Things You Need To Know About The Garden Awakens In Minecraft

Key Takeaways

• The Pale Garden update in
  Minecraft
  introduces an eerie new biome with unique features like Eyeblossoms and Resin blocks.
• The Creaking mob is the standout feature of the update, requiring players to outsmart it with strategic gameplay.
• The Garden Awakens drop offers focused content, including technical additions for a more immersive gaming experience.

Minecraft’s next content update, in the form of the smaller “drop,” comes with The Garden Awakens. Initially shown off at Minecraft Live 2024, this eerie biome and its strange details are now found in the Overworld, after only roughly two months of community feedback.

Featuring the Creaking mob, Eyeblossoms, and more oddities in the Pale Garden biome, the latest drop contains far more focused content than the wider and larger update formats. While the Garden Awakens drop is smaller in scope than typical updates of the past, having it released in slightly over 2 months is a fair trade-off. With plenty of fascinating new mechanics found within the depths of the Pale Garden, there are five key things players should know before exploring the pallid place.

5 The Pale Garden

The Titular Garden

• Found near dark oak forests
• Adds pale oak wood block set, with all the blocks found for wood sets
• Only biome with pale oak and pale moss

The main focus of the drop, and the biome hinted at with the drop name, the Pale Garden is an unnerving and slightly spooky new forested biome in the Overworld. While initially seeming identical to the neighboring dark forest beyond its obviously paler look, the details within this eerie new location truly set it apart from the standard forest biome.

What players might first notice about the Pale Garden is that passive mobs do not spawn there and that all music fades away once players set foot in the biome. Covering the entire landscape is a mix of pale moss and pale oak trees, which are only found reliably within the forest, with leaves from the oaks floating straight down, unlike the cherry petal particles blowing in the wind, adding to the strange stillness of this location.

4 Eyeblossoms

A Deadly New Flower

• Can be collected when opened or closed, with different benefits for either state
• Bloom at night and close during the day
• Found only in the Pale Garden; can be bought from a wandering trader

One of the later additions to the experimental phase of the Pale Garden, Eyeblossom flowers add another eerie detail to the forest, with eyes on the lookout at night along with working as a fake-out scare for the Creaking. The Eyeblossom, when open, shares a trait with the rare Wither Rose as a hazardous trap for bees looking to pollinate, suggesting the dangerous nature of this strange flower, even if it doesn’t harm players outright.

The opened and closed states of the Eyeblossom count as separate flowers when picked up, meaning players can do even more with this new flora. For multiplayer servers, either type of Eyeblossom creates a suspicious stew with negative effects, causing blindness from the opened flower and nausea from the closed one. Outside any additional use, the confusion and doubt the Eyeblossoms will give players looking out for the Creaking are more than enough for the flower to be a welcome new addition.

3 Resin

Brilliant New Building Blocks

• Farmed by attacking the Creaking mob, with Resin clumps spawning near Creaking Hearts
• Can be used with a Stonecutter
• Can be used with a Smithing Table

A new, vibrant block palette, the Resin family offers a renewable source for bright orange stone-like blocks. Resin has a wide array of designs and textures to use, ranging from bricks to uneven clumps, including a transparent overlay with orange Resin spots that can be used for details like oranges in trees and lava spots on smooth stone. Even beyond the building focus of the Resin blocks, the options for Resin use expand even further.

Somewhat teased in the April Fools snapshot for 2024, the orange smithing template color from amber, now used for Resin, added another color for players to better decorate their armor with. A true orange compared to the brown tones of copper in smithing, the rainbow for the bonus cosmetic option is now closer to completion.

2 Technical Additions

The Inner-Workings Of The Game

• Sounds can now be tied to blocks
• Mobs have preferred weapons, with skeletons preferring bows
• Blocks that require support, like lanterns or pressure plates, now drop when broken with any tool

For players interested in the nitty-gritty details of updates outside the often flashier content additions, the Garden Awakens drop does not disappoint. One of the more compelling details about new blocks to the Pale Garden revolves around sound and the clear potential for future updates.

Now that certain blocks produce ambient sound, to better suggest the feel of the biome, the potential to see this translated across several other blocks found throughout Minecraft is obvious. Wind through leaves, rustling grass in drier biomes, crashing waves near oceans and more are clear candidates for such treatment. One of the bigger issues Minecraft has is a lack of ambiance, a detail which fireflies would have helped immensely, and this step forward could greatly improve the feel of the game world.

1 The Creaking

Minecraft’s Newest Mob

• Cannot move when looked at by the player
• Cannot be killed by direct attacks, including lava, only by destroying a Creaking Heart
• Drops nothing on death

The star of the Pale Garden, the Creaking mob, and its controlling Creaking Heart block, have captured the attention and creativity of the community already. This is a unique mob that cannot be directly harmed by the player in any capacity except to slow it, though hitting the puppet causes Resin clumps to appear nearby. The Creaking can only move when the player looks away from it, further pushing the design choices for hostile mobs.

With the Creaking Heart block being the only way to kill a Creaking puppet, players have to tear apart the Pale Garden to try and minimize the enemies on the prowl. Beyond that, breaking and picking up the Creaking Heart with Silk Touch allows players to spawn Creaking puppets wherever they like, which is the only way to farm Resin reliably.