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Minecrafting 136: Death Clock

Minecraft Mojang

Another technical snapshot this week. “We’ve still been working hard on rewriting internal stuff (such as how blocks are rendered, or how the entire inventory system works) in preparation for the Plugin API,” explains Dinnerbone apologetically in the blog post announcing 14w07a.

In fact there are only two tweaks that’ll be of interest to the majority of you. The first is iron trapdoors. These are crafted from four iron bars, and only open when they receive a redstone signal, just like iron doors. They look quite nice, though, so we might see them being used vertically on builds if mapmakers can figure out how to deliver the redstone they need.

The second is that you can now share to LAN for spectator mode only. This is mostly a way for you to show off your creations to people on your network without you needing to worry about them destroying anything. Other than that, the changes are mostly for mapmakers. If you’re one of them, go check them out here, and we’ll go look at some community creations instead.

The best thing we saw this week was a Universe Death Clock. “I made a door that’ll only open once the Universe ends,” says creator Spumwack. “And I’m not talking about the Minecraft universe, I’m talking about the Universe universe.” His creation is essentially a redstone clock that won’t trigger for more than 10^100 years. The video above is highly recommended watching. Download the world and watched a closed door for eternity here.

We also loved this video by FinsGraphics that shows off Minecraft’s newest biomes in real life. “‘We actually did take a giant road trip and drove the the redwood forest in California and the Grand Canyon in Arizona,” he says. Great stuff.

We also liked this village design using homes from the three-home challenge, this ice castle which reminded us quite a bit of World of Warcraft, this hog roast design, this basketball hoop and this brilliant design for modern guttering.

Oh, and that Minecraft movie we mentioned last week? It’s dead. Birth of Man was killed because its creators had somehow forgotten to ask Mojang if it would be okay to include loads of their intellectual property. In a brief tweet, Notch wrote: “We don’t allow half a million kickstarters based on our ip without any deals in place. :/” :/ indeed.

Right. I’ll leave it there for today. If you’ve seen anything in the Minecraft community that you think I should be highlighting, tell me about it by dropping me an email. I’ll be back with another roundup this time next week.