Minecraft 23w12a
Trails & Tales Snapshot
Wednesday, March 22, 2023
The first 1.20 snapshot, March 22, 2023: the 1.20 experiments became part of the game, plus trail ruins, suspicious gravel, sniffer eggs and editable signs.
23w12a was the first snapshot for Minecraft 1.20, released on March 22, 2023, twenty days after the update was named Trails & Tales. It did two jobs at once. It removed the Update 1.20 experimental data pack, so everything that had been tested behind that toggle during 1.19.3 and 1.19.4, including the cherry grove, the sniffer and archaeology from 23w07a, became part of the normal snapshot. Then it added a large batch of new content on top.
Archaeology got the biggest share. Suspicious gravel now generates in cold ocean ruins and suspicious sand in warm ones, and brushing either block can turn up loot. Warm ocean ruins also hide sniffer eggs in their suspicious sand. A snifflet grows into a sniffer, and a sniffer can dig up a pitcher pod, which grows into the new pitcher plant. The calibrated sculk sensor arrived in the same snapshot: you craft it from a sculk sensor and three amethyst shards, it filters vibrations by frequency, and one of its sides takes a redstone signal.
Trail ruins were the new structure, the buried remains of a lost culture in taigas, snowy taigas, old growth birch forests and jungles. They are built from mud bricks and terracotta and full of suspicious blocks. Four of the five new armor trims come from them (host, raiser, shaper and wayfinder), along with seven of the 16 new pottery shards, now called pottery sherds. The fifth trim, silence, is found in ancient city chests at a 1.25% chance per chest, which made it the hardest one to get.
Signs changed too. You can edit a sign after placing it, give each side its own text and color, and wax it with honeycomb so nobody can change it again. The snapshot fixed 44 bugs. Pre-releases started on May 10, and Minecraft 1.20 Trails & Tales was released on June 7, 2023.