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Agtrigormortis hit the bullseye. In survival mode you have players focusing largely on building, players focusing largely on surviving, and players in the middle. You want to cater towards all these groups, hence the peaceful - hard difficulty range.

When I play survival mode I prefer to focus on the survival, but that’s just me. As we’ve demonstrated there are others with different play styles and that’s great, those differences is what keeps the game going.

However, I do believe there is a valid argument to be had that over time the game has leaned increasingly towards building / collecting rather than survival. Which is fine, but I don’t think that play style should get all the attention. I originally imagined this suggestion as a way to provide some challenge for hard mode players, fear yet overall not much to normal mode players, and nothing to easy mode players, as I by no means wish to force my way of playing onto others. This way, the change can appeal to everyone.

In short, this forum has this upstart crazy idea that they are the shark tank of Minecraft suggestions and every great suggestion should come here to earn “support” and advice before going onto the feedback forum to be added. When in practice all that happens is the rare few people frequenting here shoot down general concepts of ideas and then the new folks get discouraged by the negativity so they never post again. Rinse and repeat.

So with that in mind, let’s forgo the frankly pretentious “old suggestion guidelines” that went on forever back in the day and take a more lenient approach. Do I want more fantasy mobs? Yes. Ergo Support.

Survival Mode is (contrary to its name) for adventurers playing the vanilla game.
Creative Mode is for builders or redstoners, wanting to build something without survival mode's restraints.
Adventure Mode is for adventure map players.
Hardcore Mode is for those seeking a challenging "survival" game in Minecraft.
Spectator Mode isn't really for anyone playstyle but does come in handy for many minigames.

Thank you for putting thought into your suggestion. Looks ominously at the rest of the forum

I would also like to see Owls in Minecraft. However, I do have one issue with this idea - that owls are hostile. In Minecraft, it is a general rule that real-life animals are not hostile. This is because it encourages "animal cruelty". Although I don't agree with Mojang's slippery slope reasoning I would agree that turning an animal "evil" in the eyes of the player is not ideal.

The only animal somewhat real is the Spider, but that is a Giant Spider. Even the Polar Bear which you would assume is to be hostile in a netural mob. You must provoke it. So I think the owl should behave in a similar way. Alternatively turn the owl into a "fantasy" mob and have it behave however you would like.

Partial Support.

Agreed. It's especially annoying when your friendly wolf dies. Furthermore, it would give a powerful use for diamonds in the endgame after you've made god-tier armor. You now have to craft diamond wolf gear if you want a strong wolf army (instead of just breeding them like rabbits for the strongest wolves).

Cool! More animals to meet in the world. One suggestion, would this allow for red pandas to be added?

First off, applauds to your effort. It is clear you put a lot of thought into these suggestions. Overall, I like them, but I agree with jamescoolcrafter in that some of the foods might need better uses. This isn't that big a deal though. It can easily be fixed. As the farming overall, I like the added difficulty and realism to the game. It reminds me of Villages prior to 1.14. Once they were updated, an entire part of the game was discovered, always there, but never awakened to its fullest potential.

I agree with these suggestions. They add much-needed content to snow biomes. My only suggestion would be to add a bit more detail so people know what they're getting into. We don't want another polar bear situation where the mob has no use.

That's... actually a really cool idea! It would let you have glass floors thinner like panes, instead of just glass blocks. Although I'm not sure if it is real... eh, I guess the game is already breaking that with you holding 27 stacks of blocks.

Full Support!

If you haven't read Part 1 or Part 2, I really recommend you do. In a nutshell, Part 1 makes oceans larger and adds a sailboat, and Part 2 adds a lot of ocean animals and plants. Anyway, let's dive straight into this suggestion.

Ships

Structures

Technical Stuff

Conclusion

Many features have been added to Minecraft over the years. Some small, some large; some game-changing, some useless. While features of all shapes and sizes can improve the game, I think features that give the player more options and more things to play around with can improve Minecraft in ways smaller features just can't. At the end of the day, which would make the game better: a new dungeon, or a new tool to play around with?

