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Minecrafting 143: Snowy Textures

Minecraft Elsa's castle

As promised last week, the name-changing patch is here. Minecraft 1.7.6 has been released, and it was swiftly followed by Minecraft 1.7.7 to fix some bugs. The aim of the patch is to prepare the world for the forthcoming ability for Minecraft users to change their names – a much-requested feature.

Despite the patch, you can’t change your name yet. That won’t come until after patch 1.8. But Mojang wants to get the functionality out into the world as early as possible so that when the spigot is turned on and everyone changes their names five times in a day, most servers are likely to have been updated to support it.

Other changes in the 1.7.6/1.7.7 patch include the ability for Realms users to op other players, functionality for skins and capes to be distributed through servers, and a lowering of the minimum setting for FOV – down to 30. Grab the server patch from Mojang.com, or just download the client version through the launcher. No snapshots other than that – the team is waist-deep in internal rewrites to make the plugin API possible.

On the community side of things, the best thing I saw this week was this awesome concept set of snowy textures for the basic blocks, created by Redditor Waj171. One of the benefits of all the internal wrangling Mojang has been doing lately is that it’ll be much easier for modders to do this sort of thing in the future.

If you’re looking to add some new life to your Minecrafting, you should check out ourtwenty best Minecraft mods.

When it comes to builds, this diverse spawn town has heaps of ideas for your multiplayer server, but I was wowed by the scale of this recreation of Elsa’s Ice Castle from Frozen. Speaking of castles, Bahnstof is a nice medieval/renaissance design, and if you prefer a more ruined look then Norulan is what you’ll be looking for.

Elsewhere, the Glendale pack is a lovely texture pack containing 3D objects for your world, and I’m very much looking forward to the release of this Minecraft Bingo mod. Meanwhile, Sethbling has been busy this week recreating Goat Simulator in Minecraft.

That’s probably a good place to stop. 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.