Hardcore Winter 1.5 — The mammoth has arrived!

Something big is walking out there in the white. You'll hear it before you see it: a low rumble under the wind, then a trumpet call that carries for half a mile.

The herds didn't all vanish. The biggest ones just learned to live with the cold.

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A note on the wait. Yes, this one took a while, and sorry about that. In my defence, you can't rush a mammoth. It's three tonnes of wool and it moves at its own pace. It also needed a lot more than a new model: it eats, sleeps, shakes the snow off its back, fights back, carries your gear, lights your way and keeps you warm. I'd rather hand you something finished late than something half-done on time. Thanks for sticking around.

Your existing world is fine. Mammoths find you wherever you walk on the snowfields, explored or not. No new world needed.

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The Woolly Mammoth

• Herds roam the snowfields. One or two adults, sometimes with a calf in tow. Walk for a minute or so and you should come across one.
• Peaceful, until you hit one. Then it charges you, and the rest of the herd joins in. It tosses you with its tusks, and if you crowd it or stand too close, it rears up and stomps the ground around it. An adult has 80 health (40 hearts), shrugs off knockback, and hits for 5 hearts on Normal. Hurt a calf and every adult within 16 blocks comes for you.
• A tamed mammoth defends itself against anyone but you. Hit your own and it just backs off.
• They live out there. They graze, digging down through the snow to reach the grass underneath. They lie down to sleep at night, shake the snow off their backs, scrape at the drifts and trumpet at nothing in particular. A sleeping mammoth wakes if you touch it, and wakes fast if you hurt it.
• Wild herds don't pile up. Mammoths you leave behind wander off for good once you're far enough away. Tamed, saddled, named or leashed ones stay where you left them.

Taming and riding

• Hay bales tame them. Ten bales and it's yours, with hearts to show for it. Wheat and apples heal, but they won't win it over. A wild mammoth won't let you climb on.

• The Mammoth Saddle is the only saddle that fits. A horse saddle won't do.

  Leather  Leather  Leather
  Chest   Gold Ingot  Chest
  Leather  Lantern  Leather
  

  A soul lantern works too. The recipe is in your recipe book from the start.

• Ride it like a horse, and sprint to break into a run.

• Saddlebags. A saddled mammoth carries 15 slots of storage. Sneak and right-click to open them. Take the saddle off and the bags spill onto the snow. If it dies, the saddle and everything in the bags drop with it.

The saddle lantern

The lantern hanging off the saddle stays lit as long as the saddle is on.

• It lights the snow around you as you ride, and lights up a whole caravan of them.
• It keeps you warm. Riding a mammoth is as warm as sitting by a furnace: body heat and lantern together thaw you out even in a blizzard. Anyone standing within 3 blocks of a saddled mammoth gets the lantern's warmth, the same as holding one.
• It never needs oil. That's the reward for taming one.

Stomp

While riding, hold jump to charge the bar, then let go. The mammoth rears up and slams its front feet down.

• Everything on the ground within 3–5 blocks takes 3–6 hearts and is thrown back. The fuller the bar, the bigger the stomp.
• It spares you, other players and your own tamed animals.
• It has a 5-second cooldown, shown on the jump bar.
• The mammoth doesn't jump anymore. It climbs a block and a half without needing to.

Breeding

• Feed two tamed adults at full health a hay bale (or a golden apple) and you get a calf.
• A calf grows up in about 20 minutes. Feeding it hay speeds that up.

Mammoth Meat

• An adult drops 8 Mammoth Meat.
• Raw, it's a decent meal (3 drumsticks). Cooked, it's the best meat in the game: 6 drumsticks and steak-level saturation. One kill feeds you for days.
• Cook it in a furnace, smoker or campfire. A mammoth that dies on fire drops it ready cooked.

Icy Goblin changes

The goblins were everywhere, and they hit too hard for an early-game enemy.

• They hit softer: 1.5 hearts on Normal (was 2.5).
• They're slower. A sprint gets you away now.
• They spawn less often: weight 6 (was 10), in groups of 1–2 (was 1–3).
• Daytime is no longer goblin time. They were the only monster that could spawn in daylight, so by noon the whole monster cap was goblins. Daylight spawns under open sky are now cut to a quarter, and no more than three gather in one area.