It is because of this and other reasons that I believe player-built ships would be a wonderful addition to Minecraft. I hope that I have proposed a balanced and reasonable method of implementing this, and I hope that you enjoyed reading.

Changes

Cannons are now much more balanced. (Suggested by MinecraftPROFESSIONAL123.)

Pirates can now go on other ships.

Merchant Ships now have a few cannons for self-defense. (Suggested by steam66.)

Pirate Coves now have a chance of being tent-filled. (Suggested by steam66.)

This is Jay the Mouse.

Jay just completed his big new house! It has two bedrooms and a big balcony for staring into the abyss:

Jay has a problem, however: his house is very big and he is very small. Jay tried asking other people to live with him in his house, but he had some issues with his potential housemates:

Standy the Stand:

Standy was very nice but also very quiet. To make matters worse, if you right-clicked her face it would pop off and you'd have to stick it back on. She never wants to follow Jay on an expedition or anything and just keeps making that confused blank face.

Villy the Villager

Villy was not as nice. He kept sleeping in Jay's bed and kept trying to get Jay to make some shady trading deals. He kept making grunting noises and when Jay wanted him to go on an adventure, he tried to offer him a loan on two pieces of redstone with a small down payment of 99.99 emeralds. Clearly he was not a fit roommate.

Jay tried asking other players to play with him, but nobody wants to play with the lonely mouse.

That's where a new mod comes in...

Posse: A mod for people with no friends!

The Posse mod would add a new mob, the Party Member. You might be tempted to call them an NPC, but that would be an inaccurate name as we'll see later.

Appearance:

The Party Member looks exactly like a player, albeit perhaps with a nametag colored light gray or yellow or in italics to remove some confusion.

In Survival Mode, the Party Member will spawn with a few included skins based on Steve and Alex and with some names included in a configuration file.

In Creative Mode, the player can customize the skin and name, either using some of the included skins or an online image. (Perhaps additionally, Party Members spawned in survival mode can also spawn with skins if the URLs are linked in the config file.)

Behavior:

What separates these Party Members from NPCs is that the player can swap places with them using a configurable keybind, similar to how one might do so in a Lego game:

On the technical side, the player will swap skins, inventories, and his position with this mob, giving the appearance that the player is now playing as the Party Member and the player's first character has become a Party Member.

In Survival Mode, Party Members can be instructed to either stay in place or come along with you. They act very similarly to tamed wolves when following you in that they attack hostile mobs and players that attack the player. If the player enters a boat, the Party Member will attempt to get in a boat in order to follow, placing one down from its inventory if necessary. If the player enters a Nether Portal, the Party Member will also attempt to enter the Nether Portal. Party Members will drop their inventory if killed (unless keepInventory is turned on) and respawn at their "Party Host's" bed.

If the Party Member cannot travel to wherever the player is or if the player dies, they will switch into "stay here" mode and alert the player that they can't pathfind to where they are. This is to make sure that Party Members do not act like portable ender chests.

In Creative Mode, additional options are provided allowing you to give more advanced commands to Party Members such as sitting down, sleeping in beds, saying certain lines of dialogue in chat when they are being interacted with by another player, or performing some kind of action, etc. You can also customize certain entity tags such as Invulnerability.

Spawning

In Survival mode, all Party Members are found in Villages in a "lonely" state. In this state, they will not respawn and do not have a "Party Host", and they act somewhat like Nitwit villagers. This can be changed by paying them a small price of a couple of emeralds to get them to join your Party, at which point they will immediately begin following you around.

In Creative Mode, Party Members can be spawned in via Spawn Egg and upon right-clicking on them, you need only click a button to get them to join your party, however, you may customize them without letting them join your party.

