Minecraft 1.8 Beta Pre-Release

(Sorry I’ve been silent a while, had a big blog post and maybe a video upcoming about my minecart adventure, but haven’t had time to assemble it all. But the breaking news is worth interrupting for:)

The Minecraft 1.8 Beta Pre-Release is out, and the greatest improvement in the game since 1.0. It’s almost an entirely new game.

You have three choices with your current world:

1. Load your old world and stay in previously explored chunks, and you’ll get some new stuff but not new terrain.
2. Load your old world and go explore new chunks, and you’ll find new terrain, but not strongholds or villages unless you set MapFeatures to 1 in level.dat (not for novices).
3. Create a new world.

I made a new world, name and seed “Eighteen” (aka 1.8).

1.8 generates much steeper terrain, deeper oceans, and taller mountains up to 120 or more; the clouds are now at the skylimit instead of running through your hill house. Biomes are HUGE, they go on forever. While filling in my map, I’ve only found scrubland, pine forest, swamp, a river, and maybe the edge of a desert or a sandy island; the rest must be much further out.

I’m seeing a lot more Mario blocks, flying islands, and, um, other things in the sky:

The mineshafts are cool, you’ll get long tunnels with minecart tracks (free tracks!) through wood shorings (free wood!) covered with cobwebs (free string!) and run through with horrible tiny spiders who I hate and fear oh, great Notch, protect us. There’s usually a tiny spider spawner, and somewhere near that but NOT in the same room, one or more chests. The caverns are larger, and the ravines are huge and ominous.

Adventuring in the new areas is incredibly dangerous, until you’re geared up and safely equipped. I may need to switch to SMP, and play with a partner, this is way too dangerous solo. Tamed wolves might help, but they’re hard to control. Oh, and forget about cheater radar mode. F3 no longer shows mob ids. Sprinting in melee combat is interesting, and bow powerup is awesome, you can kill a mob in a couple of full-power shots.

The new Enderman mobs are terrifying, but I haven’t fought one yet, only saw it at a distance. Thankfully they seem to be rare. I came close to focusing on this one, and it moved out of sight, and I nearly panicked.

The NPC villages are cute, but kind of creepy (and maybe dangerous, in dark houses) without NPCs. However, they’re great for quick food supplies, since the farms are already set up for you. The village near me was flooded out, they need FEMA assistance!

I couldn’t stay in the village, it didn’t seem safe, so I built a little island fort, the only way up is parkour along the sides. And note the brick step and half-block chimney; clay seems much more common now, and is more useful.

The farm animals do seem much more persistent, for instance this sheep I sheared several gamedays ago:

Food is hugely important now. You should ALWAYS carry a stack of food, which happily stacks up. If your hunger bar drops, you don’t recover health, and can start losing health. Also, do not eat raw meat. Especially if it’s been in your inventory a while.

After a few gamedays running around, here’s the map:

I’m Mining in the Rain

Seattle is bright and sunny today, but it is dark and wet in Minecraftia. The ducks seem to like it:

Minecraft 1.5 is up, and weather and achievements are so far pretty interesting. Some of the achievements are more like dares: Now that I’ve killed a cow, it wants me to ride a pig off a cliff. Does that mean you can now craft saddles? I will experiment!

I’m not noticing great performance upgrades yet. Turning on Normal draw distance and Fancy graphics is 15-20 FPS on my MacBook Air; Far is still painful. There’s a new “Advanced OpenGL”, which I don’t see any perf gain or visual improvement from, but maybe I’m not looking in the right place yet. One HUGE improvement is UI scaling. Now you can change it to small, normal, or the usual huge. Normal looks good with MC nearly maxed out on my desktop.

A few of the textures need a texture pack upgrade, so I’m using the built-in Minecraft textures again, and they’re SO UGLY. I’ve been spoiled by Pixeludi. Mojang should do something about their awful textures, especially the cobblestone and glass.

Portal to the Nether

Goofing around on the Yogscast server, I dug out a mountainside temple and built a Nether Portal:

The thing is, the server has a mod to make portals work, even though they don’t normally in SMP. I stepped in as a lark, and GAAAH! SURROUNDED BY NETHER! And stepped back in and was back home, then ran inside and disconnected.

When I have time and a secure place to stash my goods, and maybe a party of like-minded heroes, I will explore the Nether and report back.

Inattention Kills

Playing solo survival on seed “wolf” while the Shaftlands are still down, I’ve found several gigantic sections of clay, so I’ve made a strong brick house, like the third little pig. No big bad creeper gonna blow my house down. I’m outside expanding a parapet, when my RL building fire alarm goes off, and I rush outside. I FORGOT TO HIT ESCAPE FIRST.

You can see where this is going. False alarm, so I go back in, and it’s night and a spider is humping my corpse. Hit respawn, run through a half-dozen creepers and skeletons shooting at me, collect my gear, have to dig thru inv for a sword while a skeleton’s shooting me and spider’s chomping my bits off, manage to kill both, get inside just as the kited creepers arrive. Eep. TOO CLOSE.

The single player game needs an AFK pause. If there’s no input for 3 minutes, it should pause. In multiplayer that’s probably not good, since you might idle with chat up, but maybe should put [AFK] after your name.

Tales of Minecraftia

Naturally, there’s Minecraft fanfic. Hopefully no creeper slash.

/via @collinf

The Shaftlands

I’m amused by The Shaft podcast, and so I’ve joined their SMP server, The Shaftlands.

I’m not hugely social, but I’ve built a giant twisty Capsela Towers with a cactus deathtrap front lawn for killing monsters:

Sadly, this will probably be going away when the REAL Shaftlands map or one of the previous “temp” maps comes back up, when they get some Bukkit plugins working again. With Minecraft 1.4 out, they’re upgrading this weekend. Never fear, I’ve taken many photos of my design and will rebuild (but this time lined up a bit better).

ThinkGeek USB Nether Portal

I desire this object: ThinkGeek Minecraft USB Nether Portal. April Fool’s, but they make some of their popular jokes into real products.

Even if it doesn’t actually send objects to the Nether, so it’s broken like Nether portals in SMP, it’d still be awesome to have a plastic, glowing, noise-making (with a switch to disable that!) portal.

And the great question of our times: Square or rounded corners? I love rounded corners. It’s not that it’s harder to make, I just pour lava into a mold then water onto the lava, which is much faster and safer than mining it above lava and burning and dying. But the rounded corners look more like a Stargate.