Weekly Pickaxe articles 14/01

And my most recent articles, as promised, a day after official release of the Weekly Pickaxe.

Minecraft Update 1.1

Finally, an official Minecraft update has appeared. Everything that was in the snapshots has now been added to Vanilla with some extra's and some bugfixes. Let me sum them up:

- Bow enchantments (more on that in Bow Enchantments)
- Flaming arrows will set mobs on fire
- Cheaper Golden Apple recipe (surround an apple with gold nuggets)
- Leaves of normal trees now have a slight chance of dropping Red Apples
- 56 language translations
- Flat world option added, for super flat creative worlds.
- Slightly smoothed color transitions between biomes (No more hard edges on swamp biomes)
- Improved world generation (more hilly landscapes, beaches, ...
- Reduced brewing time to 20 seconds
- Added spawn eggs to creative (the colors of the eggs even look like the mobs)
- Added world type options (currently only super-flat and default)
- Removed collision box from ladders
- Adjusted the collision box on fence gates
- Fence gates react to redstone.
- Sheep eat grass and regain their wool
- Walking on farmland will not trample it, only falling will
- Pumpkins and melons do not need tilled land anymore to grow onto, dirt is fine enough
- Magma Cubes drop magma cream now
- NPC villages now spawn treasure chests in blacksmith shops
- New server settings in Server.properties: level-type, spawn-npcs, generate-structures

But a new update also means mods need to update. Just give the modders some time. No one can predict how fast they will update, just keep in mind modders are also human...

The_Other_Retard, News Reporter


Bow Enchantments

New thing in the latest Minecraft Update: Bow enchantments! Never mentioned, few times requested, but in the update anyway.
There are 4 enchantments available for the bow: Power, Punch, Infinity and Flame. The names sound pretty obvious, but I'll explain what they do anyway.
Power is simple: arrows shot with this bow deal extra damage. There are 5 levels of this enchantment and a fully charges shot with Power V will one-shot kill any passive mob.
Punch adds knockback to mobs, maxed at level III.
Infinity is maybe the most interesting of all bow enchantments: As long as you have at least one arrow in your inventory you will be shooting infinite arrows. Arrows shot this way are unretrievable, so you can't use them to farm arrows, but hey, you'll have infinite arrows. Only one level available because you can't have more than infinite arrows.
And the last one, Flame, is applied to any flaming arrow in game, so if you shoot an arrow (or a dispencer shoots it) through lava it will automatically receive this enchantment. It's effect is pretty clear: whatever mob the arrow hits will be set on fire. This should be tested on the Enderdragon. This enchantment also has just one level.

After doing some tests on my own (with SSP commands) I concluded it is possible to have a bow with all enchantments in one, you just have to be lucky enough to get it. I got lots of bows with only Power or Punch, got one with Flame and got one with Power V, Infinity I and Punch II... One shot kills on most mobs (zombies need a finishing shot and Endermen are just a genuine Pain In The You-Know-Where) and unlimited arrows as long as the bow isn't broken... I enjoyed myself...

So there you go. Everything on the new bow mechanics.

The_Other_Retard, News Reporter


Minecraft News

So, with the new update all previous snapshots became Vanilla. Now you can spawn mobs with their respective eggs, you can enchant bows and you can't bump into ladders anymore.

Minecraft Pocked Edition will receive an update in early february (february 8th according to Daniel Kaplan) which will include mobs and new blocks. Minceraft Pocket Edition will be going more survival than creative, unlike what the original idea was.

On Minecraft Merchandise: There is already lots of stuff for sale, but there might be added a soon-to-be-released Creeper Plushie (https://twitter.com/notch/status/156007083370745856). the picture is of a test product (with santa hat added) that Notch borrowed from the office. And by borrow he meant steal.

That's about it for general news for this week.
Don't forget to check us next week and see ya until then.

The_Other_Retard, News Reporter.

That's about it...
You'll see when I post more.

