I fired up a new local 1.17.1 world over the last few evenings at home.
I'm surprised that the list of new features and changes is so long yet I've really only noticed three specific things:
- Mining iron/gold ore blocks now drops… raw iron/gold? The raw items still have to be cooked into ingots, but it's a nice welcomed aesthetic change. I wonder if the change to these raw materials might be a step in the direction of cooking alloys by mixing raw types in a future version. I'm probably overthinking that one.
- Large deepslate sections near y=0.
- SO. MUCH. COPPER. ORE.
I'm more than a little disappointed that the updated world generation with new caves and the
deeeeeeep underground stuff got axed, presumably to arrive with the next big 1.18 release. Other than an absence of interesting mobs down there, it seemed pretty solid for the week I test-drove one of the first weekly builds that had those changes several months ago.
On the bright side, that buys us more time to figure out what we're going to do with our current server world. Assuming the usual tools become available shortly after the 1.18 release, I'm still completely open to the idea of us beginning a whole new world and magicking some of our beloved structures over.
Meanwhile, it looks like OptiFine has working versions for 1.17.1 (which I've been using the last few evenings). Perhaps it's time to bump the server to 1.17.1 too.