Minecrafting 144: Right-click an emerald

Minecraft Mojang

It’s a Swedish holiday weekend, most of the Mojang team are hanging out at Blockholm (which you should really check out), and all the work that’s been done is internal changes, so there’s no snapshot again this week. Not that that stops crazy people abusing poor Dinnerbone on Twitter.

There is a little bit of other official news though. For starters, British Minecrafters will be pleased to hear that the Insomnia Gaming festival taking place this weekend has a dedicated Minecraft zone. It includes survival, parkour and walls tournaments, guests including BebopVox, Antvenom, FyreUK and Caveman Films, and heaps of merchandise from Jinx and Egmont Publishing. If you’re anywhere near Coventry, it’ll be worth stopping by.

Also the Minecraft movie that we’ve discussed a few times in the past is dead. The guy making it, Brandon Laatsch, has decided to halt all work on the project for two reasons – the first is that Minecraft’s fanbase is pretty young, and younger audiences don’t tend to have the cash to Kickstart movies. The second is that there’s a Minecraft movie in the works from Warner Bros. “This development makes me want to steer clear of it the same way Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus made Notch want to separate himself,” said Laatsch.

On the community front, the most impressive thing I saw this week was a neat Bukkit plugin by SethBling that lets you play Bejeweled in Minecraft. It’s called BlingJeweled, and you can grab it from here. To play once installed, merely right-click an emerald.

I also loved Agrarian Skies – a modpack that combines a traditional skyblock game with a series of quests, tools, spells and machines. Your objective? Rebuilding an entire world from nothing. That might take you some time. You can grab it through the FeedTheBeast launcher, if you have that installed. If not, what are you waiting for?

Builds I liked this week include this medieval blacksmith, this impressive medieval town, and this huge renaissance palace, complete with extensive gardens. If you’re into little details, you might like this set of DJ decks, these neat bits of office equipment, and this gorgeous horse statue.

Finally, a Redditor named Qeth has put together a great video talking about the efficiency of stripmining. Turns out the way we’ve all been creating our branch mines wrong. 5.6% wrong, to be specific. Watch the video above to see how.

I’ll call it a day there. 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.