The snapshots over the last weeks have been a little dull, and today’s is no exception. 14w08a has no survival features at all, beyond a slight tweak of the way health is displayed in the player list – it now displays as a row of hearts, and will only fall back to the textual display if there isn’t enough room.
There are a few bug fixes too – one preventing players from drowning underwater, and another that meant iron trapdoors didn’t have names (I now call mine ‘Archibald’). A few more technical problems have been squished, too, and there are a smattering of new features for adventure map makers. For the full list, head to theMojang blog.
If you’ve been enjoying extraterrestrial exploration game Starbound, you might want to give a Minecraft server named Starquest a try. “We took Minecraft and brought it to the space age,” say its creators. “Design, build, and fly your very own spaceship to any one of our nine magnificent custom-generated planets, where you can build your base using incredibly awesome advanced technology!”
You’ll need to move between different planets to gather all the resources you need, or you can steal them from other players. There are space-battles too, and you can protect bases and towns if you so desire. What’s particularly impressive is that it needs no client-side mods – just a 1.7.2 version of Minecraft. Give it a try at play.starquestminecraft.com, or read more over on the Minecraft forums.
There are a few builds I spotted this week that were worthy of attention. Bakufreak noticed that stained glass blocks make excellent water pipes. He or she is using a texture pack here, but the effect should be much the same with standard textures. I also liked this amusement park, currently under construction. Lots of good detail ideas.
This beginner’s guide to Minecraft by Asgaloth, made for a school design project, is pretty neat and might be useful to some of you who want to get friends into the game. This reworking of a desert town is well thought-out. Oh, and as there’s been some sort of memo that everything on the internet this week needs to refer to Flappy Bird in some way, here’s the suddenly-iconic game recreated in Minecraft.
How strong is Steve? That’s the question Spiterman set out to answer, taking the heaviest thing you can carry in your inventory — gold blocks — and totalling the amount up you can carry, multiplying by the weight of gold. Turns out he can carry about six Eiffel towers around with him at all times. Not bad.
Finally, there’s another update on the Minecraft movie – Birth of Man – that was announced two weeks ago and then cancelled last week. It might be back on. Creator Brandon Laatsch is apparently now in talks with Mojang about making it happen and has split with the studio he was working with — RocketJump — so he has more creative control. “Mojang has been supportive throughout,” he says. More as we get it.
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.