Minecraft's Combat Update Changes the Game in a Big Way

Minecraft’s 1.9 patch—known as the Combat Update—has been in development at Mojang for well over year, and it’s arriving on PC today. So what exactly does it bring to the table? Let’s take a look.

Once you start playing, the first new thing you’ll notice will likely be the off-hand slot. This is a new inventory slot which you can use to dual wield items, like a sword and a shield, as in the GIF above, or a pickaxe and a stack of torches, so you can light up your mineshafts without constantly switching between items.

Of course, you can use your main hand and off hand items independently of each other.

You can also use the off-hand slot to choose what type of arrow you’ll use when firing the bow (yes, courtesy of the update, there are now multiple new arrow types). Otherwise, the game just randomly picks arrows from your inventory.

The patch changes the way combat works, too (hence the name). The damage you inflict is now determined by cooldowns: the faster you swing, the less damage you do. How quickly a tool returns to its full damage potential is decided by a new attack speed stat, which is different for each tool type and material. In practical terms, this means that generally, spamming left click no longer works all that well in a fight.

Tool types have been rebalanced around the cooldown mechanic, meaning you’ve got good all-rounder swords, slow but strong axes, and very fast but weak hoes.

Minecraft’s endgame dimension, The End, is getting a revamp as well. The Ender Dragon, fittingly for the final boss of the game, got new breath and explosive attacks, which should make the fight—or fights, since it can now be infinitely respawned—a lot more interesting. There’s also a new type of dungeon called End city, found on infinitely generating floating islands around the central island. Here you can find the flight cape Patricia wrote about a few months back (they’re actually called Elytra), among other types of rare loot.

Those are the big ones, but it’s far from everything. Consult the full change log below, via Mojang’s blog, for a summary of what’s new in 1.9. A more detailed list is available at the Minecraft wiki.