-ThOR

Turd (yes, anal humor intended) TWP dump

And more incoming:

16/12/2011
Minecraft awards.

Since Minecraft recently won the Video Game Award of "Best Indie title" I would like to do a small retrospective on the awards Minecraft got until now.

When Minecraft still was in alpha it already was recommended to be played by Rock Paper Shotgun, the Daily Record, Penny Arcade and Good Game. After this it only got better.
In December 2010 Good Game selected Minecraft as their choice for "Best Downloadable Game of 2010" title and Gamasutra named it the eighth best game of the year as well as the eighth best indie game of the year. More awards for "Best game of the year" were from Indie DB, Rock Paper Shotgun and PC Gamer UK.

At the March 2011 Independent Games Festival Minecraft was nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Technical Excellence, and Excellence in Design awards and received the community-voted Audience Award. At Game Developers Choice Awards 2011 Minecraft won the award for Best debut game, Best downloadable game and Most Innovative game award, winning every award for which it was nominated and also winning the GameCity's videogame arts prize.
On May 5, 2011, Minecraft was selected as one of the 80 games that will be displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of "The Art of Video Games" exhibit that will open on March 16, 2012. And as we reported last week: even TIME Magazine has awarded Minecraft as highest in the top10 Games of 2011.

The most noted qualities that are cited for describing the awesomeness of Minecraft is primarily the freedom you get when playing the game as well as the simple but innovative way the game is designed. The biggest flaw is the lack of tutorial. Yes, you can find tutorials everywhere on the internet, but you must actually tab out or close the game, google it and find a instructive one as opposed to an easy ingame one...

And so all this lead to the VGA of 2011 wher Minecraft won the award for Best Independent Game and received third place for best PC game.
It has to be noted that since Minecraft development still is going on thanks to Jeb this may not be the last of awards Minecraft will receive.

I'll continue keeping a close eye on Minecraft news for you.
The_Other_Retard

Weekly Snapshot 11w50a

As weekly a "snapshot" is released by Jeb, with the client.jar (http://bit.ly/scPOSm) and the server.jar (http://bit.ly/sT51vw) downloadable for testing.
Much wasn't added, as Jeb was squashing some bugs that were in the previous Snapshot.
The changes in this version are: the sheep's grass eating has been expanded to tall grass, the Language support has improved, a few multiplayer spam protections were added and a few lines were added to the splash texts (those little yellow lines that bounce on the Minecraft Menu screen).

One thing I failed to tell with the previous Snapshot was the addition of mob-spawn-eggs. This gives you the ability to give yourself "mob eggs" in creative mode which spawns a mob when right-clicking and since they won't despawn anymore you can make add mobs to your custom maps and be sure they will still be there when someone plays it.

The_Other_Retard

Mojang News

The Mojang team and Oxeye Game Studio are working hard on getting Cobalt ready for pre-orders. For now the game is Windows only and heavily under construction. At the final release it supposed to have a full game editor to make complete game levels from scratch as well as new characters and npc's. The release of the pre-orders should also mean the new Mojang Account system will be up and running.

Mojang also started hiring more people to become "the most influential indie game development studio on Earth". They are only looking for developers at the moment, but this might change as the company will grow. Carl Manneh had more than 3000 applications to review and respond to in a few days. One is already hired, but he will only be revealed once the contracts are made.

People playing Minecraft in Europe at early hours (or very late in America) may have noticed the login servers were down a few times to update them. Everyone was warned by a big red box in the Minecraft News feed in the launcher. Everything went well thanks to Mollstam doing all-nighters.

We will be watching Mojang and Minecraft for you, tune in next week for even more.

The_Other_Retard

--------------------------------------------

Griefers

You may already have heard the next about Minecraft: "It gives the player complete freedom to do what they want". Like it or not, this also applies to griefers. Minecraft restricts very little in how much you can manipulate in the game. This was like this in alpha/classic and still is in the released version.

