1.7.2, the first release of The Update that Changed the World, was a major update to Minecraft, which added many new biomes, new generated structures, new flowers, stained glass, better networking, new commands and more.
Bubbles will show up moving towards the bobber just before the player has something on the hook. This has the appearance of a fish swimming towards the hook.
Falling has particle effects.
Particle circumference size depends on distance fallen.
Is about ten blocks deeper than normal oceans; the maximum depth is in the low 30s.
Biome Variants/Technical Biomes
Over 20 variants for the biomes.
M – Biomes with an M variant are much rarer than any other variant.
Extreme hills M, Taiga M, Roofed Forest M, JungleEdge M, Birch Forest Hills M, Cold Taiga M, Extreme Hills+ M, Savanna M, Savanna plateau M, Swampland M, Jungle M, Mesa Plateau M and Mesa Plateau F M are more mountainous versions of their normal biome counterpart.
Desert M has patches of water unlike normal deserts.
Birch Forest M has taller birch trees than usual.
Savanna M has grassless dirt (coarse dirt in 1.8 and above) and mountains that can generate above the clouds and up to Y: 220 on rare occasions.
Plateau – Biomes with a plateau variant are like the hills technical biome, but flattened at the top.
Savanna plateau and mesa plateau are the only examples.
These are landforms which are raised by up to about 30 blocks and have flat tops.
Mesa Plateau F – A variant of the plateau with trees.
Mesa (Bryce) – A rare variant of the mesa biome which works similar to ice spikes, with tall clay spikes generating from the sandy mesa floor.
Looks like a proper canyon.
Hills – More technical hills biomes have been added to fit with the new biomes.
Birch Forest Hills,Cold Taiga Hills, and Mega Taiga Hills can now be generated.
Beach – Separate certain biomes from oceans and rivers.
Stone Beach is composed mainly of stone and often generates between an Extreme Hills biome and a body of water.
Cold Beach is composed of Sand with a layer of snow on top.
Usually generates between a cold biome, such as ice plains, and a body of water.
This is done by putting a colored dye in the center of a crafting table and surrounding it with 8 pieces of normal glass, yielding 8 stained glass.
Stained glass can be crafted into stained glass panes using the same recipe as normal glass panes.
Doing this yields 16 stained glass planes, like normal glass.
Water, nether portals and other stained glass blocks remain visible when looked at through a stained glass block.
Looking through a solid wall of glass blocks, is equivalent to looking through a single piece (this does not apply to glass panes of any kind).
Air blocks make the view blurrier each time.
Adjacent glass of different colors will ignore each other's colors, and will only render the terrain behind, with the color of the outermost piece of glass.
Other translucent blocks may have different effects.
Has ID number 95, which replaces the Locked Chest's data value.
Wood Varieties
Acacia wood
Silver outside with orange inside.
Makes up the acacia tree; found in Savanna biomes.
Dark oak wood
A darker version of the oak wood.
Makes up the dark oak tree; found in Roofed Forest biomes.
Acacia wood planks
Orange in appearance.
Dark oak wood planks
Same texture as normal oak planks but darkened; almost black.
Acacia and Dark Oak Wood Slabs.
Acacia and Dark Oak Wood Stairs.
Saplings
Acacia and dark oak saplings added.
Dark oak saplings require a 2x2 configuration to grow, much like big jungle trees.
A 2x2 configuration of spruce saplings on the ground, can create the large spruce trees from mega taiga biomes.
Regular spruce trees still grow.
Leaves variants
Acacia and dark oak leaves.
Both visually identical to regular oak leaves.
Packed ice
When broken, it does not turn into water, like normal ice blocks do.
Does not melt.
Opaque, rather than translucent like normal ice.
Podzol
Dirt variation that fails to be transformed to it through any method.
Render Distance is now a slider ranging from 2–16 chunks.
Max Framerate is now a slider ranging from 10–250 fps and then Unlimited.
Mipmapping can be set to levels 1–4 or disabled.
Anisotropic Filtering can be set to 2, 4, 8, 16 or disabled.
Super Secret Settings
Plays a random sound when clicked and cycles through various shaders: fxaa, art, bumpy, blobs2, pencil, color_convolve, deconverge, flip, invert, ntsc, outline, phosphor, scan_pincushion, sobel, bits, desaturate, green, blur, wobble, blobs, anti-alias and then back to normal.
The player can remove the shader by pressing F4.
Language Selection
Added 'Force Unicode Font' toggle, which allows the player to change whether Unicode font, is forced for text or not.
Default logging location is now in logs/latest.logs; older logs are archived in logs/<year>-<month>-<day>-1.lg.gz with the number at the end increasing each startup.
The way logs are saved can be changed, for example: html pages, databases, errors only or no logging at all.
"Unbreaking" can now be applied to any item with durability.
