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Minecrafting 142: Picking Your Pocket

Minecraft Mojang

We’ve got another snapshotless week. My spellcheck says that’s not a word, but we all know that it is. The Mojang team are all working hard following GDC, but normal service should resume pretty soon – just be aware of any announcements coming out of Mojang in the next few days, as it’s April Fool’s season.

In the meantime, those who fancied a little more immersion in the Minecraft worlds may be disappointed — as Notch has publicly cancelled plans to bring the game to upcoming virtual reality console Oculus Rift. Minecraft’s creator wrote on Twitter that he was dropping out of the deal following the company’s acquisition by Facebook because Facebook ‘creeps him out’.

In an extensive blog post on the matter he wrote: “Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social. In fact, I think social could become one of the biggest applications of (Oculus Rift). Being able to sit in a virtual living room and see your friend’s avatar? Business meetings? Virtual cinemas where you feel like you’re actually watching the movie with your friend who is seven time zones away? But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games.”

Elsewhere there’s been plenty of building action going on over the last week. One of the most impressive is this pickpocket plugin for Bukkit servers, created by prodigious modder Sethbling. Has your friend got a sword you want? Now you can steal it off him. Very neat – I can’t wait to see what enterprising server admins do with it.

Build-wise, I was blown away (sorry) by this enormous nuclear explosion created by RhythmaScotian, and I also loved this contemporary house design by Abbzore – particularly due to the choice of texture pack in the photos. This well design is great, and so is this design for a storage area. Oh, and you remember the Beaver Theme Park I mentioned last month? It’s coming along well – check out this map of the latest additions.

Finally, do you like running *and* jumping? Then you’ll probably enjoy this parkour map titled ‘The Eye’. Creator SilentNoises writes: “This map basically just started with me learning how to make spheres without commands and it ended up being a full out map.” And a lovely map it is too.

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.