Do I support griefers? Yes and no.
Yes: they are playing and enjoying minecraft in their way, I can not forbid them from doing so.
And no: I wouldn't like them on my server or on a server I'm playing on.
But since Minecraft allows all this any server Admin should have the sense of limiting the actions of griefers. For example by adding a whitelist, by installing mod-monitoring tools (tools that allow mods and admins to see what modifications other players have while they're playing on the server (like x-ray mods, speedhacks, minimaps, Buildcraft, ...)) or simply by being online most of the time and banning griefers whenever they see one.

Also: don't provoke griefers. If you make a forumpost and type: "Iz hav new server, NO GREIFERZ!! I KILL THEM!!" you may expect griefers logging in to see how well you are at killing them while they grief the hell out of your server.

Another also: People tend to forget Minecraft is a game that comes with griefers progammed in the system (Creepers, Endermen and not to forget the Bane of Wooden Structures: Lightning), so being angry at player-griefers isn't that much of a point worth defending.

In short: a griefer destroying stuff on a server is not the griefers fault, he's just playing the game how he wants it. Whose fault is it then? The server admins for allowing these kind of players to the game.



--------------------------------------------
7/01/2012
Notch News:
Since there is very little news on Minecraft since our last issue so I bring you Notch news.

As he did a few times now Notch has joined the Ludum Dar contest where programmers receive a theme on which they must deliver a working in 48 hours. Notch liked his entry more than usual and continued it, making a christmas version of it and renaming it from Minicraft over to finally Minitale (and "snagging" the .com and .net domains for it). Only Notch knows where this is going.

In slightly related news: Notch has been voted "Person of the year 2011" on IGN.com. Yes, there were jokes and there were too much stating "Person of the Year is Persson!".

The_Other_Retard, News Reporter

Minecraft News
Most recent news states that Jeb finally has figured out what the imperative "fix ladders" meant (as stated in many tweets adesed to him) and he fixed it right away. Since Twitter doesn't allow very long messages the report itself is pretty cryptical and it's not shure what exactly got fixed.
Jeb and Notch both stated that the collision box for ladders got removed, what might result in some adventure-map puzzles becoming a lot more difficult, but this still isn't really confirmed.

Jon Kagstrom, the new AI programmer in Team Mojang is currently working on improving the AI in Minecraft (not yet in the Snapshot). His work will make it easier to add new behaviours to mobs. First goal will be adding breeding support to wolves, after that will follow more useful/interesting villagers.

Once I know more I'll report here.
The_Other_Retard, News Reporter

Mojang News:
Mojang hired some new people! Kristoffer Jelbring (@KrisJelbring) and Jon Kagstrom (@jonkagstrom). Jelbring is "a true Javascript ninja" according to Carlmanneh and will be mostly working on web stuff, while Kagstrom appears to be the promised AI programmer for both Minecraft and Scrolls. They haven't got a Mojang cartoony avatar yet, Junkboy should be working on it.

In other news: Cobalt is releasing smoothly, so I guess, since there's still no counter to see how many people already bought it. On Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDKFG8TzdO4) there are bugs being pointed out, custom maps being developed, just like custom map building tutorials...
During alpha (the current stage) Singleplayer and co-op General campaigns should be developed decently, just like multiplayer maps. For the "customizeable content" only the level editor is planned, while character, sound, weapons and background editors will follow after beta. The prices for Cobalt will be pretty much like Minecraft: 10 euro in alpha, 15 in beta, 20 after release.
For anyone who wants to check it out or play it in alpha: Cobalt Homepage (http://playcobalt.com/).

And Mojang hired one more. Now it's Wollay, currently making Cube World (http://wollay.blogspot.com/). It's a big, procedurally generated world, made of cubes, where you can mine, craft and build. BUT it's an RPG and not even playable except for the lucky few that help programming it. Notch has stated (http://i.imgur.com/OcGYF.png) Mojang will connect a keyboard to Wollay's brain and sell whatever game comes out. Except for that part everything is looking good for Mojang.

