If you’re one of the nearly 334,000,000 to have watched South Korean pop culture subversionist PSY’s new video, you’ll have seen him being very rude indeed - pulling chairs from beneath unexpecting ladies and laughing uproariously at the inevitable results. I’ve half a mind to claim that he’s no gentleman at all. In fact, he seems to have been recognised as a kindred spirit by what we might delicately call the deconstructive class of Minecraft - the griefers.
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Thanks to Mojang’s latest mini-patch, it’s now possible to access donkey and mule inventories by creeping up behind them and interacting with their soft, grey manes. To what end? I’m not really sure. Perhaps we’ll plant live grenades in their feed bags, Fallout 3-style. Perhaps we’ll simply steal their suppers.
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What’s in a name? In this case, everything you need to know. Minecrift isn’t the localised Kiwi version of Mojang’s world-beater I first suspected it to be, but rather a portmanteau of ‘Minecraft’ and ‘Rift’, the VR headset which has been astounding us daily since Oculus began shipping out dev kits 42 days ago. Even in its infancy, the mod’s basic stereoscopics add tangible depth to a game already adept at providing moments of acute vertigo. Take a look.
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Today, the furnaces of Minecraft burn brighter and longer than ever before. New solid coal blocks can be carved from the landscape and popped straight into the fire, and Minecraft Redditors have already asked how much iron would a coal block smelt if a coal block could smelt iron (71 ingots, apparently). But it’s not all fun and fossil fuels.
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After the volcanic eruption that was The Redstone Update, the bubblings to emerge from Mojang since have inevitably been a tad underwhelming. Even so, there’s a good chance you’ll notice at least a couple of the changes wrought by Minecraft 1.5.2 once you boot up the game today.
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I think it’s a safe bet on what could be appearing on over ten million christmas lists this year: Minecraft toys. Aiming to have products in stores by the end of the year, Mojang have announced a partnership with American toy company, Jazwares, to produce a line of action figures, plush and papercraft items based on the world of Minecraft. Jazwares are enthusiastic about the deal, stating “Minecraft is one of the hottest brands on the planet right now".
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After putting their noses to the grindstone yesterday, Minecraft developers Mojang have released their first new development snapshot in quite some time. It introduces the new, long-awaited horses and the first publicly released version of the game's new launcher.
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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’.
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In the UK, there are Titanic memorials in Belfast, Liverpool and Southampton. In the US, there are statues in New York and Washington DC. And in the intangible serverspace that connects the two, there is now this.
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The internet has spoken. After Time Magazine opened a poll asking which figures should be included in their annual list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, votes poured in for Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson. With the polls now closed, Notch sits in second place with 156,694 votes, just behind Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi.
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It was inevitable that the we'd see a Minecraft recreation of Bioshock Infinite sooner or later, not least because there's a Minecraft recreation of just about anything nowadays. Still, that doesn't take away from the fact that these creations (and their renders) are a brilliant reinterpretation of Columbia, the city in the sky.
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The PC and Mac version of Minecraft has just sold it's ten millionth copy. Someone, somewhere has clicked a button that has propelled the sales counter on the Minecraft website into eight figures. Ten million copies. Ten million. Copies.
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Paradox Interactive are usually known for their wide selection of strategy games, from complex historical titles like Europa Universalis to the forthcoming naval combat game Leviathan Warships, though in recent years they've broadened their portfolio to include such games as the Showdown Effect or the million-selling Magicka. Now, the publisher is expanding into the e-book business and their trio of launch titles includes A Year with Mojang: Behind the Scenes of Minecraft.
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After the pre-release of Minecraft 1.5.1 just the other day, Mojang have pulled the great lever that beams the latest update of their game onto our machines. Minecraft 1.5.1 isn't any great leap forward, but it is an important update that fixes some lingering performance issues. Boot up Minecraft and it should update immediately, blessing many of you with improved frame rates and bidding farewell to a serious graphical glitch.
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Minecraft Realms, Mojang’s subscription service for families, is in closed alpha at the moment - but the developers say it will see release before Christmas.
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Minecraft's Redstone Update is still brand new. In fact, it's less than a week old, and yet Mojang have already decided it needs a good polishing. To that end, version 1.5.1 of Minecraft is on its way and is set for release this Thursday. In the meantime, a pre-release of the update is available right now.
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With the Redstone Update less than a day old, Mojang have already released their next development snapshot. It contains a handful of bug fixes, including one that addresses a recurring problem with unplacable paintings. Minecraft veterans might remember that one from a few years back.
Mojang have also shown off a rather unusual representation of the development of Minecraft, a sort of abstract visual chronicle of 800 days of coding.
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Minecraft Realms is a service designed for parents “tired of trying to act as server administrators on behalf of their kids". Mojang plan to provide a simple and safe means of allowing children to play Minecraft online (and to keep them away from 2b2t, presumably), for a fee of between $10 and $15 a month.
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It's been a long time coming but, finally, version 1.5 of Minecraft is live. The Redstone Update is so named because it introduces a bunch of new redstone devices for you to play with, as well as improving the game's lighting and even making Minecraft run a little smoother. You'll also find quartz waiting for you in the Nether, hoppers and droppers that can shunt items around for you and and smarter, meaner monsters.
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Mojang have just released Minecraft Snapshot 13w10b, which they say is the final step before they issue a pre-release for The Redstone Update, aka Minecraft 1.5, tomorrow. As with the last three snapshots, it adds very little functionality that the player would notice, but it does exile a whole bunch of bugs, something Mojang are determined to do before they issue the next version of their game.
Right now, it would probably help Mojang quite a bit if you did happen to grab the snapshot, played around with it a bit and then repoted any bigs you spotted, so that the team could come down on them like a tonne of recently smelted, still warm clay bricks. Or you could just play Minecraft anyway because, y'know. Minecraft.
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