So at last Minecraft’s Adventure Update 1.8 (now 1.8.1) is upon us. It’s a really substantial update as expected so not everything will be covered here. Nor, it seems, was everything included and update 1.9 points to filling a lot of those gaps. Such as adding boss mobs to Strongholds and people to villages.

Minecraft now has animated startup screen and a few more options. The main new option relates to creation mode (as opposed to the more usual survival mode) which allows flying, unlimited resources and instant mining. I guess this could be called a true sandbox mode.

Generated a new world to have a look around for the big world additions. Namely;

• Villages
• Abandoned Mineshafts
• Ravines
• Strongholds

The first world was an island more barren the Minecraft’s survival mod and surrounded by lots and lots of water. Probably an Ocean biome. Delete. New World Regen. Found the Vines almost immediately hanging off trees, apparently they can grow too if you transplant them. This was one of the new biomes, in this case swamp and you can see more mushrooms there too. There are also Ocean and Mountain biomes and all of them can be much larger now.

Ran around looking. I knew the Strongholds were rare (3 per map!!) but the others hmm, who knows. Spent the night up a pillar of quality dirt. My first sighting of the inestimable Endermen. They work pretty much as advertised. Frozen while looking at them once you look away they are upon you pretty damn quick, but not up a pillar They do shake a bit and plenty of them spawn. Notch and team did a good job. They do do convey a sense of spooky. My only strong worry with these though is the damage they will do to my structures by picking up blocks. Endermen drop Ender Pearls which have no current use.

Yes they are after me

A few creeper explosions and a hop or two away I found one of the ravines. A nice addition, they really are enormous and that lets sunlight, lava, water stream in.

I spent quite some time looking until I discovered by using seed ’666′ or ‘Lol’ a Village will spawn near your own spawn in spot. The 666 village is pretty borked you can see it for yourself if you use the seed. Villages look very European. They include small farming plots, water wells, backyards, several types of homes and sometimes a tower or smithy. The smithy has lava and a couple of furnaces.

This is the borked 666 Village

Naturally I fell in the well. Not advised without a pickaxe.

If I find the other two structures (Abandoned Mineshafts and Strongholds) with the new Cave Spider and Silverfish mobs I will share that too. Both are apparently rich in resources making the dangers worth it.

This new Cave Spider native to the mine shafts poisons and can fit through 1×1 spaces. The silverfish seem to pretend to be stone blocks and can swarm you with numbers. They might be a bit spooky in themselves.

There’s a new food system where food no longer heals directly but fills a food bar which heals you over time if over 80% full. Most foods are now stackable. There’s now raw beef dropped from cows which can be cooked to steak and raw chicken from… chickens which can be cooked too. Eating raw food can cause a kind of food poisoning which isn’t too severe but it is more efficient to cook food. There’s melons which can be farmed. Pumpkins can now be farmed too.

The combat system has also been changed. Bows can be charged up over 3 steps in under 1 second. Critical hits can be delivered by hitting a mob while falling or if you are above a mob. The main thing is the experience bar though which levels up by collecting glowing balls which drops from mobs you kill. I yet have no idea what significance this has currently.

Lighting has changed with the colour determined by the dominant source. White for sunlight, blue for moonlight and red for other sources. The moonlight blue is a serious throwback to old movies.

There’s also other new items.

• Stone bricks
• Slabs and stairs, for both regular bricks and stone bricks.
• Fence gates
• Glass panes which work much like doors and are thin
• Iron bars, perfect for holding the inlaws.

Overall the Adventure Update is a great addition and can help encourage more exploration outside the walled comfort zone.

Update: Ironically it looks like Bethesda’s forum has had another security breach on the 12th of this month.  A full password reset has been conducted by the company.

One of the games I’m looking forward to which is not even slightly indie, is Skyrim, the latest in the Elder Scrolls Series from the famed software house, Bethesda. This role-playing game due on 11th November this year and I think Skyrim will hit that target.

There’s a collector’s edition at $AU199.99 in Australia which is around $US207. However in the US it’s $US149.99 showing us all once again how often and much Australia is ripped off by the games publishing industry. It’s not a bad kit as far as collector’s editions go with an artbook, making of Skyrim DVD and statue.

Apparently the character most desired by fans was the Dunmer thief and it looks like they’re in from this screenshot.

