It’s a pretty technical snapshot this week. 14w06a and the subsequent bugfix has a cornucopia of bug fixes (like the UI turning weird colours when you hold certain items, and zombies hiding what they’re carrying), but it also adds a few more tools for mapmakers.
You can now spawn entities that won’t expire, and ones that can’t be picked up. You can also add and reset objectives for different players and teams individually, and hide certain parts of tooltips, as well as various other tweaks. Custom block shapes are now possible too. The upshot of all that is that we’re likely to see adventure maps getting better and better.
Oh, and we’ve been given more options to see things too. An optional hotkey will show outlines of players whilst spectating (so you can find people more easily) and you can see last week’s new barrier blocks in creative mode while holding a barrier block of your own. More mobs have been updated to the new AI, too, and local difficulty and time are now displayed of the F3 screen. Oh, and there’s now an achievement for crafting an apple. Yay!
On the community side of things, we love this island fortification built by jdmiller82. This clean and simple bridge design is nice too, though you’ll need to either be using creative mode or have handy access to a *lot* of iron to provide the anvil railings. Oh, and if you want to hide away your crafting table, this is a pretty nifty solution.
The ICE GPU 2.0 project is in full swing, and another modder has created a new internal component for it – the line drawer. It’s quick enough to plot a point every 1.2 seconds, which doesn’t sound like much but isn’t too bad by redstone standards.
If you like Minecraft movies, then you might want to go kickstart Birth of Man – a full-length feature film set in the world of Minecraft. “We have been repeatedly disappointed by Hollywood’s interpretations and creations of movies based on popular video-game franchises,” says creator Brandon Laatsch. “We would love to see a video-game movie done right, and we feel that, as people with their feet in both the gaming and film-making worlds, we are the right people to do it. This is a film made for us, the real Minecraft gamers. We don’t expect non-players to get it.”
Finally, if you’re having difficulty fitting all your chests into one space and you need a more efficient solution, check out this design by Kastrel. You can fit twice as many chests into half the space by using stair blocks to allow them to open. Neat, huh?
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.