Minecraft's massive 1.20 update is nearly ready for release

Minecraft 1.20
(Image credit: Mojang/Microsoft)

Minecraft 1.20, also known as the Trails and Tales update, is looking set to come out very soon, as developer Mojang is starting to launch pre-release snapshots of the update.

Minecraft has a bit of an idiosyncratic patch release cycle, if you're not familiar with it. Major updates like 1.20 typically get previewed in 'snapshots' - beta versions of the patch made available to any Minecraft: Java Edition players who want to try out new features early. We typically get new snapshots launching weekly for several months, each of which will add a handful of new features debuting in the upcoming update.

Once the snapshots are done, we get pre-releases, which signify when the developers are done adding new features and are making final tweaks and bug fixes. That's where we're at now, as Minecraft 1.20 pre-release 1 has just gone live. You can see the patch notes for yourself on the official site, but they're pretty dry and technical - maybe the most notable thing is that a nearly 11-year-old bug has been fixed, the latest in a chain of fixes for ancient glitches.

This is all a very long-winded way of saying: Minecraft 1.20 is likely to launch across all versions of the game within the next month. It could be longer if Mojang discovers some major technical problems at the last minute, but precedent suggests that we'll be diving into Trails and Tales by early June.

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Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.