The Minecraft World

New 1.8 (Adventure Update)

2011-09-21T06:34:00.000-07:00

Three new mobs.
- New Enderman mob.
  - They take damage from water.
  - They emit purple smoke particles the same as or very similar to portal particles.
  - They drop Ender Pearls.
  - They open their mouth when hostile/looked at.
  - They burn in sunlight.
- New Silverfish mob.
  - Will spawn from rarely generated blocks, that look identical to stone, or stone bricks.
- New Cave Spider mob.
  - They spawn in Abandoned Mine Shafts.
  - Their attacks are venomous, and turn the player's health yellow-green upon being poisoned (will not kill you but will make you lose 4 health bars, if you are below 4 health bars then it will bring you down to heart). They cannot poison players on Easy difficulty.
  - Have a unique mob spawner.
  - They are smaller than regular spiders.
9 new blocks and crafting recipes
- Stone Brick
  - Stone Brick Slabs
  - Stone Brick Stairs
- Brick Slabs and Brick Stairs
- Fence Gates
- Glass Panes
- Iron Bars
- Melons
New Creative game mode.
- Flying by double tapping Space
- Unlimited resources
- Instant mining
- A new screen, the Unlimited Item Selection screen
New features in the terrain generator; things which will only appear in new worlds/chunks.
- Optional structures
  - NPC Villages with farms and "town borders".
    - Contain houses, "smithies", and wells: all of which are connected through gravel pathing
    - Made of: Cobblestone, Mossy Cobblestone, Wooden Planks, Wood, Torches, Cobblestone Stairs, wooden stairs, Gravel, Fence, Glass and/or Glass Panes, Ladders, Wooden Doors, Crops, Farmland, Water, Lava, Furnaces, Iron Bars, Black Wool, bookshelves, and Pressure Plates.
    - Will spawn only on flat areas.
  - Strongholds, consisting of 4 new blocks: Stone Brick, Mossy Stone Brick, Cracked Stone Brick, and Iron Bars.
    - Will only spawn 3 times in a map.
  - Abandoned Mine Shafts
    - Contains naturally generated Cobweb.
  - Ravines including canyons on the surface and ledges to walk on.
- New, fractal-based biome code, spawning much larger versions of existing versions along with 5 new biomes
  - Rivers flowing through/in between biomes.
  - Ocean Biomes, that are deeper and much more vast than before.
  - Mountain biome.
  - Swamp biome, which is the only biome to generate vines on trees. Mushrooms are more commonly generated here as well.
  - Using Bonemeal on Mushrooms will generate Huge Mushrooms
  - Clay is now much more abundant
  - Snow in Taiga and Tundra biomes does not generate for technical reasons. They will return in Beta 1.9
New combat Mechanics.
- Hold-to-charge bows.
  - 3 different charged states; takes less than 1 second to fully charge.
  - Fully charged bows causes the player to walk slower.
- Critical hits.
  - When the player hits a mob while falling or if the player is above the mob.
  - When the mob is hit by a fully-charged arrow.
- Player blocking attack animation and hostile mob attack animations.
  - Block "stance".
- Mobs killed by the player drop tiny flashing Experience Orbs that add to your experience bar.
New Food System.
- There is now a food meter.
  - Food no longer heals directly but indirectly: if the food meter is above 80%, heals about every 5 seconds.
- All food (except Mushroom Stew) is stackable.
- Food takes 1.6 seconds to consume, accompanied with an animation.
- 5 new food items.
  - Melon Slices.
  - Raw Chicken.
  - Raw Beef.
  - Cooked Chicken.
  - Steak, which has Cooked Porkchop's old texture. Cooked Porkchops' new texture is a tan shade of the same sprite.
- Eating any raw food or Rotten Flesh has a chance to give the player food poisoning.
New farming options, more interesting farming.
- Plantable pumpkins and melons, each with a central stem that grows to max size and spawns a fruit next to it.
- Melon Seeds.
- Pumpkin Seeds.
Tall grass will now spread.^{[citation needed]}
A new achievement: "Kill a skeleton with an arrow at 50 meters".
Sprinting: By double pressing the forward button, the player will move faster.
- Sprinting is limitless, but will deplete your hunger bar.
- Hitting a mob while sprinting sends them flying.
- Jumping while sprinting boosts the jump to a length of about 4 blocks.
- Sprinting makes particles come up from the ground.
- While sprinting, the field of view slightly increases.
Mob changes
- Passive mobs will randomly flee if attacked by the player or other mobs (such as Wolves).
- Zombies drop Rotten Flesh instead of Feathers.
- The snout on pigs now protrude from their head.
- Skeletons now hold full-size bows.
  - Skeleton arrows originate from about their eyes to the bow, instead of above the head.
New uses for shears.
- Vine
- Tall Grass
New improved lighting
- Day/night cycles no longer require chunk updates. Lighting is updated via a texture, whose coordinates are the block's sky light and block light levels.
- The lighting on a block is given a tint based on the most prominent source of light
  - Redish from Non-sunlight light sources
  - Blue from Moonlight
  - Total darkness keeps the same black tint
  - Sunlight gives the same white tint
- Torches (and possibly other sources) now will lightly flicker brighter and darker on the screen (to see stand on a torch then look at edges of screen while in a dark area). It may be hard to notice at first.
Main Menu/Options changes
- The Main Menu's background is now an animated scene.
- In the Main Menu, the version in the main menu is in the lower left, instead of the upper left.
- New sliders for Field of View and Brightness
- 4 new entries in control list
  - "Attack" and "Use Item", default to left and right click respectively
  - Player list, default to tab
  - Pick Block, defaults to scroll-wheel click
- Improved server join screen: The server join screen features a list of servers.^[1]^[2]^[3]
New texture for Moss Stone.
Clouds change color during sunrise and sunset to match the sky color.
New particle effects.
- Performing a critical hit on any mob will cause 'sparks' to fly.
- Explosion particles are now shockwaves instead of smoke.
- Tiny stationary bubble particles can be seen when underwater.
- Fog is now thicker and darker deep underground, and gives off particles. Due to this, the void appears black.
Changes with debug-view (F3)
- Mobs are no longer visibly labeled with their entity ID
- The world's numeric seed is displayed in a field below player position.
- Changing fog by hotkey now requires debug-view to be open in addition with pressing F.
The version number plate displays ingame again.
User-placed leaf blocks no longer decay.
Cloud height raised to the top of the map, so clouds no longer go through buildings.
Cloud movement syncs with the time.
Rain and snow renders faster with caching.
Armor bar moved to above hearts, due to food bar.
Player to mob damage decreased by half a heart.
Both Wooden and Stone pressure plates can now be placed on fences.
Arrows that hit a mob visually "stick" to the mob.
Improved chest model with a 3D lock and an open state/animation.
- They are now slightly smaller than one full block, and cannot have a breakage texture applied to them.
The ability to allow moderators to enter creative mode in SMP.^[4]
Easier changing of the max level (map) height.
Shift-Clicking items will craft the maximum possible amount of what you are trying to craft with the limit at 64 and will directly put it in your inventory without the need to drag it there. (e.g. You have 16 coal above 16 sticks and you shift click the torches, a stack of torches (64) will appear in your bottom usage bar) This includes the crafting of items that are not stackable, which are then all placed in separate inventory slots.
Holding the left mouse button down will now count as just one click (e.g. holding the left mouse button down with a sword equipped used to make the sword swing infinitely, but now only counts as one swing).
Holding the right mouse button will place blocks/open doors slower than before. (3 times per second instead of 4 times per second)
Animals are now persistent, they no longer despawn which makes it possible to capture them.

