abstract swirls (Cyan, Purple).
• Rotation Sensitive: This is key to their use. The pattern displayed on the top face of a Glazed Terracotta block depends entirely on the direction the player is facing when placing it. By carefully rotating your character before placing each block, you can align, mirror, or contrast these patterns to create stunningly complex mosaics, intricate floor designs, striking wall accents, or even directional markers.
  • Placement Tip: Look at the top texture in your hotbar; that's the orientation you'll get if you place it while facing North. Rotating changes the placement orientation. Experimentation is key!
• Uses: Ideal for decorative flooring in temples, castles, or feature rooms. They create eye-catching wall patterns, elaborate borders, intricate fireplace surrounds, and unique visual centerpieces. Due to their detailed nature, they work well as accent blocks alongside simpler materials like Concrete or Stone. However, mastering their placement for large, consistent patterns requires patience and planning.

Colored Beds

• Change: A simple but highly requested feature. Beds are no longer restricted to the iconic red color. They can now be crafted in any of the 16 dye colors.
• Crafting: The crafting recipe remains similar (3 Wool over 3 Planks), but now the color of the 3 Wool blocks used must be the same, and this determines the color of the resulting bed. You cannot mix wool colors in a single bed recipe.
• Functionality: Purely aesthetic. Colored beds function identically to the old red beds – setting the player's spawn point and allowing them to skip the night. Breaking a colored bed drops the bed item itself, retaining its color.
• Impact: Adds significant personalization options for player homes and bases. Allows players to color-coordinate their bedrooms or use beds as decorative elements that match a specific theme. In multiplayer, different colored beds can help distinguish different players' sleeping spots.

Recipe Book & Crafting Help

This update introduced a major quality-of-life improvement for crafting, especially aimed at newer players or those who don't want to constantly consult external wikis.

• New UI: A green book icon was added to the standard crafting interface (both the 2x2 inventory grid and the 3x3 crafting table grid). Clicking this book toggles the Recipe Book overlay.
  • Features: The Recipe Book displays icons of craftable items. Clicking an item shows its recipe. If you have the required ingredients in your inventory, clicking the recipe again will automatically place the items into the crafting grid (if possible). It also includes a search bar and categories (Building Blocks, Tools, Combat, etc.) for easier navigation.
• Unlock System: Recipes aren't all shown immediately. Instead, they unlock progressively as players naturally gather key ingredients. For example, picking up Wood Planks unlocks recipes for crafting tables, sticks, wooden tools, etc. Mining an Iron Ore or Ingot unlocks various iron-based recipes. This creates a sense of progression and discovery.
  • Notification: A small toast notification subtly appears on screen when new recipes are unlocked.
• Guided Crafting: This system fundamentally lowers the barrier to entry for crafting. New players can easily see what's possible with the materials they've gathered, reducing frustration and encouraging experimentation. Even experienced players benefit from the quick crafting feature for common items.
  • Toggle: Players who prefer the classic crafting experience or want to discover recipes manually can simply keep the Recipe Book closed or toggle a setting to only show recipes they can currently craft ("Show Craftable" toggle).
• Custom Recipes: Crucially for mapmakers and server administrators, this system was built with customization in mind. Using data packs (introduced later but supported by this framework), creators can add their own unique crafting recipes, remove existing ones, or modify them, integrating seamlessly with the Recipe Book UI. This opened doors for unique adventure map items, custom game modes, and mod-like experiences without traditional mods. The

  doLimitedCrafting

  game rule can force players to only use unlocked recipes found via the book.

Advancements System

Replacing the legacy "Achievements" system, Advancements offer a more structured, expandable, and informative way to guide players through Minecraft's core gameplay loops and challenges.

• Replaces: The linear, often obscure Achievement system. Advancements provide more context and act as a soft tutorial and challenge tree.
• Categories: Organized into logical tabs:
  • Minecraft: The core progression (Stone Age, getting Iron, Diamonds, enchanting).
  • Adventure: Focuses on exploration, combat, and trading (killing mobs, trading with Villagers, finding structures).
  • Nether: Tasks related to the Nether dimension (entering the Nether, getting Blaze Rods, brewing potions).
  • The End: The final stages of the game (finding the Stronghold, entering The End, defeating the Ender Dragon).
  • Husbandry: Centered on farming, breeding animals, and taming (breeding animals, fishing, growing crops, taming pets).
• UI: Features a brand new, dedicated interface (default key 'L'). It displays advancements as nodes on branching paths within each tab. Completed advancements unlock subsequent ones, visually showing progression. Hovering over an advancement reveals its requirements and often a flavorful description.
  • Types: Advancements come in different frame shapes: square for normal progression, rounded for goals/milestones, and star-shaped for difficult challenges.
• Custom Support: Like the Recipe Book, the Advancement system is fully data-driven. Mapmakers and datapack creators can design entirely custom advancement trees with unique triggers, rewards (like running functions or granting recipes/experience), icons, and descriptions. This allows for creating narrative quest lines, custom tutorials for specific maps or servers, or unique challenges tailored to a particular gameplay experience.

