Minecraft Bedrock beta 1.19.40.20 patch notes: Mob spawning fixes, various tweaks, and more

Minecraft has over ten years of active game development. For many of these years and a large portion of the game’s updates, betas, previews, and pre-releases have existed. These betas are ways for the game’s developers to fix the bugs that players discover, as well as tweak game features to work as intended if they are not.

The latest of these beta previews is the recently announced Bedrock beta 1.19.40.20, which has included numerous bug fixes for various game areas and updated a lot of the touch UI for pocket players.

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Minecraft Bedrock beta 1.19.40.20 is ushering in many changes

Updated Touch Controls

The new touch controls from the 1.19.40.20 beta (Image via Minecraft)

There is a new implemented button under the Settings > Touch menu to show the Touch Control Selection Screen, which can be used to modify the selected control scheme.

When the auto jump feature is enabled, players automatically jump out of water when moving towards a land block.

In creative mode, when using touch input with Action Buttons disabled, the delay for breaking the first block is delayed to 800 milliseconds, reducing the risk of accidentally breaking a block.

Added support for dragging and dropping with touch gestures in the inventory. Players can split stacks more easily with touch controls using a long press.

Double tapping ‘descend’ now toggles flight off in joystick touch control modes.

Updated the positioning of status effects for Pocket UI.

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Bug fixes

Slimes spawning in an ancient city: MCPE-153524 (Image via Minecraft)

There are a fair few bug fixes found within this beta version. These bugs will be described, and then, where applicable, the bug number will be placed in parenthesis.

Spectators no longer drop XP orbs when killed. (MCPE-160245)

Spectators will no longer respawn with a reset player level when killed.

Getting killed by a renamed weapon will produce a death message with the custom name.

The roofed forest, savannah mutated, and birch forest biomes now use the correct grass colors. (MCPE-34936)

Hotbar item text backgrounds are now affected by the Text Background Opacity slider. (MCPE-79331)

Mobs used to be able to spawn in Ancient Cities on the Bedrock version of the game. This has been fixed. (MCPE-153524)

NPC names used to not default to displaying only when they are being looked at.

Falling blocks will no longer break when dropped onto double slabs. (MCPE-159921)

Keyboard users are now able to sprint diagonally. (MCPE-144702)

Huge Fungus will no longer replace partial blocks when growing from Nylium. (MCPE-65661)

Redstone will no longer output the wrong strength signal in some configurations. (MCPE-81981)

Several issues surrounding sticky pistons near the world build limits were fixed. (MCPE-96088)

Usernames can no longer be above the regular max size. (MCPE-152884)

An example of waterlogged leaves glowing too bright: MCPE-76949 (Image via Minecraft)

Water texture on some waterlogged blocks will no longer render too bright when placed underneath other blocks. (MCPE-76949)

The position of the screen on some Android devices has been fixed. (MCPE-159703)

The game will no longer crash when loading an arrow with an unrecognized data value. (MCPE-157983)

Baby villagers will accept flowers from Iron Golems.

A different view of a guardian floating (Image via Minecraft)

Guardians are no longer able to float in the air. (MCPE-33641)

Tamed mobs can follow the player through the end portal.

Grove biomes are now classified as “Cold” biomes. (MCPE-147834)

The “Clear Account Sign in Data” button has been removed from all non-Switch platforms. (MCPE-129704)

The profile screen has been split into two sections: General and Account.

Text-to-speech works appropriately now for the revamped death screens.

Fixed a bug that caused achievements to be disabled for some world templates.

Fixed a bug that caused players to move in the wrong direction after using VR Snap camera movement. (MCPE-152443)

Boats will no longer disappear when pushed through a portal. (MCPE-161563)

Teleports will instantly move the player instead of appearing to fly the player to the location.

Added the ‘replace block’ overload to the /loot command.

Implemented the ‘/execute rotated’ and ‘/execute rotated as’ commands

Added the ability to set a custom block with specific properties with /setblockcommand.

The game will no longer crash when loading a structure from a Structure Block, and the player left a dimension via a portal. (MCPE-132561)

Custom items, tags, and block tags now work correctly with the Minecraft:digger component. (MCPE-155786)