I hope to have some fun in 1.20 myself. Been kinda disconnected the last year or so, but I have plans, that'll make steamdeck control input a bit more fun.
I'd rather have Mojang get their act together and address some of the more fundamental issues that are starting to plague the game.
I understand that Minecraft is a complex game and there's a lot that would need to be rewritten; but as thing stand right now they are signing themselves up to drown in mountains of technical debt.
A good example is the threading issues on the server where the game has to tick each entity and each chunk which is a fairly independent process and is an almost perfect candidate for multithreading, but the game uses a forEach() loop on a single thread.
There's dozens more issues like these where decisions from 10 years ago (which made sense at the time) are now inadequate for the scale of the game at large.
This is felt doubly so by mod devs who have to adjust to how things are done and have to try and fit their code with some of the now archaic java code that lies at the foundation of the game.
As things stand right now they are refusing to address these issues at al and just kicking the can further down the road, but there will be a point where doing so will simply cost them too much to do so and I fear that that will be the end of the Java edition of the game.
And I do know that doing this is far from a trivial task; but if you start work now while you still have the time you can do this slowly in the background with other updates.
For a long time, I've suspected that Mojang would eventually stop updating Java Edition to focus on "Minecraft," (that is, Bedrock Edition) instead. Time will tell if and when, though.
there's been a general shift to BE (Bedrock Edition) over the last few years, but quite a significant part of the active community is playing on JE instead due to more content, less paywalling, and actual mod support (even with BE having some mods and mods on JE split between forge and fabric for now).
it's going to be hard for mojang to give up the JE of the game as that is where the active playerbase lies and most of the people there are unlikely to migrate to BE even after being offered this version of the game for free twice.
There's a LOT of under the hood stuff people havent really noticed yet. Armor Trims AND A DUMMY ENTITY with an ok level of default listening parameters is a massive step forwards for making the game more fun in the future.
Armor trims alongside attributes and NBT fundimentally allow you to make custom armor in vanilla. Armor trims let you target unmodified armor, and replace it with the armor you code in. If Mojang extends this to items, and give us some dummy trims, we could remake mods with data packs even easier.
The dummy entity is beyond crazy for plugin and datapack creators as well. I saw someone make a functional piano when the system first came out.
Will it replace modding? Absolutely not, but it will help improve mod performance going forwards for sure.
The only thing I really got news wise of the update is that there's cherry blossoms, but it doesn't feel very new because modpacks have pretty much always had some version of the trees in there. Glad it's official, at least.
As a server owner, not really. My friends and I like certain mods, so we usually wait until ALL of those mods are updated before moving versions (we're just now working on updating from 1.18.2-1.19.2). Plus our normal motivation for updating is whether our favorite mods have added new content we'd like play with (Ars Nouveau is one of these).
It'll probably be a year or two minimum before we start looking seriously at 1.20.
I suppose that's one of the biggest drawbacks to modded Minecraft. Back in the 1.7.10 era MC updates were SLOW, so mod authors had time to build and perfect big mods. Nowadays bigger mods may skip a whole version or two on their way to updating, and be behind once they get done. Minecraft updates faster than big mod authors can code.
I haven’t really played a true survival game of vanilla since 1.10. Every version that comes out I say “I’ll try it this time” and wait for the next one instead haha.
that being said, I do like how 1.11 to 1.20 truly feels like a huge update so I’m excited to try it.
I really think 1.20 was kind of a filler update with nothing really new noticeable but more lag (Maybe my computer is just bad though!). However, if 1.19 modding is any indication of what is to come, then 1.20 could be a step in the right direction for making modding easier, thus making the experience better for all. Until then, I'll just try and see how to improve my performance with it so that I can try out some of the new features.