Minecraft Monday (10-03-11)

News

With Minecraft’s official launch just over a month away, development has been pretty much non-stop the past few weeks.

Notch and Jens have been working hard to create new and interesting features to implement in the game, as well as tweak the one’s already set in place from beta 1.8.

notch Endermen suck because they’re annoying, and because I nerfed them and made them too easy. I shall fix this.

Ender Pearls have a unique ability now. They’re fun.

notch Oh snaaaaaaaap! I broke a long lasting tradition in minecraft by making each experience orb equal one score point. :-o :-O :-( )

notch Yeeesss!! Arbitrary NBT Data per Item Instance is done! Works in both single player and multi player. :D :D

What it means? It means we can do item enchantments, item naming, more than “just” 65k possible maps per level, and all sorts of nonsense.

jeb_ This will probably ->NOT<- be included in Beta 1.9, but it’s a nice screenshot

jeb_The reason why I don’t think the potion effects will be in 1.9 is because there’s not enough time to add the brewing system

Potions are delayed because *add to cauldron, pick up, look at tooltip, pour back into cauldron, repeat* was extremely tedious

A quick discussion with @notch led me in on a new way of doing the potion brewing. Cauldron is out…

Look back at me! Your Cauldron is now a Brewing Stand. Anything’s possible when working with interaction design.

jeb_ I’m fully aware the potions are very thin (diet?), but it looks cute (Always work in progress, of course)

The cauldron is still in the game, but it doesn’t really DO anything at the moment. You can still add water to it, though

In the prerelease, there are 161 brewable unique potions. Unless we change it, there will be 2,653 with all ingredients added.

notch Working on Item Enchantments. It costs experience points. It’s totally random. It has three tiers. What does an enchantment table look like?

How does enchanting work in Minecraft? Well, you open a magical book and pick a random spell, not quite sure knowing what it will do. MAGIC!

As soon as this image of the enchantment text hit the internet, the Minecraft community wasted no time in decoding it – and a short while later, Reddit had already cracked it.

notch I am very very impressed with how fast you figured that text out!! :D

Today we were even treated to a look at some enchanted armour.

notch It looks way better ingame. In screenshots, it just looks pink!

notch Baby animals!!

But potions, enchanted items and giant-headed baby animals aren’t the only new things to hit Minecraft in 1.9.

C418 So out of nowhere Minecraft suddenly has 40 minutes more music. <3 @notch@jeb_

That’s right, after a year of playing around with the same two records and handful of music, C418 has released a multitude of music to our world, with yet more songs and sounds to come.

Later in the week, Notch outlined both on Twitter and his blog Minecraft’s development plans up until release.

notch  There are two more major things we want to add to Minecraft. We’ll do a code freeze on the 18′th, then polish for a month before MineCon.

After MineCon, I’m going on a vacation (trollface), then we’ll get started on new content again.

And one final bit of news this week – the vote for which cloak MineCon attendees with be adorned with was confirmed. Lydia Winters (MinecraftChick) announced on the Mojang blog:

After almost 30,000 votes, the official cloak for MineCon attendees is…. (drum roll please)

…Just as I hoped!

Feature

I love it when things get recreated in Minecraft – especially TV shows.

The Simpsons opening in Minecraft

This is a pretty good representation of the Simpsons opening; everything is pretty much where it should be, timing is good – it’s pretty much as close to the Simpsons as you can get without recreating the whole of Springfield.

And who would go and do that?

Minecraft AWESOME! Simpsons! – Welcome to Springfield!

Video Games Awesome! are at it again, using their amazing team of builders on their server to create yet another phenomenal build. All of the famous sights from Springfield are here, with information on when they first appeared and various easter eggs hiding around each corner (keep an eye out for Sideshow Bob stalking Bart everywhere he goes!)

Watch the whole episode over at Blistered Thumbs – there’s a fair few of them, but so incredibly worth it if you like big Minecraft builds!

Endermen make terrible neighbors

Since 1.8′s release the other week, the new hot-topic is Endermen. Some people love them (me included), but some people couldn’t stand them, hating their ability to move blocks.

I never understood the hatred myself, until I saw this video… Now I understand.

But what about zombies? Surely people couldn’t have forgotten about the dangers of Minecraft’s first hostile mob?

Minecraft: Zombie Attack

AndrewMFilms is renowned on YouTube for creating excellent video game recreations in real life, such as Metal Slug, Super Mario Bros, and Bulletstorm.

Call me bias, but this newest video has quickly became my favorite from his collection.