Minecraft snapshot 14w27a introduced bunny rabbits. How do you top that? Well: last week, Mojang tried to compress time and space. But that didn’t work out, so for this week’s snapshot they’ve decided to “try something else and bend space around time”.
Released yesterday, snapshot 14w29a infused the game with optimisations designed to tackle render performance. It’s been swiftly followed by 14w29b, which will do “even more” good for performance. Or break the game. That’s what we’re going to find out.
“We can never be sure if bending space around time is the right approach until we get feedback from you on the 14w29b snapshot that bends time around space instead,” explained Michael ‘Searge’ Stoyke, in reference to the game’s newly implemented threaded render batch system.
“That’s a lot a fancy sounding words, so if you don’t know what that means, it should improve performance even more,” said Searge. “Or crash horribly. But without your feedback, we’ll never know which one is true.”
Brave players can now select VBO in Minecraft’s video settings. If your system supports it, enabling Vertex Buffer Objects should increase FPS by between 5% and 10%.
Elsewhere, Mojang have fixed a slew of silly bugs – including one which saw mobs eschew spawning next to water if its map coordinates were negative. Find the full list at the Mojang blog.
As ever, snapshots are something you don’t want to run without backing up your favourite worlds first. But once you have, you can enable experimental updates by creating a new ‘snapshots’ profile via Minecraft’s launcher and ticking the relevant box.
Do you think you’ll risk a crash for a world that generates as fast as you can run through it? Or would you rather run a cocktail of the very best Minecraft mods?