Minecraft’s latest snapshot adds chat reports, for abuse-free building

pcgamesn.com:

Minecraft is a game that should be shared with friends. Sometimes you’ll all be mucking in to build something incredible, sometimes you’ll be using mods to recreate Elden Ring, and sometimes you’ll be exploring servers online to see what the internet holds for you. If you are online and playing with strangers, though, sometimes things can get messy, and that seems to be what the latest Minecraft snapshot is trying to address.

Minecraft snapshot 22W24A is here now, and it’s building towards 1.19.1 by introducing a few bug fixes and two new features. The main one here is chat reporting, which allows you to report players sending “abusive messages” in the game chat. It’s worth noting that the blog explains that “any reports made during the testing period may not be actioned on,” but the ability to kick out toxic players is an integral part of any online game, so this could be a good step.

Chat reporting can be accessed in the social interactions screen, and you’ll need to report the individual chat messages along with picking a category for them as well. Presumably, this is to stop the system itself from being abused, as you cannot simply create a generic report of a player – you have to specify what they have done, and the blog states that your report will then go through a moderation team. There’s no telling yet what will constitute a genuine and actionable report, but it’s worth knowing all about it anyway.

Outside of that, the other big change is that the wonderful Minecraft allay can now be duplicated. You can do this by giving them an amethyst shard, but duplication has a 2.5-minute cooldown. This should help alleviate woes around how many allay mobs there are. Plus, more of a cute thing can only be good news, right?