Minecraft to get underwater worlds featuring shipwrecks, dolphins and tridents

Minecraft’s oceans will be filled with shipwrecks, animals and a unique weapon in a new update to the popular blockbuilding game.

While large bodies of water are common in Minecraft, they are largely empty, and only contain squid, clay and sand.

The Update Aquatic will introduce coral, kelp, fish, dolphins and a trident, creating large underwater worlds that players can explore.

“Minecraft’s oceans are barren and empty but this update will put shipwrecks, animals, and coral into them,” said Matt Booty, Corporate Vice-President of Minecraft at Microsoft Studios. “There will be a whole underwater world to explore, and players will get to use tridents, too. We are very excited to see what people create.”

The trident can be thrown at enemies and used in close combat. It can also be enchanted with Impaler and Slipstream Dash abilities, while the Loyalty enchantment will make the trident come back to you even after you’ve thrown it.

The features were announced at Minecon Earth, the annual conference devoted to the game. In previous years, Minecon has been held in Los Angeles, but this year Microsoft ran several events across the world, including in London.

To celebrate the event, Minecraft gave away a new skinpack and released several new worlds – including the Purple Party Parrot Palace, Truffletop Town and Enderman’s Forest.

Minecraft also announced the release of a new server partner. The Hive will bring its Death Run mini-game, in which players race through a map while dodging obstacle and traps, to the franchise soon.

Fans can also get to grips with a new Mob – The Hovering Inferno. Jens Bergensten, lead designer for Minecraft, said: “This is a master Blaze, with body parts that look like shields, which it uses to defend itself. The Hovering Inferno spawns with a group of blazes as a random encounter in the Nether. It has a shockwave attack that is very dangerous; you will definitely need some flame protection to defeat this mob.”

Minecon Earth came less than a week after a new coding tutorial set in the Minecraft world was released. A Hero’s Journey has been made available to coincide with Hour of Code, a global initiative aimed at encouraging more people to get into computer programming.

The free Minecraft tutorial features a new character called the Agent, and gives players 12 challenges that teach core coding concepts such as loops – a sequence of instructions that is continually repeated until a certain condition is reached – debugging – removing errors from the program – and functions – reusable code that performs a function. It also contains popular objects such as Redstone and pistons.

For the first time, players can upload the last level in A Hero’s Journey to Minecraft: Education Edition and see their work come to life in the game. Using the Code Builder extension for Minecraft, they can then continue to work on their creations in a larger version of the game.