State of the Minecraft Address

Good evening ladies and gentlemen.  The developers over the Mojang have been quite busy lately with Minecraft updates and announcements.  It’s no surprise that one of the fastest rising PC games with a strong creative entity was at E3 this year.  Notch, or Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft had some announcements during E3 that will expand the market and size of Minecraft.

The E3 event was loaded with tons of new Minecraft news.  First off, Minecraft is coming to both console and mobile play.  Also, the official release date of the PC version will be changed.

The original target release date of Minecraft, where they remove the “beta” tag was to be 11/11/11.  However, according to Notch, they will not be able to book a venue for “MinecraftCon”.  The goal is to still release the game officially in November, but an exact date has not been set in stone.

Minecraft will be coming to the XBox 360 sometime this winter.  The game, which will not be named Minecraft specifically will exclusively be on the XBox 360.  The game will support Kinect, but it is not required.  As of right now, they have not decided on the name, but game is specifically for console play.

“Minecraft - Pocket Edition” will also be released for the Sony Xperia PLAY.  This version of Minecraft will also differ from the PC version.  It is being built as a native Android game which will be used to cater to the Xperia PLAY controls.  After time, the game will be release fully on all Android devices.

As of right now, there are no additional details behind the XBox and Xperia PLAY versions of the game.  Mojang is keeping details under rap for the time being.  We should expect to hear more as we close in on Fall and Winter.

Additional news for the PC version of the game was also fleshed out at E3. The next Minecraft update is being called the “adventure update”.  Not much in the way of information has been passed along about this update.  Originally, the update was slated to be released on beta version 1.7, however was pushed to 1.8.  More and more information is becoming available in the adventure update such as making it rewarding to explore and engage in combat, at least one new mob, new combat mechanics, a new lightning engine, more interesting farming, and NPC villages.

Currently, Minecraft is on version 1.7_3.  The 1.6 version fixed a large number of bugs that had accumulated over the previous versions.  In fact, 1.6 required 6 different bug releases to finally have Survivor Multiplayer work correctly.  On top of the bug fixes, Nether support was added to multiplayer.  Previously, the Nether was a single player or server custom mod addition only.  Maps and trapdoors were added as craft-able items as well.  Tall grass was added in some biomes, and dead shrubs were added to the desert biome.

The 1.7 release saw the addition of pistons.  Pistons are blocks that can push other blocks up, down, left, right, etc.  They can also be activated via redstone (Minecraft’s version of electricity).  Pistons have been on custom made mods for Minecraft for a very long time, so the addition of these to the game came with great excitement to the players.  Shears were also added, and is now the only way to get wool from a sheep.  Previously any type of damage done to a sheep (punching, sword, pick axe) would render wool.

All we do now is wait for the massive 1.8 update, which is still quite awhile away.  Happy mining!