Snapshot 14w04a is out, bringing with it some nifty changes to villager AI, rare loot, flammable bushes and more.
It means terrifying things like this.
Villagers now actually do stuff – like harvesting and replanting crops. Plus, doors are now added to the closest village, making iron farms “practically pointless“. Comparators have been changed to work with item frames, detecting rotation (which now goes in 45-degree increments) and therefore allowing for the creation of nifty combination locks.
Buttons can now be placed on ceilings and floors, and dispensers can place mob heads, allowing for the automatic creation of withers and snow and iron golems. Bushes can now catch fire, and the “Looting” enchantment now gives a one percent chance of rare loot per level. Mobs now ignore people with invisibility, too, and a big stack of bugs have been fixed. Yay! To play it, open your launcher and choose “latest snapshot” under the profile menu.
On the community side of things, there’s been a bit of a ruckus this last week over automation and command blocks. The first stirrings came with a lengthy post on Reddit complaining that Mojang is removing too many of the automatic aspects of the game. “Removing the possibility to create farms and removing the possibility to automate tedious processes is going to be bad for the game because it starts to take all the possibility away from a sandbox,” said Littleguyyy. “If we are playing a sandbox game, why aren’t we allowed to make what we want?”.
More than 10,000 upvotes later, Jeb responded on Twitter, saying: “Mob farms are item dupes in my opinion, but I’m not an idiot who ignores a 1500 posts long uproar on Reddit.” He added: “I just wish automation was by design and not by unclear mob spawn rules.”
Since then, another complaint has come along that’s getting some traction. Redditor I_Have_No_Idea_What pointed out: “Lately it feels like all of the new content we’ve been getting is for command blocks, and nothing for “vanilla” redstone.” He added: “Tons of new commands and everything to use in them almost every update, if not updates for existing commands. But what if they get a bit too much content?” It’ll be interesting to see if Jeb takes notice here too.
But away from such negativity, and on to the awesome stuff we’ve seen. Dudwithacake has installed an awesome river valley under the floor of his base, while RetardedMouse has build an incredible medieval-styled wall. We also loved this recreation of the fields of Holland, and skin-makers will almost certainly appreciate this handy guide to making skins in Minecraft 1.8.
But our favourite occupation this week has been working out how this Spanish guy built spheres in Minecraft. It seems to involve about a billion command blocks, but we have no idea what else because it’s in Spanish. Suddenly, our blocky domain may not be so blocky any more. It’s a brave new world.
Right. I’ll leave it there for today. 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.