Minecraft Ditched Fireflies In The 1.19 Update So Kids' Real Pet Frogs Won't Croak

Minecraft 1.19 launches today, loading up the Wild Update's new biomes, mobs, and technical changes. It's the final push to (almost) all of the new features that were initially presented to players during Minecraft Live 2020. This update is the last of three very major updates.

As always, there are no secrets on launch day as Minecraft game director Agnes Larsson assures me, as does Ulraf Vakhnin, a developer. Mojang is committed to player feedback, or else why bother with snapshot builds, betas, and release candidates-and the developers talked about some of the changes 1.19 underwent after users got involved.

The Wardens, who are dangerous, may have changed the most during development. Vaknin explained that "that was a spot where we were looking at feedback from both technical players and challenge players." In their March debut snapshot, the Wardens were already quite scary when I first tried to play with them. They made a very loud heartbeat noise when they agitated, roared at me, and decimated every chicken I spawned to distract them.

They now have a Sonic attack, which is a ranged ability emanating directly from their chests. This allows them to deal with players who have managed to sneak out of their long arms. Based on feedback from Minecraft's redstone tech lovers, the Skulk, a new Warden-summoning block that is snitchy and witty, underwent some changes.

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Vaknin admits that it's a technical matter. He explains that the Skulk sensor stopped responding to the first sound that was detected in the code. "We were able to see some contraptions that people tried to build, and they didn’t work because of the quirkiness of the code. So we made it more intuitive."

Mojang is still relying on feedback to inform their decisions. In the lead up to the Wild Update, fireflies, originally pitched as frog food for Minecraft Live 2020, were a surprising topic of contention. A recent Q&A video was titled "What happened the fireflies in Minecraft 1.19?"

Anna Lundgren, the producer of that video, explained that players had pointed to how fireflies can cause poisoning in frogs. Larsson and Vaknin explained that it wasn’t just players who raised the alarm. "I got reached out to by pet shop owners who said this is already a problem with people not getting educated about this and there's memes about frogs eating fireflies," Vaknin says. "So people already make this error and if Minecraft amplifies it that only makes it worse."
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Larsson claims that "we reach millions of players." Larsson said, "And that should come at a great cost." We realized that if we release features like fireflies that can be poisonous to frogs and people have frogs eating them that it could lead to their real lives being destroyed."

We reach millions of people, and that should come at great cost.

While I instinctively want to defend developers' decisions about in-development feature features for almost any reason, Larsson’s more measured explanation is probably better. Minecraft has been more than just a game for years at this point, marketing itself as an educational tool as well. New Minecraft features aren't just beholden to Bedrock vs Java editions or PC vs Xbox interfaces, Mojang also has to consider its roles as both entertainment and education for its huge audience of young kids.

Larsson states that the scope of new bugs was much smaller without fireflies feeding frogs. Mojang decided to eliminate them completely and send them back to the grand ideas catalogue. This will allow Mojang to focus on other features in the pipeline.

Vaknin is excited for seeing new Allay friends fly around houses and build. Larsson is a player of my own heart. He's excited about finding new mangrove swamps to build new buildings with the reddish mangrove wooden set and mudblocks.

Minecraft 1.19 is available as a new version in your Minecraft Launcher. It comes with a long list patch notes. Today is also the day all Minecraft players will be able to access both Java and Bedrock versions.