Armor, bows, fishing rods & swords can receive the enchantment directly without the use of enchanted books.
New enchantments for fishing rods that can bias the outcome of fishing.
"Lure" – reduces wait time to catch an item; increases the chance of catching fish and decreases the chance of junk and treasure.
"Luck of the Sea" – increases chance of getting treasure and decreases chance of getting junk.
Enchanted books can receive multiple enchantments at once.
Nether Portal
Can now have different width and height, to allow for design variations.
If the one in the Nether is big enough, ghasts can go through them.
Portals can be activated when any fire block appears inside the frame.
Before only the bottom-most blocks would work.
New nether portal building rules: Any rectangular size from 4×5 to 23×23.
Fog
Removed the thin fog around the player.
Fog is only at the edge of the visible chunks.
Death Screen
If the player dies and selects the 'Title screen' button, a prompt will ask if they are sure they want to quit, and give the player the options to go to the title screen or respawn and continue playing.
No longer crashes when given the wrong type (integer/short).
Added <structure>.dat files in data folder for storing structure data.
Contains .dat called Village.dat, Fortress.dat (Nether Fortress), Temple.dat (Desert Temple, Jungle Temple and Witch Hut), Stronghold.dat, Mineshaft.dat and others.
NBT structure consists of the individual parts of each structure, labeled "children," the chunk it originates in, a tag called BB, and an ID for what type of structure it is.
The children tags have information on each part of the structure and the type of part it is.
All blocks beyond X/Z 30 million (±30,000,000) from origin now act as solid blocks.
This includes air blocks.
This creates essentially an invisible wall at the boundary.
As all blocks function as solid, if the player is moved outside the boundary via external tools, they will be unable to move outside the block space they are within.
Can only smelt half as many items as wood, when used as fuel.
Weighted pressure plates
Now output a signal relative to the amount of entities on them, always starting at 1 signal strength if any entities are present.
For light weighted pressure plates, every entity adds 1 strength to the signal.
For heavy weighted pressure plates, starting at 1, every 10 entities adds 1 strength to the signal (Example: 11 entities increases signal strength to 2).
Cauldrons
Cauldrons with water in them will put out burning entities, taking away one water level each time.
Sugar canes
Color/shade is affected by the biome color (similar to leaves, grass and vines).
Dead bushes
Can be placed on hardened clay, stained clay, red sand and dirt.
Roses
Removed and replaced by poppies.
Look very similar to the old roses.
Still exist in the form of rose bushes.
Air
Is now a block rather than the absence of a block.
This allows for specific air blocks to be marked and identified through data values.
It lacks an item form.
Attempting to /give it to a player, will result in that inventory slot having no item.
Command blocks
Show what command it ran recently in the GUI.
Extended character command limit to "many thousand characters".
Locked chest
Removed completely.
Iron bars & glass panes
Connect to each other and glass blocks.
This includes panes of different colors.
They are exactly 2 pixels thick.
Ferns, dandelions & dead bushes
Are now randomly offset horizontally like tall grass.
Ice, nether portal (blocks) & water
Are visible through each other.
If water is directly adjacent to ice, when looking through the ice, the player cannot see the water, but not vice-versa.
This allows for custom fish tanks.
If water is not directly adjacent to ice, the player can see the water through ice and viceversa.
The player can no longer see the water surface from underwater.
Items[]
Enchanted books
Can receive multiple enchants at once.
Written books
Can be cloned by crafting them with an unused book and quill.
Can clone multiple copies of the same written book, by putting more book and quills in the crafting grid.
A book can be cloned infinitely many times, regardless if it's the original.
Can now be stacked up to 16.
Maps
Maps in item frames cover the whole block face, so that connected maps join together smoothly.
They won't display player markers then.
Each different type of block has a different shading on the map.
It now show colors for colored wool and stained clay, allowing a wider range of colors visible on maps.
bed (26), piston head and extension (34 & 36), redstone wire (55), wheat crops (59), standing and wall sign (63 & 68), wooden and iron doors (64 & 71), lit redstone ore (74), unlit redstone torch (75), sugar cane (83), cake (92), unpowered and powered repeater (93 & 94), pumpkin and melon stem (104 & 105), nether wart (115), brewing stand (117), cauldron (118), lit redstone lamp (124), tripwire (132), flower pot (140), skull (144), and unpowered and powered comparator (149 & 150).
They can no longer be obtained with /give or /summon, but can still be placed as blocks with /setblock, /blockdata or summoning a special falling sand entity.
Reduced the lag that zombies created by pathfinding.
Witches
Now drink a potion of water breathing, when they are trapped underwater.
Can drop a potion of water breathing upon death, as a rare drop.
Have been added to the mix of low light-level hostile mobs, spawning anywhere where the light level is below 7, including at night in every biome and in caverns.
They usually spawn in pairs.
They have roughly the same spawn rate as the enderman.