Chaos Cubed Is Out: Sulfur Caves, Sulfur Cubes and Our First Impressions

Chaos Cubed is out, and it's one of the more playful updates in a while. The headline is a mob that eats blocks and changes its behaviour depending on what you feed it. Around it there's a new cave biome, two colourful block sets and some new music. Here's our rundown, plus a few tips from our first hours with it.

Finding Sulfur springs

Sulfur springs are in the Overworld. Look for pools surrounded by Sulfur and Cinnabar blocks with gas rising from the surface. That gas is the giveaway. Dig down from there and you'll reach a Sulfur cave with the new blocks, Sulfur spikes and the Sulfur Cube.

A word of warning: the gas gives nausea to players and nearby mobs. Don't fight anything next to a pool, and think twice before you build a base right on top of one.

The Sulfur Cube

This is the part everyone will talk about. The Sulfur Cube lives in Sulfur caves and absorbs blocks you feed it. What it eats changes what it does: some blocks make it bounce, others make it slide, and a couple are dangerous.

• Feed it TNT and you get exactly what you'd expect. Do this far away from anything you care about.
• Give it a Magma block and it turns into a game of hot potato.
• You can catch one in a bucket (Bucket of Sulfur Cube) and carry it in your inventory, which saves you from guiding it through the caves.

Our tip: try every block you can think of, one at a time, and note the result. Half the fun is finding out what does what, and it's even better with friends on a server.

Potent Sulfur, bubbles and geysers

Potent Sulfur is what makes the springs bubble. Put it under water and you get hot bubbling pools, bubble columns and puffs of that same nausea gas. Put Magma under submerged potent Sulfur and you get a geyser that launches you upwards. That's handy for getting around and great for parkour maps.

New blocks to build with

There are two full block sets, Cinnabar (reds) and Sulfur (yellows), with bricks, stairs and other variants. Sulfur Spikes grow on both and add a nice jagged detail. We think the red and yellow mix works really well for volcanic builds, alchemy labs and warm desert towns.

Music

fingerspit (Paula Ruiz) wrote new menu, Creative and biome tracks, plus a new music disc called Bounce. You'll find it in Minecarts with Chests in the mineshafts inside Sulfur caves, so explore those properly.

Fixes we noticed

• Texture streaming is now on by default on PC and mobile.
• An item duplication bug when crossing chunk borders in the End is fixed.
• Bees now pollinate, breed with and follow Spore Blossoms and Chorus Flowers.
• Strongholds now generate with iron doors and stone buttons.
• Lit TNT shows smoke particles, and there's fog in the End while the Ender Dragon is alive.
• Skeletons, Strays, Bogged and Parched now fire arrows at the same rate as on Java.
• Party chat shows up in the world, and you can reply with /party.
• Realms Hub is now on the pause screen, and Windows players get an early preview of cloud backups for worlds up to 4GB.
• There are plenty of crash and stability fixes too.

What it means for add-on and pack creators

• Resource packs: there are lots of new blocks to cover, including two full block sets, spikes and the Sulfur Cube itself. If your pack has a fixed colour palette, the new reds and yellows are worth planning for now.
• Add-ons: if your add-on already has its own sulfur item or block, check how it looks next to the vanilla ones in the Creative inventory. Two "Sulfur" entries side by side can confuse players.
• Ideas: the Sulfur Cube is a great example of a mob that reacts to what you give it. In GodCraft's mob editor you can build simple versions of that idea with your own mobs, and it's a fun way to learn how interactions work.

Our wish for next time: more ways to use Sulfur Cubes in redstone builds. Which block have you fed one so far, and what happened? Let us know in the comments.