New Mobs

Parrots

Adding life and sound to the jungle biome, Parrots were the main mob addition in 1.12.

• Biome: Found exclusively in Jungle biomes, often flying in small groups.
• Behavior:
  • Taming: Can be tamed by feeding them any type of Seeds (Wheat, Melon, Pumpkin, Beetroot). Taming is chance-based per seed consumed. Once tamed, they will follow the player. Right-clicking a tamed parrot makes it sit down. Right-clicking again makes it sit on the player's shoulder (up to two parrots, one per shoulder). They dismount if the player jumps, takes damage, or goes underwater.
  • Sound Mimicry: Parrots interestingly mimic the idle sounds of nearby hostile and passive mobs (within a 20-block radius), including monsters hidden behind walls. The sound they make is slightly higher-pitched. This can serve as a useful, if sometimes confusing, early warning system. They do not mimic all sounds (like footsteps or attacks).
  • Warning: Feeding parrots Cookies is lethal and will kill them instantly! This reflects the real-world toxicity of chocolate to parrots.
• Variants: Come in 5 vibrant color variations: Red (Scarlet Macaw), Blue (Hyacinth Macaw), Green (Green Parrot), Cyan (Blue-and-yellow Macaw), and Gray (Cockatiel). The color is random upon spawning.
• Easter Egg: If a Parrot is near a Jukebox that is playing a music disc, it will start dancing, bobbing its head and changing colors. A delightful little touch!
• Health: Parrots are fragile with only 3 hearts (6 health points), so care must be taken around hazards.

New Commands & Functions

For the technical community, 1.12 brought significant improvements to the command system, paving the way for more complex creations.

• Functions: The headline feature here. Functions allow creators to group multiple commands together into a single text file with the

  .mcfunction

  extension, stored within the world's data folder (specifically

  data/namespace/functions/

  ).
  • Execution: Instead of needing chains of command blocks, you can execute all commands within a function file using a single command:

    /function namespace:filename

    .
• Use Case: This revolutionized mapmaking and technical Minecraft. It makes complex command systems much easier to:
  • Organize: Keep related commands together logically.
  • Edit: Modify sequences easily in a text editor.
  • Debug: Test functions independently.
  • Reuse: Call the same function multiple times from different triggers (command blocks, advancements, etc.).
  • Share: Easily share

    .mcfunction

    files as part of datapacks.

Game Rules & Tags

• NBT Tag Improvements: Commands gained more power to target entities and blocks based on their specific NBT data (though full NBT manipulation via commands came later, 1.12 improved selection). This allowed for more precise targeting, for example, selecting only zombies with specific equipment or villagers with certain trades.
• Game Rule Tweaks: Additions and refinements to game rules provided more control. Notable examples related to this update include

  doLimitedCrafting

  (tying into the Recipe Book) and expanded control over advancement notifications (

  announceAdvancements

  ).

Miscellaneous Features

Beyond the headline changes, 1.12 included several smaller but welcome additions and improvements.

• Narrator: An accessibility feature that uses text-to-speech synthesis to read out Minecraft chat messages, system messages, and UI elements (like button names). It can be toggled using Ctrl+B and has different modes (off, chat only, system messages only, all). A great addition for players with visual impairments.
• Colored Shulker Boxes: Similar to beds, Shulker Boxes can now be dyed any of the 16 colors by placing a Shulker Box and a Dye together in a crafting grid. Undyed (purple) Shulker Boxes remain the default.
  • Benefit: Immensely useful for organization, allowing players to color-code their portable storage systems. A yellow shulker box might hold valuables, red for redstone components, green for farming supplies, etc. The box retains its color when broken and picked up.
• New Sounds: Many new sound effects were added or updated for block interactions (e.g., placing concrete powder vs concrete), user interface clicks, swimming, fishing bobbers, and enchanting tables, enhancing the game's auditory feedback and immersion.
• Bug Fixes: As with any major update, 1.12 included hundreds of bug fixes addressing issues ranging from minor visual glitches to game-breaking crashes, improving overall stability and polishing the gameplay experience. Many long-standing community-reported bugs were resolved.
• Hint/Tutorial System: Subtle pop-up hints were added for new players, explaining basic controls or concepts when they first encounter them (e.g., how to break blocks, open inventory).

Conclusion

Minecraft 1.12: The World of Color Update delivered far more than just a palette refresh. It brought foundational changes that enhanced creativity, accessibility, and technical possibilities. The introduction of Concrete and Glazed Terracotta provided builders with powerful new tools for expression. The Recipe Book and Advancements system significantly smoothed the learning curve and offered better guidance through the game's progression. Parrots added ambiance and interaction to jungles, while function files revolutionized how complex maps and game mechanics could be created. Whether you’re building a vibrant modern city, designing an intricate adventure map with custom advancements and recipes, or simply enjoying a more polished and user-friendly survival experience while grooving with your shoulder-mounted parrots, 1.12 added layers of flair, function, and fun that continue to be appreciated in the Minecraft world today.