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Friday, February 10, 2017
Blog Updates!
Minecraft Candy Pack!
NEWS
CANDY PACK SWEETENS UP POCKET / WIN 10
Gorge your eyes on the tasty 1.03 update
Until someone finally bakes an electric cake that runs Minecraft, this news of the Candy Texture Pack hitting Pocket and Windows 10 Edition is going to be our tastiest announcement ever. Or at least since its arrival on Console Edition. Wouldn't it be sweet if we could get through it without any tortured candy puns? Geddit? Sweet? Well, we tried.
Console players have been exclusively indulging on this colourful pack for a while now. But no more! Starting from today, players of portable versions of Minecraft can download a texture pack that pours a dentist-weepingly high amount of sugar into your game, replacing all the textures with sweet new treats. Jelly Creepers! Starlight Mint Skeletons! Velvet Cake Cows! Entire floors made of cake! It's almost lunchtime! Sorry. Writing about such delicious nonsense is making this candy-starved writer all kinds of hungry. Don't lick the screenshot. Learn from my mistakes.
Minecraft hasn't been this irresistibly delicious since we accidentally poured melted chocolate into our disc drive. Don't ask and enjoy the pack!
Here’s the rest of the 1.03 changelog as an amuse-bouche:
New Features:
- Added Candy texture pack
- Added Dutch localization
Tweaks:
- Fixed some spacing when truncating bolded text.
- Tweaked spawn point selection to be “smarter” (e.g. avoid lava).
- Tweaked the textures of flower/mushroom blocks.
- Assorted texture fixes.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a crash when a server/Realm would first start.
- Fixed an issue causing servers to blink between online and offline status
- Fixed a Realms crash when a player exits
- Fixed a crash when using some items
- Fixed a server crash when a player entered a mutated biome
- Fixed an issue that caused pressure plates, buttons, and other Redstone items to become stuck
- Fixed an issue with hoppers not ticking the proper order
- Fixed an issue when destroying a door
- Fixed an issue with item duplication
- Fixed an issue allowing a player to incorrectly obtain End Gateway blocks
- Observer block's arrows should now point in the direction of power
- Observer blocks will no longer be placed upside-down
- Fixed an issue where realms members that were not your friends were not being displayed
- Bats should spawn more often!
- Fixed an issue with End Gateway textures on mobile devices.
- Fixed an issue where buttons & other redstone devices could get locked when a redstone lamp activated.
- Fixed some rendering geometry which created weird results
Thursday, February 9, 2017
Minecraft Realms!
NEWS
NEW ON REALMS: FORGOTTEN THINGS AND FLYING WINGS!
Three new games and adventures for you and your friends
Welcome, brave adventurers. Last time we met, we unveiled the new experiences category on Realms for PC, led by the epic music event Big Giant Light Show. This week, we’ve got a trio of treats for you to test your wits, your wayfinding and your wingsuit skills.
First we hop, skip and puzzle our way through a visually striking adventure map set amid the overgrown ruins of an ancient jungle temple. Then we pelt through a rapid-fire gauntlet of parkour arenas that should challenge even the most sure-footed player. Finally, we take to the skies in elytra-powered air-battles and try to not faceplant into any walls... with mixed success.
Sound like your cup of tea? Then take a big old metaphorical swig of this post! Mmm! Delicious.
THE FORGOTTEN BOOK
by Foleros and tomaxed
Recently, I’ve been reminiscing about older, immersive games that took you on adventures around the globe. Games such as The Amazon Trail, which featured sights and sounds that transported you into an exotic location, complete with narrative and a solemn duty. The Forgotten Book scratches that itch through its cutscenes, voiceovers, textures and custom mechanics, such as wall grappling. Starting the map drops you right into the story and presents you with a world that you won’t want to leave.
10 MINUTE PARKOUR
by FantomLX, iWacky, and Tiliba
Parkour maps are all the rage in Minecraft, and 10 Minute Parkour has you running and jumping through a random selection of 101 different mini arenas. Special blocks aid or hinder you as you jump higher or get knocked about. Completing a level gives you a point, skipping a level removes one. Moesh’s best record is 22 levels, while mine is… somewhere in the negatives. See if you can beat our scores!
ELYTRON
by Theticman, ChildOfStars
Did you know that elytron is the singular form of the word elytra, the two wing cases of a beetle? It’s true! Elytron also makes for neat wordplay, as this map features mechanics that remind us of the movie Tron’s light bikes. Here we have a fancy elytra-based, competitive minigame where players outlast their opponents by rocketing around the arena and avoiding the glass trails! Team up with your friends, or bait them into flying into a wall. Be careful to avoid your own walls!
That's all for now!
To learn about loading this and other content into Realms for PC, visit our help site. If you haven't yet tried Realms for yourself, you'll have a blue diamond on the Minecraft Realms button, located on the main screen of Minecraft for PC. Click it, then follow the instructions to try Realms free for 30 days.
We hope you enjoy this week’s map!
More video and photo here: https://minecraft.net/en-us/article/new-realms-forgotten-things-and-flying-wings
More video and photo here: https://minecraft.net/en-us/article/new-realms-forgotten-things-and-flying-wings
Wednesday, February 8, 2017
Minecraft Updates!
NEWS
MINECRAFT SNAPSHOT 17W06A
The first snapshot containing 1.12 features
Welcome to the first Minecraft 1.12 snapshot! We anticipate to do many more snapshots in the upcoming months, as we will continue adding more features and make major improvements to the core game itself. This particular snapshot brings you a bunch of new blocks and a very useful addition to Creative Mode. Please remember to make backups of your worlds before loading them in any of the snapshots. An even better option is to always create a new world when checking out the new features!
Changes in snapshot 17w06a
- Save toolbars in Creative Mode with Ctrl+Slotkey and load them with Shift+Slotkey
- Added colored Concrete blocks
- Added colored Concrete Powder blocks
- Added colored Glazed Terracotta blocks
- Updated the base color palette of Minecraft (affects things such as Banners and Sheep)
- Updated textures for Wool blocks
Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com. If nobody reports a bug, we can't fix it!
To get snapshots, open your launcher and press the "New Profile" button. Call it "snapshots" and check the box saying "Enable experimental development snapshots" and save. To switch to the normal version, you can select it in the dropdown at the bottom left corner of the launcher. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (See the "new profile" dialog).