The_Other_Retard, News Reporter


Weekly Snapshot 12w01a

And another Snapshot got released with the following updates:
- Languages have been updated
- Color transitions between biomes got "slightly smoothed" (I sure hope they fixed the swamp transitions).
- Brewing time is now 20 seconds
- Enchantment tables are less random (still trying to figure out what this means)
- spawning eggs got colors more representing the mob they spawn
- Biome changes! In general they got more varied, but when starting a new world you can now choose between 'super-flat' and 'default'
- collision boxes on ladders got removed
- collision boxes on fence gates got aligned with the fences

Modding API is underway, but far from implemented...

The_Other_Retard, your favourite News reporter

 That's about it. I'll be posting all new articles the day after the Weekly Pickaxe will be updated

That's all for now

-ThOR

Second TWP Articles dump

Dumping more

As many of you probably have heard or argued: Minecraft looks a lot like Lego. It invites for creativity, with a couple of blocks and some imagination you can make interesting stuff and the possibilities are almost endless.
Now Minecraft and Lego are getting even closer together.

Lego recently launched a new service, called Cuusoo where subscribers can post ideas for "the next lego product". After some heavily supported ideas of the Minecraft community Mojang decided to add their own entry. Mojang also encourages the community to come up with creative ideas on what could be possible done with Lego, as some already have showed.

How well was the response for the Mojang entry? Well, it got the required 10.000 supports in less than 2 days and caused at least 3 server crashes at Lego because of high traffic.
The Lego Cusoo team responded the Minecraft idea went on to the "review phase" where a professional Lego Jury will examine the concept on general Marketing strategies (as any other Lego product must go through). It may take 2 weeks before a go/no-go decision will be made.
After this comes the Design phase, a Production run and finally the release after several months.
This may seem a long time, but hey, you'll be able to play Minecraft even in Real Life!



by The_Other_Retard
---------------------------------------------

Weekly Snapshot 49

As promised a Weekly Snapshot got released again. Now sheep eat grass so their wool regrows, the farmland problems got fixed together with some bugs and last but not least: Languages got added.
Now for the languages, they aren't finished yet, so there might be some bad translations, some may be missing and some may be just plain ridiculous. Originally Jeb relied on the entire internet for help on translating the stuff, but since the entire internet isn't famous for being nice the file got griefed and it became limited to dedicated members of the community.
Client .jar is for download here
Server .jar is for download here

For anyone wondering: the version number is YYwWWx, where YY is the current year, WW is the current week (yes, it's the 49th week already) and x is "a", but may turn to "b" or even "c" if there are more snapshots released in that week...

The_Other_Retard
---------------------------------------------

Mojang News - Account Overhaul

As Mojang is expanding, developping new games and attracting more people they decided to improve their account system, so it will be useable with all Mojang Games (Cobalt, Scrolls and maybe future ones).

With the new account system Players will be able to have multiple profiles on one account.
The sign in name will be the e-mail adress, while profile names will be changeable but they will be unique for every Mojang game. There's been a discussion going on on Reddit for anyone who wants to comment on it. A problem that surfaced was the whitelisting of accounts: if you change your name you may not be whitelisted on your server anymore (Mollstam is looking into it).

The reason for this change is to keep it simple for people playing minecraft and want to play other Mojang games and to be able to have several Minecraft profiles under the same roof.

This account change will happen some time soon, so Cobalt will be able to use it, while the almost 18 million (4 million of them premium) Minecraft accounts may optionally (starting an undefined date) do this until a big overhaul early next year.

The_Other_Retard
---------------------------------------------

What's going on with Minecraft?

Notch may still be on vacation playing Skyrim (as stated by himself at the end of an interview), but Jeb is giving Minecraft the development that was promised us. He has rementioned a idea that was mentioned by Notch some time ago: in-game books with customiseable content. This will be helping adventure map maker a lot, since they wouldn't need to cover entire walls in signs or add a load of message.txt files to their maps so they can tell a story (maybe even custom made paintings that notch has mentioned to have the same file-handling system).

