Games. They’re never finished, are they? You can’t even stop Mojang from tinkering with Minecraft‘s gubbins. Not even now, in 2015, years after someone completed a 1:1 scale replica of Minecraft within Minecraft. Following on from last months’ Ender Dragon battle fix, The latest snapshot, catchily titled 15w36a, herarlds the dawn of a new era in which you’re more vulnerabe while wearing armour, the AI’s a bit less buggy, and you can fish more effectively. It’s a brave new world.
Direct from Mojang’s official site, here’s the full list of improvements in the latest snapshot:
– Rebalanced armour.
– Changed damage & protection enchantments to match new armour system.
– Fixed a few AI bugs across lots of mobs.
– Made endermen creepy again.
– Vwooop.
– More optimisations! Many optimisations!
– Added player collision again.
– Fishing rods can now catch entities properly again.
– Added team-based options for collision.
– The world may corrupt slightly less times now! Or slightly more, we’re not sure!
– I like hugs!
The eagle-eyed among you will have already singled out two entries on that list that are, in fact, nonsense masquerading as improvements, but the others all sound pretty welcome.
The headline act there is obviously armour rebalancing. Prior to this update, armour in Minecraft worked by attributing each armour item a value from 0-20 (20 being diamond armour), then dividing that value by 20& so damage reduction scales from 0-80%.
That system made it problematic for Mojang to add challenge to combat scenarios for players in full armour without creating a world of one-hit kill beasties for those not clad head-to-toe in diamond. Now, as Mojang explain on the Minecraft subreddit, it’s a good deal more complicated:
“First, the total armor value is calculated as normal, then it’s decreased by 50% of the incoming damage, and then it’s divided by 30 instead of 25. So now the protection percentage gets weaker from strong attacks, and the maximum protection is 66% (instead of 80%).”
I couldn’t agree more.