As long as you have your graphics set to “fancy,” this snapshot means you’ll now be able to view any item as a 3D object rather than the 2D sprites that they used to be. As well as fireworks that now pop, Mojang have also included a new type of enchantment, known as “Thorns,” which can be placed upon armour and which causes anything mob that hits you in melee to also harm itself.
You can download the new development snapshot from Mojang’s site here, but it you’ve never tried installing a new snapshot before then I’d recommend you have a look at our how-to guide first.
As well as those mentioned above, there’s a host of other changes that have been made. Here’s a (not exhaustive) list taken from reddit at around 2:30pm today:
- Added enchanted books to villager trading and loot chests.
- Added tool highlight when switching items in the hotbar.
- Added a warning for users playing Minecraft on systems that won’t be supported for much longer. (PowerPCs and Java 5.)
- Dropping items while sneaking now drops the entire stack.
- Death messages now appear in server log files.
- You can now use Written books to enchant any item in Creative mode.
- Expanded on enchanted books:
- They can now be found in dungeons with special enchants normally not obtainable.
- Silk Touch can now be applied to shears on the anvil, cobweb can be harvested this way.
- They can now be found in loot chests and by trading with villagers.
- Unbreaking can now be applied to anything with durability.
There’s a whole bunch of other bug fixes, too:
- Fixed the Firework Star crafting recipe consuming unneeeded items.
- Fixed enchanted books allowing enchants to be applied to items that shouldn’t receive them.
- Arrows shot at Endermen should no longer disappear.
- Fixed a bug with custom mob spawners not spawning different types of entities correctly.
- Fixed animals appearing to walk through fences in single-player.
- Fixed some items with multi-layer textures rendering both layers separately when on the ground.
- Fixed tools differing only in damage not being able to be swapped in the inventory.
- Fixed some Z-Fighting with the beacon.
- Fixed some graphical issues in the trading GUI.
- Fixed /say not showing the text in the original purple color.
- Fixed placing double slabs ignoring damage value.
- Fixed minecarts being unable to travel through Nether portals.
- Fixed lightning not flashing.
- Fixed firework star duplication crafting recipe.
- Fixed the Nether and the End generating random client-side blocks in MP.
- Fixed FallingSand spawners failing to save properly and causing crashes.
- Fixed the blocks in lowest layer of the map not being recognized by beacons.
- Fixed enchants not showing up in item frames.