Snapshots can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds.
Cross-platform server jar:
Report bugs here:
Minecraft Updates!
Changelog for 1.0.3 beta build
- Added Dutch localization
- Fixed an issue causing servers to blink between online and offline status
- Fixed a realms crash when a player exits
- Fixed a crash when using some items
- Fixed a server crash when a player entered a mutated biome
- Fixed an issue that caused pressure plates, buttons, and other Redstone items to become stuck
- Fixed an issue with hoppers not ticking the proper order
- Fixed an issue when destroying a door
- Fixed an issue with item duplication
- Fixed an issue allowing a player to incorrectly obtain End Gateway blocks
- Observer block's arrows should now point in the direction of power
- Observer blocks will no longer be placed upside-down
- Fixed an issue where realms members that were not your friends were not being displayed
- Bats should spawn more often!
- Fixed an issue with End Gateway textures on mobile devices
Thursday, January 19, 2017
Minecraft Redstone!
IN DEEP THOUGHT
The making of a mini redstone computer
Considering it's a game about having adventures and building, Minecraft sure is home to a lot of computers. Computers that calculate; computers with screens; computers that run programs; computers that play games. They’re computers in a world in a game in your computer!
That’s because Minecrafters discovered that redstone and some of its components, such as comparators, repeaters and redstone torches, act very much like the electronic components that you find squeezed down to a microscopic scale inside a chip.
But just because redstone behaves like this doesn’t mean that it was intended to build computers. When the first Minecraft computer was shown off, way back in September 2010, it knocked a lot of socks off, even Notch’s. That computer was made by theinternetftw and it performed maths and logic operations, but it wasn’t a computer that you’d easily recognise. It lacked its own memory and a screen and it didn’t play games. But it was extraordinary to behold.
The reveal as theinternetftw comes out of the cave and looks out across his computer as it spreads out into the distance still puts shivers down my spine. What a sight!
Since then, many, many more Minecraft computers have been built. Laurens Weyn’s Redgame computers came with memory and a GPU and could run programs and even play simple games. They were huge, comprising thousands of blocks, using both redstone and command blocks, and today, Minecrafters are still pushing the boundaries, like SethBling’s new Atari 2600 emulator, which can run and display games like Donkey Kong. Very, very slowly.
As well as building massive and complex computers, there’s also the challenge of making small ones. A new computer called Deep Thought is tiny by Minecraft standards. Built by n00b-asaurus, it fits into an area of just 40 by 40 blocks across and 35 blocks high. Seriously, this is small, but it can execute four different operations: AND, XOR, OR, and ADD+C. Together, these can perform just about any calculation you need, and what’s more, Deep Thought has ports into which you can plug other hardware you might build, such as a screen.
Inside Deep Thought’s neat exterior lies its complex Redstone workings.
n00b-asaurus has had an interest in electronics since he was about 10, when his parents got him a Radio Shack electronics kit. “At 13, I got an Arduino, and when it came time to go to college, I signed up for the first electronics class I saw, no hesitations,” he tells me. Arduino is a system of connected components you can use to build and prototype electronics, and it led him to learning more about electronics in college.
But n00b-asaurus finds it a lot easier to work with redstone than it is to work with electronics. “There's no power and ground traces to route. You don't have to deal with induction causing noise, plus you can see everything happening inside the computer as it's happening. Also, components are expensive!”
But this doesn’t make creating a computer like Deep Thought easy. Its size brought some serious challenges. “It took quite a bit of 'deep thought' itself,” n00b-asaurus jokes. (Deep Thought’s name is a bit of a joke, too: it’s from the city-sized computer in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which calculated the answer to the Answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything to be 42.)
Designing a computer like Deep Thought takes a lot of doodling on scrap paper.
To fit in the space, n00basaurus had to rein in some of his ambitions. He originally wanted it to be 8-bit, but had to scale it back to 4-bit. In simple terms, bits relate to the size of individual numbers a computer can handle. An 8-bit computer can handle numbers up to 256, while a 4-bit computer can handle only 16, but it uses far fewer blocks. Yet with some clever design Deep Thought can perform calculations on much larger ones.
Another tactic n00b-asaurus used was to use something called a finite-state machine as the control circuit, a structure that tells each part of the computer what to do. Though simplistic and rather inflexible, a finite-state machine is smaller to build than the logic circuits found in other computers, and it also made timing instructions more straightforward.
The result is a machine that n00b-asaurus says is similar in architecture to an Intel 4004, which was the first commercial microprocessor when it was launched in 1971. He admits that Deep Thought is rather lower powered, however.
As for his next challenge, it’s all about recreating in redstone an x86 chip. This is a long-living family of chips on which you might well be running your copy of Minecraft today, since it’s inside most PCs!
After all, the only real restriction to building Minecraft computers is time. “A redstone computer’s clock speeds are limited to how long it takes to get data from one side of the computer to the other,” he explains. Thus, the bigger the computer, the slower it is. “Really, there's no limit to how sophisticated redstone computers can get, it’s just whether you’re willing to wait 4-5 hours for the result.”
But why does he only work with headstone and not command blocks, which are inside most other Minecraft computers? “I’m not at all against using command blocks in a computer,” n00b-asaurus says. “In fact, I do intend on eventually making a computer out of command blocks simply for the fact that so many options open up when you use them. For now, though, the challenge presented by redstone is a lot more fun and rewarding. That and it's fun to watch redstone lines flicker on and off when you finally get your computer running.”
Video and Photos here: https://minecraft.net/en-us/article/deep-thought
Tuesday, January 17, 2017
Minecraft Map!