Bonus Points:

• It might be interesting if you could tell a Party Member to avoid common mob traps like pressure plates or open trapdoors if at all possible unless the pathfinder can't find a way around.
• In addition to this, it might be helpful if Party Members avoided some of the pitfalls that normal mobs tend to fall for, for example, they will not attempt to pathfind into another Party Member, possibly knocking them into a fall or lava. Party Members should actively try to avoid death in "Stay Here" mode too, trying to fend off mobs if they attack and fight for ground on small platforms if mobs try to push them off.
• It might also be interesting if the Party Member had the ability to jump over 1 or 2 block gaps.
• Party Members can be taught to prefer more powerful (Diamond/Enchanted Sword), less expensive (Snowballs), or less dangerous (Bow) weapons and whether or not to automatically attack mobs.
• In addition to the previous point, if a Party Member is using a sword, it might be interesting if they were able to intentionally try and get critical hits when possible.
• I feel like the ability for Party Members to mine blocks is overpowered, though potentially this could be allowed through a config. (This wouldn't be some kind of difficult-to-code intelligent system, more like "Please mine this area from coordinates ABC to coordinates XYZ")
• Support for some weapons, tools, and armor from other mods like Immersive Engineering or Simply Jetpacks might be nice. Elytra support goes under this heading too.
• MorePlayerModel support would be nice.
• Possibly limited to Creative mode, but it would be useful if you could configure which skin overlays are being displayed on a Party Member through a GUI of some kind, similar to how the player can customize his/her own.
• Seeing as this mod is called "Posse", which is a term often associated with cowboys... well... it only makes sense to add a new armor item.

The Update Aquatic was one of the best updates in Minecraft’s recent history— it addressed a serious issue (a lack of ocean content) and, for the most part, executed its additions well. In fact, before the Update Aquatic, many people (including me) made suggestions for the ocean. However, the ocean could still use more content and some of the Update Aquatic needs tweaking, so I’d like to propose some more changes and additions to the ocean.

Continents

The Sea Floor

Beaches

Ocean Mobs

Deep Sea Mobs

Transportation

One final thing that needs to be improved in oceans is transportation. Tiny boats only fit two players, can’t carry chests, break too easily, and are a little slow.

Longboats

The longboat is crafted with two normal boats. It can hold up to three players and a chest. Up to two players are able to row; if one player is rowing, then the boat goes the same speed as the normal boat, but if two players are rowing, it goes much faster. Unlike the normal boat, a single hit from a tool or arrow will not destroy it. Instead, it has more health and takes multiple hits to be destroyed.

Sailboats

The sailboat is crafted with a longboat and a banner. The banner design will be shown on the sail. Like the longboat, the sailboat can hold up to three people and is able to hold a chest. However, the sailboat does not move by oars; instead, the sailboat moves without a player having to hold W.

One of the advantages of the sailboat is that you don't have to hold down W. It will keep moving until you press S to stop it, so you're able to look at treasure maps, organize items in your inventory or the chest, or even try to shoot arrows at mobs or players with your bow.

The sailboat goes forward at a speed that starts out at 0.75 times the speed of the normal boat, but slowly increases to a speed that is 1.5 times that of the normal boat. It takes 10 seconds for this speed increase to complete. This means normal boats and longboats are more practical for transportation across short distances, while sailboats are more practical for traveling across long distances.

The sailboat is turned by pressing A and D. The first player to enter the sailboat is the one able to turn the boat.

Like the longboat, the sailboat takes multiple hits (even from an arrow or tool) to be destroyed.

Conclusion
With all of these new features, I hope Minecraft would have oceans that are more fun and interactive. The new animals and monsters would make oceans and beaches more challenging and interesting. The new boats would make navigating across oceans a lot more enjoyable and efficient since they are faster and can have chests.

Thanks for reading! What do you think about these ideas?

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Chairs

I've seen a lot of chair suggestions with the same flaw– the chair serves no purpose. We have beds, but they allow you to skip the night and set your spawn. Some have suggested that chairs be used to skip the day, but others argue that removing the ability to simply sit down from the chair also takes away from its aesthetic use. So, I propose a mixed approach to solve those issues.

