What are Minecraft trial chambers? Over the past few years, Mojang has added more and more to our underground experience in Minecraft, with new, stunning cave systems added with the Caves and Cliffs update in 2021, and amethyst geodes and Ancient cities brought in to stumble across while exploring. There are of course Strongholds to look out for underground too, and all those valuable ores. But with the Minecraft 1.21 update, trial chambers add another massive and exciting structure to your next Minecraft adventure.
Announced during Minecraft Live 2023, the Minecraft 1.21 update adds new vanilla features, changing the way you craft with the automated Minecraft Crafter block and expanding on your underground exploration. Trial chambers are large, multi-level structures found underground that you can plunder alone or with friends to practice your combat skills and earn some valuable loot. They feature new decorative blocks sets, a new light block, and even a new mob: the Minecraft Breeze.
Minecraft trial chambers
Here’s everything you need to know about Minecraft trial chambers:
Copper bulb
Once you mine your way into one of the special structures, your gloomy and mysterious path will be lit by new copper bulbs, which look somewhat similar to redstone lamps and are built into the chamber’s halls.
Ok, so we know that, technically, these structures haven’t been here a long time, but let’s immerse ourselves in the lore for a minute and pretend that they have – these copper bulbs, which have been sitting underground for so long, have started to oxidize, just like existing copper blocks do, so they don’t let out as much light as they once might have. If you’ve got an axe handy, though, you can scrape away this oxidization and light your path ahead. You can wax copper bulbs with honeycomb at any stage in the oxidization process to prevent your surroundings growing dark again.
New blocks
As we’ve come to expect from any good Minecraft content update, another set of pretty building blocks is being added with Minecraft 1.21, and this time around the Tuff block and Copper set get some new additions.
The grey-green Tuff block was originally added to the game with Minecraft amethyst geodes but is now found in veins below y-level 0. In trial chambers, though, copper walls are decorated with detailed new tuff blocks, which have a pretty, geometric edge.
There are at least two new copper blocks coming to 1.21, as well as the copper bulb, which we just got a small glimpse of during Minecraft Live. There’s a copper door, which presumably changes color as it oxidizes, just like the other copper blocks. There’s also a pretty grate block which appears to be a transparent block, with an intricate, trellis-like pattern on all sides.
Trial spawners
Mob spawners: you either love them or hate them. We have never been big fans of stumbling upon a skeleton dungeon or a cave spider spawner, but thankfully these new trial spawners are slightly less terrifying.
Hidden within the depths of the trial chambers, trial spawners can spawn a range of different mobs, but you should know which one it is by the blocks on the ground around it. For example, in the Minecraft Live stream, the trial spawner was surrounded by ice blocks, suggesting that Strays were going to appear. We don’t yet know what the other spawner types are, but we’re sure plenty of the rarer hostile Minecraft mobs, like Strays, are going to get an appearance.
What’s so special about trial spawners, though, is that they don’t keep chucking endless, killer mobs at you. As these are for training purposes, the number of mobs that spawn depends on how many people are training. No matter how many of you there are, though, there’s still a limit to how many mobs the spawner generates before it pauses for a time, giving you a breather from combat. Successfully defeat all of the mobs it throws at you, and it ejects loot at you as your reward.
The Breeze
The Breeze is one of the brand-new mobs coming to the game alongside the Minecraft mob vote winner. This sort of hostile mob, from what we know so far, only generates in trial chambers and fires gusts of wind that explode on impact. The good news is that these projectiles don’t cause damage when they explode, but if the ball of wind hits you directly, it can hurt a bit. We’ve got more on this new Minecraft mob in our Minecraft Breeze guide.
Trial chamber loot
Supply chests lie scattered about trial chambers, in large combat rooms, and in small alcoves of their own. Since trial chambers are procedurally generated, their number and where you’ll find them will always be a surprise. We don’t know what’s going to appear in these chests yet, but they will include “things that will challenge you, but also things that can help you,” according to Mojang’s Matthew ‘Moesh’ Dryden.
While that’s everything we know about Minecraft trial chambers so far, we don’t have to wait too long to jump into them for ourselves. Make sure you know how to download and play Minecraft snapshots or Minecraft Preview so you’re ready to test your skills in these chambers when they become available as an experimental feature ahead of the Minecraft 1.21 release date sometime in 2024.