The 1.21.5 version of Minecraft’s Spring Drop 2025 is fast approaching, with Minecraft 1.21.5 Pre-Release 1 already available! New cows, pigs, chickens, and various natural elements are set to enrich the Surface. Alongside that the update begins with a new bar.

Features:

Additions and Changes

  • Added the old spawn egg textures in the “Programmer Art” texture pack.

Player Locator Bar – Find Friends Easily

The Player Locator Bar is a new feature designed to help players locate each other in multiplayer worlds. It appears in place of the XP bar when other players are present, showing their location—even behind blocks. Each player gets a unique icon color, with arrows indicating elevation differences.

How to Stay Hidden

  • If you don’t want to be found, you can:
    • Sneak to stay off the radar.
    • Wear a mob head or carved pumpkin instead of a helmet.
    • Use an Invisibility Potion for complete stealth.

Additional Stealth Tactics

  • Approaching from behind keeps your icon hidden.
  • Players earning XP won’t see the Locator Bar.

Disabling the Feature

  • Server admins can disable the Locator Bar, but it is enabled by default in Java snapshots and Bedrock beta/preview.

Technical Changes

Command arguments that accept inline values (such as loot tables, predicates, modifiers, data components, formatted text in /loot, /give, /tellraw, /execute if predicate, data components in /execute if items, etc.) have been reverted to accept numbers instead of booleans.

Network Protocol

  • The player_chat packet linked to the client now contains an incrementing index for each message sent to the client.
    • The index starts at 0 upon connection (or is reset by the configuration phase and connection packet).
    • The server must increment this value by 1 for each message.
    • If the value is unexpectedly modified, the client disconnects.
    • Since the protocol requires chat packets to reach the client in the expected order, this allows custom server developers to detect missing or rearranged chat messages more quickly.
  • The chat and chat_command_signed packets linked to the server now include a control byte and an update for the “last seen” state.
    • This consists of a simple hash of the “last seen” signatures, which the server must reconstruct, enabling faster detection of desynchronized states.
    • This value can be set to 0 to disable verification, ensuring compatibility with protocol translation.

Resource Pack Version 55

  • Improved the models of leaf piles.

Screenshots:

Requires:

Java

Java Runtime Environment

How to install:

Minecraft 1.21.5 Pre-Release 1 Download Links

Server: Download from Server 1

Click to rate this post!
[Total: 1 Average: 5]