Bug Fixes:

The Shift+Click crash bug from 1.8pre2 is fixed.
Fixed Redstone circuits not working after /time set x glitch is now fixed in SMP.
Destroying boats and minecarts now creates particles.
Ghast attack sounds are fixed in SMP.
The Far Lands had been removed, now there is only ocean, and at some point, nothingness.^[5]

New bugs:

There is a memory leak mainly occurring on Linux 32 bit.
The destruction animation for chests is missing.
If you place a torch underwater, the torch will fall off but its light will remain.
Experience orbs when dropped don't drop in a stack like items do, so when a player dies when they have a large number of experience, each orb has to be processed individually. This will cause a high amount of lag, especially for SMP servers.
Occasionally minecraft crashes when a bed is placed.
Double chests placed before 1.8 on multiplayer servers all appear to players to be facing the same direction, even when they should be rotated by 90 degrees.
The Item Selection screen in the new Creative game mode is missing a few blocks: pine and birch leaves (18:1 and 18:2), tall grass (31:1 and 31:2), double slabs (43), monster spawner (52), snow cover (78), and huge mushroom (99 and 100).
Items will not eject properly if a block is placed on them and the items are touching one side of farmland.
Some seeds (Ie 'infiniteapples') don't generate strongholds at all, with ravines where the stronghold should be.
NPC villages occasionally spawn over partial water areas and 'float'

Minecraft Beta 1.5, and some thoughts on this blog

2011-04-26T10:37:00.000-07:00

* Weather (rain, snow, thunder)
* Statistics
* Achievements
* Detector rail
* Booster rail
* Performance improvements
More statistics and achievements will be added over time as we develop the game. They’re only stored locally at the moment, but we’ll slowly be rolling out online storing of achievements over time.
Also..
Ever since we got the office started, my inspiration for blogging here has slowly declined over time. I still enjoy doing it, but I never quite have the time or feel the need to do so. I wonder if that means this blog is dying? I hope not!

