JAVA EDITION TECHNICALLY UPDATED
Waiting for the 1.13 update? It’s here! But also not! Sort of?

1.13 is dead! Long live 1.13!

We’re going to hold back the official launch of 1.13 and merge that release with all the features we’d planned for the Update Aquatic. But, in a weird twist, this delay means you’ll actually get to play with cool Aquatic features earlier. Let me explain!

As you may have heard, this year we have some pretty big things planned for Minecraft. Pretty big, pretty wet things, in fact, all bundled into the suitably soggy-sounding Update Aquatic! This’ll bring you all kinds of submarine marvels, including turtles, dolphins, coral reefs, deep sea vents and other mysteries of the abyss.

But before we get to all that, we were planning on releasing the rather technical 1.13 update, which includes equally exciting-sounding things like a new world format, a new command parser, data packs and the elusive rewrite of world generation. Woah, woah, settle down! I know you’re crazy for command parsers, but let’s not lose a sense of decorum.

Most of this stuff is already in the latest snapshot (along with some fun but definitely unstable things that we don’t plan on ever officially supporting - like the debug sticks you can see in the picture above, which let you change a block’s state when you whack it). However, because our world generation overhaul is taking a little longer to get ready, we’re going to hold back the big 1.13 release and put it out at the same time as the Update Aquatic. In fact, the Update Aquatic will become 1.13!

As a result, however, this means we can actually start snapshotting Update Aquatic features much earlier than previously planned! Lucky you!

So, get ready to take a dip… soon… ish!

Source: https://minecraft.net/en-us/article/java-edition-technically-updated