Do you like mesa biomes in Minecraft? I rarely find any. But this week’s snapshot has tweaked mesa and desert terrain generation, as well as fixing a stack of bugs and making a few quality of life improvements.
Meanwhile, the community has been hard at work creating beautiful things for you to click on. An adorable village! A slime-piston marble run where you’re the marble! A nifty obsidian generator! A replica of the original Pokémon map! The list does not end there, read on for more.
Snapshot 14w20a, which you can find full details of on the official Mojang blog, isn’t exactly packed full of exciting new things. If you’re a fan of caves then you’ll find more of them in deserts and mesas, and the F3 menu now shows which direction you’re facing. Again.
Meanwhile, the tab-list is a little prettier and if you’re stuck outside of the world border you can now walk freely to go back inside, so that’s nice. You’ll also no longer suffocate in leaves, redstone, TNT or glowstone. Finally, for adventure map makers, there’s a neat feature that lets you put cinematic titles across the screen. Here’s what it looks like. Pretty neat, huh?
I share a lot of cool things people have built in this column, but the stuff I build for myself tends to be just “functional” at best. That’s why I love this How To Build guide by kaephis, which covers the absolute basics of making things look pretty – covering a lot of aesthetic theory. Colour and texture matching, shape choices and depth are all discussed in detail with examples. Go take a read, then have a look at this beautiful village design by ReverendPickleChips that takes many of these principles into account. Then build your own.
It appears that people haven’t finished making awesome things with pistons and slime blocks yet. This mad marble run, created by Zdf46, uses you as the marble – shunting you between a series of crazy jumps and drops. Don’t watch if you suffer from motion sickness.
NiceMarkMC also shared this brilliant design for an obsidian generator that effectively turns a piece of redstone into a piece of obsidian. The lava gets sucked back into the dispenser. Great stuff – particularly if you’ve got a witch farm supplying you with infinite redstone. Oh, and if you’ve ever wondered how to kidnap villagers and get them where you want them, you might find this guide by Legendary Assassin useful too.
Finally, Pokémon fans rejoice – the team behind one of the longest-running Minecraft projects (started in December 2009!) has finally completed a version of their Pokécraft map that they’re happy enough with to release to the public. It includes 1:1 recreations of Kanto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh regions, as well as a bunch of bonus areas and hidden easter eggs. You can find full details on the project blog, see loads of screenshots on Imgur, or just download the damn thing here.
Right, that’s enough from me. 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.