As you can see above, chairs would be able to be made out of wood, cobblestone, and wool. They link together when placed together (allowing you to make a couch), but this can be avoided by holding shift while placing them.

When you right-click on a chair, you sit in it. Just like there is a "leave bed" button that appears when you enter a bed, there is a button that says "skip to night." This button fades away after sitting in the chair for 5 seconds. Pressing the button will make the screen fade to dark, and then the game will skip to nighttime. Like with beds, every player on the server must be doing this to skip to night.

The chair does not contribute to the nights slept statistic like the bed since you are choosing to experience the dangers of the night. Also note that the chairs do not set or remove players' spawnpoints.

If you right-click a chair with a wool block, it will add cushioning. On the wooden and cobblestone chair, it looks like this:

But on the wool chair, it looks like this:

(If the chair had another chair adjacent to it only on one side, it would have the second model; otherwise, it'd have the first model.)

With this system, chairs would be customize-able, aesthetically pleasing, and useful for if you need to skip to night.

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Quote from ExtinctInsanity»

Sounds pointless. You're wanting another version on creative mode...

I know this has been suggested a few times by other people, but another take on it won’t hurt anybody

As has been pointed out before, the dimensions in Minecraft sort of correspond to the classical elements. The Overworld is earth, the Nether is fire, the End is air, and water is missing. So it deserves its own dimension: the Abyss.

Accessing

Now in other people’s ideas for a third otherworld I’ve seen people claim that you’d need resources from both the Nether and the End, but I don’t like that. The “End” needs to remain the “end” of the game. If anything the Abyss should contribute to getting to the End. But anyway.

The Abyss is accessed by portal like the other dimensions. Its portal are like a mix of Nether and End portals. Like the Nether portal, they are composed of blocks you can obtain and position how you like. Like the End portal, the they are horizontal and entering it is like jumping into a pool. The corresponding portal floats in the Abyss, and can we swum back into at any time. Spawning back into the overworld finds you standing in the portal, which won’t teleport you until you jump out and back in.

The portal needs to be made of Prismarine Crystal blocks, made by 9x9 crafting of Prismarine Crystals. These are arranged in the same way as an end portal (or larger if that’s what you want). To activate it you need to place a water block against the inner rim of it, like setting fire to a Nether portal.

Landscape

The Abyss needs to be very distinct from the Overworld Ocean. The same way that the Nether is very different from a cave with lava in it and the End is very different from the occasional floating islands you find.

First things first: the Abyss is totally filled with water. It is possible to create air pockets, and a few will naturally generate the way lava lakes generate in the Overworld caves. Bubble columns from the depths should also help the player stay alive. Being underwater tends to be pretty difficult with the light levels. The water getting darker as you go deeper is a more gradual in the Abyss. Up in the top layers, it should be nearly as easy to navigate as in air. In the bottom layers, it’ll be nearly pitch black (natural light sources not withstanding) and require serious stocking up on night-vision potions and sea lanterns.

Like the Nether, both the top and bottom of the Abyss are covered with a layer of bedrock, though the Abyss shouldn’t feel like a cave. The top layer of the Abyss is a layer of ice (and packed ice and blue ice), as if the surface of the ocean is frozen over. Giant ice stalactites spear down into the water. Air pockets and other goodies are waiting for you inside the stalactites. The ice doesn’t freeze the water around the stalactites or regenerate them, though the very top layers until the height limit is reached contain an increasingly rapid water freezing effect that ensure the layer of bedrock is impossible to reach (maybe there shouldn’t even be one? Just an impassable layer of ice? Or a new form of bedrock ice?).

I haven’t made up my mind about what belongs in the middle layers, other than otherwordly fish. Open water seems just boring, but is probably more practical. The floor of the Abyss depends of different biomes (to match the Nether’s upcoming biomes) which I’ll expand on later.

