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Minecrafting 109: Lego of me

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It’s been a busy week in the Minecraft community, with plenty of news from both official channels and from the fans. I’ll start with the ridiculously exciting announcement that more Minecraft Lego is incoming. A few years back, an enormously-successful petition on Lego’s CUUSOO site led to the release of a “micro-world” set, with Mojang donating the 1% royalty it gets on sales to charity.

But that doesn’t seem to be the end of the collaboration, because Lego has just announced a pair of new Minecraft sets.

In September, fans will be able to get their hands on a Minecraft village, which comes complete with crops, mines, and pig, villager and zombie micromobs. They’ll also be able to build the Nether, which comes with an obsidian portal, netherrack, gravel, flowing lava and bedrock. That set will be populated with two ghasts and a zombie pigman. I can’t wait to get out hands on them.

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Speaking of zombies, have you been having invasion problems since 1.6 hit? Reddit user Dittiox has come up with a nifty set of stairs that retract at night to leave zombies moaning below your porch. It’s tuned so that it retracts just before the light gets to a level allowing zombies to spawn, and the light detector is hidden beneath a nearby frozen lake. Very impressive.

Another design that caught my eye this week comes from Angs200, who’s built an automatic lamppost that lights up at night. A number of configurations let you decide exactly when you want it to turn on, but unfortunately it’s not quite symmetrical. If you’ve got a better design, I want to hear about it – tell me in the comments.

In custom map news, I’ve got an interesting complete-the-monument map for you – the third instalment of the Emerald Dream series. It’s a huge, sprawling world that tasks you with fighting through a series of dungeons to collect records and blocks that are then placed on the “Crown of Awakening”. Creator Orange1095 has added custom monsters and even a trading system. If you’d like to give it go, grab it from the Minecraft forums.

Finally, WolfieMario has come up with a nifty way of improving in-game text – in chat, in books and on signs. He’s created a resource pack with custom fonts that add heaps of useful icons to the game, a bit like Minecraft emoji. All items, blocks, mobs and entities are represented, It replaces a few of the characters in Han Chinese, so if you’re using that language in-game, you might run into a few difficulties, but anyone else can enjoy them without any issues. For full details, head over to Imgur.

That’s all for this week. 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.