I spent about 10 minutes just now trying to work out precisely how Most Influential Markus Persson and Jens Bergensten are, but it seems Time have de-numbered their list. Instead, according to Will Wright and a magazine who have been doing this for a very long time, the two men of Minecraft are ‘Titans’.
After many enticing updates, Mojang have told us that the Redstone Update will be coming our way sometime this month, perhaps even sometime very, very soon. Here's a breakdown of all the most exciting features the team have said they're working on, plus a little speculation as to what else might still sneak its way into Minecraft 1.5. Although the team seem pretty certain about what will and won't be in this update, they have been known to spring the odd surprise, so you'll forgive us for throwing in a few excited (ahem, educated) guesses, too.
It's very likely the nine millionth copy of Minecraft for PC will be sold today, judging by the daily rate of sales. Jeb tweeted the possibility and linked to the Minecraft stats page which, at the time of publishing, listed 8,991,708 total sales of the game, of which 18,593 were In the last 24 hours.
A year before Kickstarter became a household name among video gamers, 2 Player Productions were comfortably successful in their attempt to use the site to crowdfund a feature-length documentary about the creators of Minecraft. Nearly two years on, a hundred minute documentary is the result. A mixture of montages and talking heads (and featuring some of the games industry’s most famous figures), it looks outward much more than it looks inward and is more a film about the reach and the impact of Minecraft than it is the game itself, or the studio that created it.
But is it good? And is it worth watching? Only if you’re a Minecraft fan, because The Story of Mojang feels like a film for fans and perhaps even by fans. While that satisfies someone like me, I don’t know if it’s going to convert you.
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Tweets from both Dinnerbone and Jeb have shown the forthcoming comparators and daylight detectors as they might be used in game. The new redstone devices, coming in version 1.5, were discussed at Minecon last year and it looks like Mojang have spent at least some of their holiday period working on these.
Jeb has just confirmed via Twitter, that the official release of Minecraft 1.4.4 will be with us in about 24 hours, so that's 3pm Central European Time. If that's still too much of a wait for you, there's already a pre-release out now.
Submissions for the Independent Games Festival 2013 have been open for, ooo, two-and-a-half months now. Soon, they’ll be turned over to a cabal of developers, journalists and assorted experts for judgement. And it turns out that one of those shadowy council figures will sport a familiar orange beard.
The term "Minecraft IRL" has been used in all sorts of contexts over the years, including for elaborate in-public cosplaying or examples of real-life behaviour that mirrors the game, but lately it's become more and more associated with a particular kind of image manipulation. Lately, and particularly on reddit, Minecraft IRL has come to stand for photoshops that suggest the world of Minecraft sometimes exists just beyond our own. Here's a few of the most popular posted on r/Minecraft/ in just the last 24 hours, representing only a few of the many, many images out there.
As well as introducing the witches that we mentioned the other day, the latest Minecraft snapshot features another suitably spooky mob.
Alongside the usual technical tweaks and bug fixes, Minecraft 1.4 is set to introduce some clever and curious new features, many of which you can see for yourself if you fancy downloading the latest developer snapshot. Be aware that, of course, this is a work in progress and not representative of everything 1.4 will offer, but here's some of what we can expect.
With monsters now picking up and using items that they've found laying around, we're now getting situations like this one, spotted by a reddit user. Sure, you can laugh, but this means the monsters are able to make themselves not only tougher, but also immune to the effects of sunlight. They're getting smart. Too smart.
Barely a day seems to go by without someone at Mojang casually releasing yet another screenshot or snippet about Minecraft 1.4, which becomes increasingly exciting with every new detail. Today Jens Bergensten (our dear @Jeb_) decided he'd show off the decoration blocks above, while Nathan Adams, aka @Dinnerbone, showed that he took carrot-and-stick game design quite seriously...