The bottom layers of the Abyss before the bottom bedrock are made of “Abyssalstone” (equivalent of Netherrack or Endstone, deep indigo in colour). There are a few caves in there, some flooded and some containing air pockets. There are also ores to dig, rewarding you with Prismarine shards, Prismarine crystals, and maybe something more substantial that couldn’t already be harvested from Ocean Monuments. Atop the abyssalstone is a layer of sand and gravel, or maybe a unique block with similar properties. Also some magma blocks to provide air columns.

Biomes

The Abyss needs to be an equivalent realm to the Nether, and since it’s receiving new biomes the Abyss should have them too. I’ve heard they’re working on 3D biomes but I’m not smart enough to try and implement this in my proposal (maybe the layer of ice could have its own variants?). These are a few examples, and should be the absolute minimum of the biomes included:

• Coral: Abyssal corals come in far more variety than the Overworld corals, covering every colour not covered by Overworld coral. The Coral block structures are also much larger than Overworld coral reefs, forming enormous tendril-like towers to match the ice-stalactites. Airpockets and other goodies might be found inside the coral towers. The design of each tower depends on the type of coral. Some of the coral might be luminescent to help the players see.
• Kelp Jungles: Very different from the kelp and seagrass of the Overworld. Here it grows tall and thick, and resembles the trees of the Overworld jungles. The player should swim over them unless they want to get lost. From these kelp-trees the player can get a unique green-coloured wood, and the decaying leaves will drop otherworldly fruits. The leaves and branches might hold air pockets. Some trees grow glowing fruit that help the player see.
• Ice columns: Very simple. Where the ice stalactites on the roof are much larger and extend all the way to the sea floor. There are no lights here, or magma blocks to provide air. A very inhospitable biome unless you’re lucky enough to burrow into an air pocket.
• Plains: No fancy terrain features, except maybe hills and trenches that occurs in all of them. Just the bare floor of the abyss. Useful for generated structures.
• Other ideas: Brine swamps? Magma fissures?

Mobs

In other suggestions for an Ocean Dimension I’ve seen mob suggestions like “whales, sharks, rays” and all that, and I have to disagree. All those are natural species and belong in the Overworld oceans. The Abyss is an alien world and should be at least as alien as the Nether mobs. Here are a few suggestions:

• Merfolk: A humanoid mob with fish tails. Merfolk are the Villagers and Piglins of the Abyss. Friendlier than Piglins but more distrusting than Villagers. Like the Villagers they get different variations depending on where their village spawns. They can defend themselves like Piglins, though also have dedicated guards like the Villagers. Which brings us to:
• Abyssal Guardians: A variation of the Guardians from the Ocean Monument. Neutral rather than hostile, and focuses primarily on physical attacks than putting status effects on their foes. The player is capable of crafting this kind of Guardian to defend their own ocean bases.
• Zombie Merfolk: Self explanatory. Tend to keep to the undersea caves or the ice layer.
• Skeletal Dolphin: Kind of a silly idea I'm only partially sold on.
• Sludge: The Abyssal equivalent of Slimes and Magma Cubes, coloured like gravel or sand or something. Smallest are harmless, like Overworld Slimes.
• Kraken: Monster A from Minecon 2017. Very dangerous and lurk around the generated structures. Maybe hint they're magical or mechanical?
• Murkmite: A mix between bees and silverfish that have nest blocks on the sea floor. Hitting one causes large swarms to come after you. Are a prime source of food if you’re up to fighting them.
• Leviathan: The first thing you’ll learn to hate, and patrol the open water everywhere its big enough to spawn them. Resemble giant crocodiles with flippers, but each flipper is another mouth.
• Mobs currently in Minecraft: Guardians, Drowned, I guess fish can inhabit the sea, and Endermen can rarely spawn in air pockets.

Generated Structures

Just like everywhere else, there needs to be structures to encourage exploration. I don't have many ideas here, sorry.

