The first pre-release for 1.16.4 is officially out! If you’ve been on the Internet for some time, you’ve probably noticed that you occasionally run into other players that you don’t get along with. To alleviate some of that frustration, we’re introducing a UI element called the “social interactions screen”, which will let you disable chatting with certain players, thus hiding any messages you receive from them. Additionally, the 1.16.4 update will contain some fixes for critical bugs, but other than that, this will be it for this dot-release. Please help us out by testing the new UI and reporting any bugs you find on the Minecraft Issue Tracker.

New Features in 1.16.4 Pre-release 1

New UI called Social Interactions Screen

Social Interactions Screen

A new screen available in Multiplayer which shows a list of all players on a server so you can can hide chat from any player.

Opens with a configurable key binding, by default P
Whether a player is hidden resets when re-joining a server

Technical Changes in 1.16.4 Pre-release 1

New network protocol scheme, with a high bit (bit 30) set for snapshots. The protocol version will increase by 1 for each snapshot, but full releases may keep the same protocol version as the previous full release in cases where the network protocols are compatible
More information is now added to the crash log in cases where poor performance causes the server to crash

Fixed bugs in 1.16.4 Pre-release 1

MC-192434 Netherite Leggings are textured weirdly
MC-199487 WorldGen Deadlock

Minecraft 1.16.4 Pre-Release 1