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Minecrafting 139: Sword In The Stone

Minecraft Mojang

Groan. Snapshot 14w10a is another pile of bug fixes and mapmaking tweaks without anything exciting for survival players. “Don’t worry, we have some cool survival plans soon!” promises Dinnerbone. Among the fixes are an inconsistent door texture and an improper cake texture, phantom floating mobs and a problem that caused baby cows to suffocate. Aww.

More exciting are the features in the patch that enable future support for name changes. Right now, you’re stuck with the playername that you put in when you first signed up for the game – which some people don’t like. The problem is that the server files refer to players using those names, so they’re needing to be tweaked to use unique identification codes instead.

These changes have now been made in the game files, but name changing won’t be properly available as a feature until Minecraft 1.8 drops later this year. Dinnerbone says that’s so they can be confident that the majority of active servers have updated to the new code. A 1.7.6 patch in March will backport the changes to normal servers.

Over on the community side of things, it’s been a good week. If you’re a fan of Arthurian legend, you’ll want to grab Boggy_San’s resource pack coming soon – its redstone torch texture is a sword in a stone, meaning it’s just the thing for a medieval fantasy themed build. We also liked this irrigated farm design by EdgeUK.

We don’t tend to cover map seeds very often, but if you’re looking for a nice place to start, try putting this in the world generator: “7208794910977586159”. It’s got a huge area of stone, coal and iron at the surface, a load of horses, a lovely birch forest, dozens of surface caves and a nice wide clear area for building a town. Thanks for Raggdconstant on Reddit for spotting that one.

Meanwhile, a chap named Christopher Mitchell is building a 1:1 scale model of Manhattan in Minecraft. Not by hand, because that would take aaaages, but by pulling in data from loads of places including Google Earth. Ars Technica has a great article about the process, which you can read by clicking right here.

Finally, what’s your go-to design when building a new house? That’s the question that CagedChimp asked on Reddit, and the answers are excellent – covering subterranean strongholds, villages, treehouses and much more. If you’re looking for some inspiration for your next map, it’s a good place to start.

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.