Minecraft's Latest Snapshot Updates Chat Reports, for Abuse-free Building
Minecraft is a game to be shared with friends. Sometimes you'll be putting your all in to create something awesome and sometimes you'll be playing with mods to recreate Elden Ring, and other times you'll be looking at servers online to see what the world offers. Sometimes things can get messy when you play online with strangers. That is what the latest Minecraft snapshot is aiming to fix.
Minecraft snapshot 22W24A is out now, and it's building towards 1.19.1 by adding a few bug fixes and two new features. The main one here is chat reporting which lets you report players who send "abusive messages" in the game chat. It's worth noting that the blog states that "any reports made during the testing phase may not be taken into consideration," but the ability to kick out toxic players is an integral aspect of any online game which is why this could be an excellent move.
Chat reporting is accessible in the social interactions screen. You'll have to report chat messages individually and select the appropriate category. This will help keep the system from being misused. It is not possible to create a generic report on a user. You have to specify what they did. The blog states that your report will be scrutinized by a moderation team. It's not possible to know what constitutes a real and actionable report yet, but it's worth learning the basics of it.
Another major change is that you can now duplicate the amazing Minecraft allay. This can be accomplished by giving them an amethyst shard. However, duplicates have the benefit of a 2.5-minute cooling time. This should help alleviate woes about the amount of allay mobs there are. Plus, there's always more of the cute thing, isn't it?
In more non-official news, we're hugely fond of this Mario Kart mod for Minecraft. It adds the karts that you enjoy in Minecraft, but also includes cool water features.