Minecraft 1.20 Trails and Tales: Complete Feature Breakdown

The Trails and Tales update has finally landed, and Minecraft 1.20 brings one of the most varied content drops in recent memory. Pink trees, prehistoric mobs, customizable armor, and a brand new tool category all arrived together. Here is what each addition does and where to find it.

Familiar Materials, Fresh Recipes

Several of the new building blocks reuse resources you already keep stockpiled. Chiseled bookshelves combine planks with slabs, hanging signs need stripped logs plus chains, and bamboo finally graduates into a full wood family with planks, doors, fences and more. Carry any of the ingredients with you and the recipes show up in the crafting book the moment you load the game.

Cherry Groves

The biome everyone was waiting for sits high up in the mountains. Cherry groves are painted entirely in shades of pink, from the trees down to a new flower that develops through three blooming stages. The cherry wood set is the obvious souvenir, but the area is also packed with rabbits if you are after a calmer farming spot.

Tracking one down can take a while since they spawn in mountainous terrain. A dedicated walkthrough for hunting cherry blossom biomes is available on the blog.

Camels and Sniffers

Out in the desert, the new camel struts around with one or two humps. Feed it cacti to gain its trust, then climb on. Camels seat two riders, leap across surprising gaps, and stand tall enough that ground mobs cannot reach whoever is on board.

The other newcomer takes more effort to find. Suspicious eggs spawn in chests scattered along the ocean floor, and once hatched they release sniffers, a mob officially voted back into the game years ago. Sniffers wander, dig up torchflower seeds and occasionally nap in the sun. Plant one of those seeds in any dirt block and you will eventually grow a torchflower, a bloom as ancient as the mob itself.

Note Blocks That Speak

Drop a mob head on top of a note block and the instrument stops playing musical notes. Instead, it broadcasts that mob's signature sound. Skeletons rattle, creepers hiss, ghasts wail, and an obvious wave of prank builds has already taken over multiplayer servers. As a bonus, piglins now drop their head whenever a charged creeper finishes them off, rounding out the mob head roster a little more.

Armor Trims and the Smithing Overhaul

Crafting netherite armor now requires a netherite upgrade template alongside the usual ingots. The trade-off is the armor trim system, which lets you stamp eleven decorative patterns onto any chest, leggings, helmet or boots. Each template hides in a different structure:

• Pillager Outpost: Sentry trim
• Desert Pyramid: Dune trim
• Shipwreck: Coast trim
• Jungle Temple: Wild trim
• Ocean Monument: Tide trim
• Ancient City: Ward trim
• Woodland Mansion: Vex trim
• Nether Fortress: Rib trim
• Bastion Remnant: Snout trim and the Netherite Upgrade
• Stronghold: Eye trim
• End City: Spire trim

Combine the template with the right material on a smithing table and you can match colors to your base, your faction, or whatever aesthetic you are chasing.

Archeology Arrives

The most unexpected addition is an entirely new gameplay loop. Archeology introduces the brush tool plus a fresh pair of soil types, suspicious sand and suspicious gravel, which appear in desert wells, desert temples, trail ruins and warm ocean ruins. Crouch and brush them carefully, because each block hides a single drop. Loot ranges from diamonds and TNT to pottery shards used to assemble the four new decorated pot designs.

A detailed walkthrough with loot tables is up on the blog if you want exact drop rates before raiding every dig site in sight.

Final Thoughts

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Trails and Tales packs more variety than its modest name suggests. Whether you commit to a long mountain trek for pink trees, ride a camel into the dunes, or settle in at home brushing pottery shards, there is a thread worth pulling on. Hopefully this guide saves a few minutes of patch-note skimming. Which feature are you trying first?