Minecraft Pocket edition for Android was on sale for 10 cents in euro's, pounds or dollars for a day. A survival mode for the Pocket edition is officially anounced, but they warned it will be a bit different from the PC version to fit the touch interface. No dates are anounced yet.

Reviews keep praising Minecraft and not just on the usual Gamer websites. Wednesday was announced Minecraft received the first place in the TIME's Top 10 Games of 2011, rated higher than Portal 2, Skyrim and Battlefied 3.

That's about all for this week, I'll be back next week with more news

I hope the HTML codes translate well when posting

-ThOR

First TWP articles

Ok, I noticed I actually also write lots of stuff for the Weekly Pickaxe. I decided to also post articles I wrote on here, to have a bit of an archive of stuff I wrote.
This will first of all be a dump of articles of previous issues...

First is the first few articles I wrote for TWP

 Minecraft News December 2nd 2011
By The_Other_Retard.

Minecon is over and Minecraft finally got released, now what?

Well, Minecraft development goes on, even if Notch is taking a break for a while Jeb is full on squashing bugs where Wiki members point him to.

But even if Minecraft 1.0 is already out for almost a week there are still some mods waiting to be updated. Main reason was the dependency of lot of mods on Minecraft Coder Pack, which got released only a few days ago. Lots of modpacks still are waiting for some core mods to be updated
The Technic pack for example still is missing an IndustrialCraft², as Buildcraft is already available for the Final Release.
Because of this lots of mods provide support for earlier versions of Minecraft, especially 1.8.1, while Minecraft Nostalgia and Minecraft Downgrader enjoy lots of downloads...

A very positive aspect of the most recent update is the absence of th usual patch-updates. There's been only one and only for the server.jar, so most Minecrafters are still playing the 1.0.0 version. The reason for this almost unusual update is the "leaking" of PreRelease files, basically unfinished versions of the game so the Minecraft Community could test the game for bugs and glitches. Most of it was communicated with Jeb through MinecraftWiki pages, which resulted in a very smooth Minecraft release.
A fun fact with these PreReleases was the accidental presence of some debug features, like the 1x1 glass towers in Prerelease 3, or the Camera Mode in PreRelease 5. It was very quickly communicated (mostly through Twitter) that they were debug features.

One feature Notch said he felt sorry for not being in the most recent update was the Modding API, as he was promising this for a long time, but it should be added very soon.

Yesterday (December 1st) Jeb released a "weekly Minecraft snapshot", a .jar file of minecraft with the version of Minecraft Jeb is working on at the moment. This gives voluteers of the Community the opportunity to dive in and search for bugs to help Jeb in debugging it further. Downloadlinks are on the [url=http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/833222-new-prerelease-is-available/]Minecraft Forums[/url] and on [url=http://twitter.com/#!/jeb_/statuses/142250239871561729]Twitter[/url].


-----JUST IN-----

Notch has anounced on his [url=http://notch.tumblr.com/post/13633493969/och-med-dom-orden-sa-passar-jag-micken]Tumblr Blog[/url] that from now on Jeb will be the lead developper of Minecraft. This in fact doesn't change much as Jeb already was doing the major part of the development, but now he will be officially in charge of Minecraft while Notch will be helping out as well as starting a new project.
So Jeb will working on Minecraft by himself until January when a new programmer will be joining him. Jeb feels his main responsibility now will be creating a Modding API, but he warns the release will be not sooner than March.


That's about all about the state of Minecraft at the moment.
I hope to write more.

- ThOR



Outtakes:

For those who didn't or couldn't make it to Minecon there are lots (really LOTS) of video's, blogs, vlogs, tweets, threads and post to be found only about it. Just a simple Google search will do to give you enough stuff to fill some hours of not playing Minecraft.(didn't want to add this as it's pretty obvious for everyone who follows minecraft stuff)

 That was one ... I think I'll need a few posts to dump all this...

*opening next .txt file*
Hrrm, even more...
Ok, next one will be spread over 2 posts.