• Merfolk Villages: Found in different styles, some built into giant coral or kelp or ice columns, or some just by themselves on the oceanic plains. Constructed mostly with the kelp-wood, but also have some Prismarine so we know who build those Ocean Monuments Or maybe not, maybe we should leave that ambiguous.
• Abyssal Citadels: Equivalent of the Nether Forts. Resemble Ocean Monuments but should put them to shame. Inhabited by the undead, Krakens, and Guardians. Should have some major rewards. Like, rework the progress to the End so its necessary to visit these structures type rewards.
• Submarines: I'm a little unconvinced on this one, but I'll keep it for completion's sake. Similar to End Ships, sort of. Rare vessels in the open water between the ice layer and the ocean floor. Designed sort of like real pre-industrial submarines, and contain air pockets. Built long ago, so are slowly beginning to decompose; they should be partially flooded but still contain goodies.

Why?

Minecarts have always been clunky, and are very overdue for an overhaul.

Changes

While I am going to propose new minecarts, I first want to make some changes to the current system through which minecarts work.

Improve Minecart Physics

One of the reasons the minecart system has always been clunky is the fact that both players and other minecarts can pass through minecarts. This should be changed to make minecarts easier to manage and more predictable. Minecarts should now be "solid" as boats are; walking into one is akin to walking into a block, and you are able to stand on them. Similar to cauldrons, you can stand inside a minecart.

Minecarts should also follow this rule when colliding with one another, meaning two minecarts can't pass through each other. When two minecarts hit each other, they should also not get more reaction momentum than action momentum. At the moment, a slowly moving minecart can make another minecart go very fast with just a small touch.

Improve Minecart Speed

According to the Official Minecraft Wiki, boats have the same speed as minecarts. While boats do have a decent speed for a vehicle that is placed down and used immediately, this speed should not be equivalent to that of a vehicle that requires a preliminarily-built track to work.

What I am saying is that minecarts should be faster. Once built up to full speed, minecarts should travel at twice the speed that they currently do. For those who think this would be overpowered: minecarts are already this speed on the Legacy Console Editions.

Make Rails 3D

This is obviously much less of a priority than the previously mentioned changes, but I still think it should be implemented. The game actually has support for 3D rails, and there are even resource packs that make this change. So, why not add it to vanilla? This would of course be optional, and could be configured via the setting called, "Rails: Fast/Fancy."

Increase Rail Output

Now this is something that is definitely high priority. At the moment, these cost one gold ingot per rail excluding the cost of sticks and redstone. This sounds reasonable, but it's still pretty expensive for players who don't have a gold farm. Thus, the output should be changed from 6 powered rails to 8 powered rails.

Chunk Loading

This might be one of the most important changes to minecarts. When they are moving, they should load chunks. This would mean that you can send a minecart off and it would continue moving and loading chunks until it stops. Unlike how players load many chunks surrounding them, a moving minecart would only load 5 chunks at a time: the one it is in, and the four chunks that are directly surrounding them.

Because this could cause serious lag issues on servers or custom maps that use lots of moving minecarts, there would be a gamerule you could use to disable or enable minecart chunk loading:

/gamerule doMinecartChunkLoading true

/gamerule doMinecartChunkLoading false

"Splat!"

When a player or mob is hit by a minecart that's moving quickly, it takes damage. The minecart will also slow down slightly.

Linking Minecarts

This is one of the most asked for features, and I am sad Mojang still hasn't put it in the game. Minecarts should be able to be connected with leads. Simple as that.

New Minecarts

Dispenser & Dropper Minecarts

These are crafted just how you would expect. Just like actual dispensers and droppers, these minecarts can be placed in any orientation. They have an inventory of 9 slots, and are activated with a powered activator rail.

Redstone Block Minecart

Crafted with a minecart and redstone block, the redstone block minecart powers adjacent blocks. The blocks that get powered are:

• The block placed directly above the rails

• The blocks on either sides of the rails

• The rails themselves

This means that you can link up redstone block minecarts to your minecart train and they will power the powered rails!

Locomotive Minecart

(The current furnace minecart would now just be used for cooking items.)