The plan for mods

2011-04-26T10:35:00.001-07:00

After some internal discussion and general anxiety, we’ve arrived at a
plan for supporting mods. It’s still a bit vague and the details might
change after we’ve run it by our lawyers, but here’s what we want to
do:

* Let players sign up as “mod developers”. ~~This will cost money~~ (edit: no longer costs money!), and
will require you agreeing to a license deal (you only need one per
mod team).
* Mod developers can download the source code from our SVN repository.
As soon as we commit a change, it will be available to all mod
developers, unobfuscated and uncensored.
* Mod developers get a unique certificate for signing their mods. This
means players can see who made what mod and choose to trust individual
developers. The cost of signing up makes sure only serious developers
have access to this certificate.

The rules of the license deal will contain:

* Mods must only be playable by people who have bought Minecraft
* You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a
separate license deal with us
* The mods must not be malicious (obviously)
* We retain the right to use your mod idea and implement it ourselves
in Minecraft. This is to prevent the situation where we have to avoid
adding a feature just because there’s a mod out there that does
something similar. It’s also great for dealing with bug fixes provided
by the community.

In the long term, we hope this means people will do awesome new things
with the Minecraft engine and play around with it. We want to buy
and/or license good mods and/or total conversions and sell them
ourselves. It’s possible we might have a mod marketplace for selling
and buying mods that fans have written, or we might purchase and
integrate nice mods that fit the main theme of Minecraft.
[edit:]
Just to clear up two things:
The access cost won’t be prohibitively expensive, and if you make a good mod or something else based on the source code, it’s highly likely we will want to license it.

Noches Words

2011-03-09T18:57:00.001-08:00

Terrain generation, Part 1

I’ve been promising to write a technical post on Minecraft for a while, but never really got around to doing so. I’m on a tiny airplane now, though, with nowhere to run, so here we go!
One of the most complex parts of Minecraft is the terrain generation. When I changed the game over from being just single zones of a map to an infinite map, the terrain generation got a whole lot more complicated, as terrain needs to get generated on the fly as the player explores, and it has to be the same no matter what direction the player approaches it from.
1) How infinite is it?
First of all, let me clarify some things about the “infinite” maps: They’re not infinite, but there’s no hard limit either. It’ll just get buggier and buggier the further out you are. Terrain is generated, saved and loaded, and (kind of) rendered in chunks of 16*16*128 blocks. These chunks have an offset value that is a 32 bit integer roughly in the range negative two billion to positive two billion. If you go outside that range (about 25% of the distance from where you are now to the sun), loading and saving chunks will start overwriting old chunks. At a 16/th of that distance, things that use integers for block positions, such as using items and pathfinding, will start overflowing and acting weird.
Those are the two “hard” limits.
Most other things, like the terrain generation seeds and entity locations use 64 bit doubles for locations, and they do much subtler things. For example, at extreme distances, the player may move slower than near the center of the world, due to rounding errors (the position has a huge mantissa, the movement delta has a tiny, so it gets cut off faster). The terrain generator can also start generating weird structures, such as huge blocks of solid material, but I haven’t seen this lately nor examined exactly what behavior causes it to happen. One major problem at long distances is that the physics starts bugging out, so the player can randomly fall into ground blocks or get stuck while walking along a wall.
Many of these problems can be solved by changing the math into a local model centered around the player so the numbers all have vaguely the same magnitude. For rendering, Minecraft already uses local coordinates within the block and offset the block position relative to the player to give the impression of the player moving. This is mostly due to OpengGL using 32 bit floats for positions, but also because the rounding errors are extremely visible when displayed on a screen.
We’re probably not going to fix these bugs until it becomes common for players to experience them while playing legitimately. My gut feeling is that nobody ever has so far, and nobody will. Walking that far will take a very long time. Besides, the bugs add mystery and charisma to the Far Lands.
2) Isn’t that terrain shape pretty awesome?
In the very earliest version of Minecraft, I used a 2D Perlin noise heightmap to set the shape of the world. Or, rather, I used quite a few of them. One for overall elevation, one for terrain roughness, and one for local detail. For each column of blocks, the height was (elevation + (roughness*detail))*64+64. Both elevation and roughness were smooth, large scale noises, and detail was a more intricate one. This method had the great advantage of being very fast as there’s just 16*16*(noiseNum) samples per chunk to generate, but the disadvantage of being rather dull. Specifically, there’s no way for this method to generate any overhangs.
So I switched the system over into a similar system based off 3D Perlin noise. Instead of sampling the “ground height”, I treated the noise value as the “density”, where anything lower than 0 would be air, and anything higher than or equal to 0 would be ground. To make sure the bottom layer is solid and the top isn’t, I just add the height (offset by the water level) to the sampled result.
Unfortunately, I immediately ran into both performance issues and playability issues. Performance issues because of the huge amount of sampling needed to be done, and playability issues because there were no flat areas or smooth hills. The solution to both problems turned out to be just sampling at a lower resolution (scaled 8x along the horizontals, 4x along the vertical) and doing a linear interpolation. Suddenly, the game had flat areas, smooth hills, and also most single floating blocks were gone.
The exact formula I use is a bit involved (and secret!), but it evolved slowly over time as I worked on the game. It still uses the 2D elevation and noisyness maps, though.
STILL TO COME, ON TERRAIN GENERATION:

