Mojang has announced that the long-awaited archaeology feature is finally coming to Minecraft. New tools, types of sand, and types of items to excavate will all be coming in this year's Minecraft 1.20 (opens in new tab) update.

If you've been paying attention to the Minecraft rumors, they confirm some of the doubts that began with a hint from the developer (opens in new tab) that Mojang initially announced the archaeology feature in 2020, then delayed it for several major update versions. However, as Mojang confirmed in a post published today (opens in new tab), it is finally back.

"With this feature, players will be able to find new types of sand - suspicious sand - near desert temples," Mojang says. Using a newly introduced tool, the brush, players can brush away suspicious sand blocks to reveal hidden tools, bones, sniffer eggs, and pottery shards. Each new pottery shard has a partial pattern, and four shards can be combined to create a patterned jar that tells a unique story.

Combining pottery shards to create an ancient jar seems especially wonderful. I'd love to get some new ornaments for my base that actually show the journey I've been on, and archaeology turned out to be a perfect fit, along with the sniffer that was chosen by players in the 2022 mob poll and will appear in update 1.20. We already knew that the ancient creatures would be brought back to life Jurassic Park style, but digging up the eggs with a new brush seems to pair nicely.

According to Mojang, these features will be in the snapshot build and the Bedrock version beta "very soon."

Mojang intentionally kept the feature list for the 1.20 update fairly wrapped up, saying that they learned from their mistake last year of announcing features too early (open in new tab). This time around, the developers plan to give us a little bit more to go on for the launch date of the new version. Mojang said, "We will be releasing the rest of the features in Minecraft 1.20 as they become available."