Minecraft’s copper age is getting closer with the first two pre-releases of version 1.21.9, bringing refinements to everyone’s favorite robotic helpers and some useful quality-of-life improvements.
The Copper Golems continue getting attention with behavior tweaks that make them smarter and more consistent. They now only try to access chests that are actually next to them when they’re riding something, which should prevent some awkward pathfinding situations. More importantly, they’ll now oxidize properly even when daylight cycles are turned off, and their transformation into statues has been improved to match how it works in Bedrock Edition – they can turn into statues immediately when fully oxidized and don’t need to be perfectly positioned anymore.
Mannequins also received some useful updates, gaining the ability to show custom description text and accept profile information from spawner items. This makes them more flexible for map creators and server administrators who want to create detailed NPC setups.
On the technical side, there are some handy command improvements. The spawnpoint command can now include pitch (looking up/down angle), and world spawn can be set in any dimension, not just the Overworld. This means you could technically have players respawn in the Nether by default if you really wanted to make things interesting.
The second pre-release focused mainly on bug fixes and ensuring the Copper Golem changes work smoothly across different game scenarios. Since pre-releases don’t follow the usual Tuesday schedule, keep watching for more updates as we get closer to the full release.