Biomes!
Caves and Large Features
Trees, Lakes, and Small Features
The nether!

Now I’ll prepare for landing so I can switch flights!

Minecraft Wins 5 Awards

2011-03-04T09:15:00.000-08:00

Five Star Minecraft

In the IGF, Minecraft won the Audience Award and the Grand Prize.
In the GDCA, the game won awards for best Debut, Downloadable and Innovation.

To say this game isn't even finished yet, i can assure you it will only get better and better with more and more content added every month.

Words of Notch

2011-03-02T13:21:00.000-08:00

Monday morning, I met one of my idols for breakfast, and kinda promised him I’d add pet dogs to Minecraft, so I guess that’s happening.......

i guess this means that we will be seeing pets in minecraft sooner than later.

Find Me On Facebook And Twitter

2011-03-01T16:04:00.000-08:00

Facbook = Bobtheminecraft builder
Twitter = MinecraftBuilds

Notch's Words

2011-02-27T03:33:00.001-08:00

I’m sorry about the downtime

I don’t know what happened exactly, as I’m currently on a fight and seated far away from the other guys. But it seems that as soon as the entire company sat down on a cross Atlantic flight, the minecraft.net servers went down. This is frustrating.
We are working on improving server stability and uptime.

New Added Content To The Blog

2011-02-25T10:04:00.000-08:00

i have given pictures, movies and mods there own pages so hopefully they will be more space and it will be easier to find what you are looking for.

Minecraft Beta 1.3

2011-02-24T12:40:00.000-08:00

* Implemented a new lighting engine with the help of Mr Messiahs (can be turned off)

* Changed the options around, added a new “Graphics options” button

* Added beds. If all players in a map sleeps in a bed during night, the game immediately skips until morning

* Added three new half-size blocks

* Added Delay/Repeater redstone dust blocks

* Added white listing to the server. To use, enter “white list ” where cmd is “on”, “off”, “add ”, “remove ”, “list” or “reload”

* New save file format, old maps need to be converted (that might take a while..)

* It’s now possible to have more than five save slots, and to rename saves

* Scroll bars in both the texture pack list, and in the map selection screen

* Replaced the Mojang splash image to reflect the new logo colors

* .. and a bunch of bug fixes and tweaks!

Words of notch himself

Minecraft bug fixed already?

2011-02-24T03:37:00.000-08:00

I think these fixes are only for the mac tho? .....as i was writing this post Minecraft just crashed on me, nice timing, so im guesing there are still a few bugs or maybe its just the save file?

The Beauty Of Minecraft (HD)

2011-02-23T10:33:00.000-08:00

What would you like to see in Minecraft?

2011-02-23T10:18:00.000-08:00

Me personally, to be able to cook the eggs rather than them being used only just for cakes, its nothing huge, but its always the small things that make most things good.

What Are Your Favurite Minecraft Mods?

2011-02-23T08:39:00.000-08:00

Minecraft HD looks good.....as most things do in HD =)

My first ever blog

2011-02-23T05:43:00.000-08:00

Sorry this place isn't quite finished yet, im just trying to do the basics and looking for a little help? Hopefully ill figure out a place were you can upload all your pictures and videos so you can rate and so on, let me know what you would like to see on the blog?