LEARNING TO FLY
How 4J designed the Console Edition’s epic new tutorial map!
When Elytra wings hit the Console Edition in its big update at the end of last year, they came with a brand-new tutorial map specially designed to help players take to the skies.
4J’s tutorials are much more than just a set of instructions on how to play. They’re huge and exciting playgrounds in their own right. So how did 4J go about designing this new one?
The first thing was to think about how to make somewhere that’s great for flying around. Previous tutorial maps have been set in recreations of some special places in 4J’s home country, Scotland, including Edinburgh Castle and Melrose Abbey.
But amazing though Scotland is, it doesn’t quite have somewhere to fully showcase Elytra flying.

The team included as many biomes as they could for variety, while also using extreme terrain generation to ensure there are a lot of deep canyons, pinnacles and precipices for exciting flying!

Here’s the full layout of the new map. It's a clever mixture of handcrafted and generated terrain, dotted with unique structures and gigantic sculptures of mobs. Spot the guardians off the coast?

Early in development, 4J decided players would start in a blocked-off area for the initial tutorial before getting to freely roam from a central hub set in a ruined castle in the centre of the map.

The team included as many biomes as they could for variety, while also using extreme terrain generation to ensure there are a lot of deep canyons, pinnacles and precipices for exciting flying!

Here’s the full layout of the new map. It's a clever mixture of handcrafted and generated terrain, dotted with unique structures and gigantic sculptures of mobs. Spot the guardians off the coast?
Next
So the setting was open, but the first step for the 4J team was to figure out what the player’s flow around the space should be and what sort of terrain it would need. “It had to have high mountains and vantage points from which to fly and we also wanted to show off the new amplified terrain,” 4J art director David Keningdale tells me.
The map is a mixture of hand-painted height map with naturally generated terrain, so the team could control its large, flat areas for the core tutorial while also mucking about with the amplified terrain generation for the exciting flying bits. What’s more, it’s peppered with different biomes to give a real tour of the Minecraft experience!
The challenge for designing the Elytra tutorial was ensuring it’s set at the right level of challenge. “It was tough to balance so it isn’t too hard or too easy, because the more we tested it, the better we got!” says David. “But eventually I think we found a happy medium.”

Hoops are carefully placed to mark aerial courses that really put your elytra skills to the test.
At the core of the flight tutorial are a set of hoops to fly through, with tight turning circles to test and hone players’ skills. But instead of having them hang in boring open space, 4J created tunnels and arches in the canyons, and used the sharp twists in the deep gorges of the map to create thrilling runs that allow flyers to stay airborne for long periods.
Oh, and in case they should fall down, 4J also added a few ladders, paths and towers so they can get up high so they could take to the skies again.

There are loads of details carved into the landscape - ancient scultures and outsized weapons!
With the layout of the map completed, the next step was to think up a theme. 4J settled on something dramatic: the ruins of an ancient civilisation of Minecraft worshippers! “With towers and viaducts decaying in the landscape, giant statues of mobs and items strewn around the map for players to discover,” David says.
“As we were testing flight paths through the ravines, we started thinking about the type of people who would live in each biome. We started making bases or forts in each, themed to the settlers you might find there, so treehouses, caves, even building into giant mushrooms. The people that live there must be fun guys.”
Props to the excellent dad-joke, David! And thank you for taking us through the map. Here are a few more screenshots to show off some more of its many highlights!
More photos here: https://minecraft.net/en-us/article/learning-fly
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