Just like the normal minecart, it can be ridden by players. However, it requires fuel to move. You can get it to start moving by right-clicking on it with fuel. Each fuel powers the minecart for half as long as the fuel lasts in a furnace. The locomotive starts out very slow, but its speed can be increased by giving it more fuel while it is moving.

The maximum speed of the locomotive is 3 times the current maximum speed of minecarts, meaning it would be 1½ times that of the new maximum speed.

Locomotives would be balanced because they require a player to keep putting fuel in to ensure the locomotive keeps on going. Also, when a locomotive is traveling at a speed greater than the new max. minecart speed (so more than 75% of its own maximum speed) it explodes when crashing into blocks or other minecarts, and will even derail at turns.

Cow Catcher

Cow catchers are able to be placed on any minecart (including locomotives, of course) via right-click and do extra damage and knockback to any mobs or players on the tracks.

They also prevent minecarts from slowing down from hitting mobs/players.

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Just copy the image above.

Special Thanks To:

AaronBlader12 for the idea of redstone minecarts

Introduction

There's no question that a "cave update" or "underground update" is quite popular among the community.

Here are some examples from r/minecraftsuggestions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/minecraftsuggestions/comments/7t822n/its_time_we_put_the_mine_back_into_minecraft/

https://www.reddit.com/r/minecraftsuggestions/comments/cka3d5/biome_specific_caves_and_dungeons/

https://www.reddit.com/r/minecraftsuggestions/comments/6s2l5i/for_a_game_called_minecraft_we_sure_havent_had_a/

https://www.reddit.com/r/minecraftsuggestions/comments/8zebd7/minecraft_really_needs_a_mining_update_here_are_7/

https://www.reddit.com/r/minecraftsuggestions/comments/cnfzwj/new_cave_variant_wet_cave/

Not only is it clear that the community wants more underground content, but there is also a very good reason to add more to caves: they are nearly identical to one another, and there is little to look for after you've acquired a large amount of ores. To make underground exploration more fun and rewarding, there should be more cave variants. This is an idea for just one variant. There could be many, many more!

Mushroom Caves

Mushroom caves can be found anywhere in the Overworld with a similar rarity to mine shafts. In mushroom island biomes, they are twice as common. Mushroom caves are only found below y=40.

Appearance

As you can see, mushroom caves have a floor that's about 50% mycellium, with mushrooms and the occasional somewhat-giant mushroom.

New Mycellium Variant

In this cave, the walls are almost entirely covered with a new variant of mycellium. This variant is white and resembles vines. It grows just like vines, but it's unable to grow if the light level is above 8. As you would expect, you're able to climb it.

When powered, hyphae will transmit the redstone signal to other hyphae. Unlike with redstone, the signal does not decrease over time. However, because hyphae don't actually power anything on their own, you'll have to use a redstone comparator to receive the signal.

Hyphae allow you to transmit redstone signals on walls without losing the signal, but with the drawback that it only works on walls and that you have to read it with a redstone comparator.

Glowing Mushrooms

A new green-tinted white mushroom is occasionally found in the mushroom caves and on the surface of mushroom islands. Glowing mushrooms give off as much light as a torch. They only spread in mushroom island biomes, and even then they spread quite slowly and are unaffected by bone meal, making exploration the main way to obtain them.

You can craft one glowing mushroom into 3 glowing mushroom powder, which can be placed like string. When placed, it gives off the same amount of light as a torch, but it's nearly invisible, just like placed string. This would allow for more hidden lighting.

Rivers have two issues:

1. They aren't wide enough. This makes sharp turns in rivers very narrow and awkward.

2. More importantly, because of issue 1, rivers are often inadvertently overridden by adjacent terrain generation, making traveling by boat across a river impractical.

These issues are shown in these images:

The solution is to make rivers wider and to make them turn less abruptly. Not only will this prevent parts of rivers being too narrow or completely overridden by other terrain, but it will also be more realistic. Instead of rivers sporadically turning left and right, they'd have a coherent direction, making navigation easier.