Zaldir on the forums of Bethesda has compiled quite a nice list of all the features and details of the upcoming game. It’s well worth checking out as the detail is staggering including information about the dragon shouts.

h/t SystemLink Multi

Terraria has been updated to 1.0.6. There’s a bunch of significant changes including 4 new mobs much more crafting including a grandfather clock and toilet?! There are keys and presumably locks to use them with. Mud and ash no longer fall due to gravity

Loads of changes on the interface front. I’ll have to play it out to get a real feel for it but I am confident it will be an improvement.

There’s core gameplay changes too. There’s a difficulty level selectable on character generation. Now fighting can yield critical hits. There’s also debuff/time effects such as poisoning and curses.

As promised potions have been nerfed. They heal less and have a cooldown. To balance that we’re supposed to heal by not being hit for a while. Mana also regenerates automatically.

More options when making your characters along with the extra items and interface changes should improve this game’s cosmetic side a bit.

For the full 1.0.6 Changelog see here.

I will add more if there’s anything interesting once I’ve actually played it for a bit.

Update 1: Very cool improvements. You can make ale with the keg and a mug crafted from sand. Ale makes you hit harder but gives less defence. A cooking pot lets you make soup which gives a stat buff.

The interface includes a trash now and ammo slots which is great. You can also see how much ammo you have to use. Be careful with using <shift> when emptying your bags into a chest. It goes into the trash instead.

Update 2: Quite a few bugs in this update which isn’t surprising given the update’s scope.  A fix (1.0.6.1) is due next week.  Things that are not bugs are also mentioned in their post.

Update: The teething issues appear to be all sorted.

Just released. You can get access by buying it here if you don’t have an account yet.  They are having some teething issues with the rush but it should settle down soon.

Yay Minecraft 1.7 is out. The bad news is that the adventuring has been delayed until version 1.8. The good news is the pistons I’ve shown in an earlier post.

Pistons were originally a mod by mod developer Hippoplatimus. Pistons can push (up to 12) and pull (one only) blocks. To pull blocks you need to use a sticky piston which is a regular piston with a slimeball added. Slimeballs come from slimes and I have only seen two slimes in game so far so I’m going to have to do some serious lower level excavation to help them along a bit.

Pistons are going to be very useful they can push mobs, players and dropped blocks around and they can stop and start the flow of water. I expect to see a bunch of innovative mechanisms using pistons. If you have a cool mechanism, I’d love to see it.

I guess it means the water flow torch drop technique will now be rather pointless too. I’m already laying out how I can use it to improve my farm which like most has a manual water stop of a block. Now it can be automated. Minecraft, the game you spend hours planning and building to theoretically save you a few seconds of walking and clicking.

Pistons will not push or pull all blocks, especially those with entities such as chests, as well as obsidian and bedrock. There’s also a few nasty bugs.

Other changes include;

• Fire or redstone is required to trigger TNT. No more bash and run.
• Fences can be stacked without the tedious workaround.
• Shears are added which is how you get wool off sheep and also lets you harvest leaf blocks. Unfortunately leaf blocks must be near a wood block to remain ‘alive’. Punching sheep no longer drops wool and that may also mean wolves don’t cause wool to be dropped either.
• Cobblestone and Bricks have a new texture

The minecraft devs still want to deliver a full release by around a week after 11/11/2011 and there’s a lot to do. Namely; “finishing up the mod api, improving stability and performance, adding supporting features like friends lists and a proper server browser, integrating singleplayer and multiplayer, and most importantly fleshing out the gameplay.” I’m not sure they will make it but will be fun to see how they go.

The more immediate version 1.8 coming soon, appears as though it will be an exciting release. They have mentioned NPC villages, a new mob, new mechanics. A ‘silverfish’ texture was slipped into this 1.7 update but it is not used in any way.  In real life silverfish are small, silvery wingless insects which are well known for eating paper and wood… hmmm.   My precious library! nom nom nom.  On the other hand they might just go for the throat and kill you.  All in all it seems to be late game and adventuring focused which should be a great improvement.

Well Firefox 5 was out on the 21^st June. I’ve barely gotten used to Firefox 4 released around 3 months ago. The rapid releases are a reaction to the rapid release schedule of Chrome, another popular browser.

This release doesn’t seem to have any whiz-bang features but it does have a solid set of under the hood improvements to improve the overall experience for developers and users of the browser. There’s security fixes, improved Linux integration, better standards support, many performance improvements and better spell checking in some locales.

So the result is looking the same as Firefox 4 but is a richer, faster experience.