Mojang Studios has released Minecraft Snapshot 25w20a, delivering the final features from 2025's second content drop. The update introduces craftable saddles, new music tracks by composer Amos Roddy, and quality-of-life improvements including the ability to remove equipment from mobs using shears. Players can now craft saddles using just three leather and one iron ingot, making this previously rare item much more accessible.
Saddles Finally Become Craftable After Years of Player Requests
In a long-awaited change, Minecraft players can now craft saddles using three leather and one iron ingot. The recipe automatically unlocks when a player picks up their first piece of leather, making transportation options more accessible to early-game players. This addresses a common frustration where saddles could only be found as treasure in various structures.
Complementing this change, players can now use shears to remove saddles, horse armor, harnesses, and carpets from mobs (except Ravagers). This feature works only when the mob doesn't have a rider and the player isn't crouching. To balance these changes, several loot tables have been modified to give leather instead of saddles in chests found in Monster Rooms, Ancient Cities, Desert Pyramids, Jungle Pyramids, and Stronghold altars.
New Music Brings Fresh Atmosphere to the Blocky World
Composer Amos Roddy has created several new music tracks for Minecraft, including "Below and Above," "Broken Clocks," "Fireflies," "Lilypad," and "O's Piano." These tracks will play in various biomes in both survival and creative modes, as well as in the main menu.
A new music disc titled "Tears" has also been added, which can be obtained when a player kills a Ghast with its own deflected fireball. Music enthusiasts will appreciate the new option to display which song is currently playing in the top-left corner of the in-game pause menu, along with settings to adjust music frequency and enable notifications when a new song starts playing.
What other improvements does this snapshot include?
The snapshot features several visual enhancements, including an updated main screen panorama and improved fog effects. The fog now applies to 3D HUD elements like first-person player hands, while rain and thunder weather is less foggy overall. Players will also notice the addition of a Realms logo to loading screens and region information when connecting to a Realm.
On the technical side, the snapshot introduces Data Pack version 77 and Resource Pack version 61. An experimental dialog system has been added, allowing for various types of in-game dialogs to be displayed to users. Ghasts now have a flying_speed attribute affecting their movement, and numerous bugs related to sound, rendering, and gameplay have been fixed.
How to Access the Snapshot
Players eager to try these new features can enable snapshots in the "Installations" tab of the Minecraft Launcher. As with all test versions, Mojang advises backing up worlds or running snapshots in a different folder from main worlds to prevent potential corruption.
The Minecraft server jar for this snapshot is also available for download. Players encountering issues can report them on the Minecraft issue tracker.
Please refer to the original source(s) for more details.
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