Minecraft 1.9 Leaks Out

Just like the release of Minecraft Beta 1.8, which was released early. On twitter Jens Bergensten, one of the developers of Minecraftt tweeted that the prelease of 1.9 has been leaked. Apparently very early pre-release, it adds in 2 more mobs and focusing on the Nether areas of Minecraft. Some people have noted that since it's a pre-release all the 1.9 features have not yet been finished or added. You can grab the prerelease file for Mincecraft Beta 1.9 here

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Possible Minecraft Update Tomorrow With Snow Golems?

Keeping up on Notch's twitter account detailing a possible update tomorrow to address some bugs and other issues as well as the possible new enemy; Snow Golems.

There hasn't been any mention on the size of the update, but I for one defiantly want to check out this new frozen foe and see what they are all about.

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TDPOTI Podcast: The emmys, Minecraft, and Curb

Today, our pop culture junkie friends discuss what happened in the Mayweather/Ortiz fight, the 65 Emmys, the new Minecraft 1.8 update, the upcoming Gears Of War 3, The Resident evil 6 teaser. and a special Doctor Who ending. Will Lorne return from L.A.? Stay tuned and find out!

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Minecraft 1.8 Changes and Screenshots (Updated)

I got the Minecraft 1.8 running now and decided to post some changes I have noticed so far. Unfortunately, I have been playing with Corocraft and Norsecraft texture packs on as of late so I might not notice all the changes that have taken effect.


There have been some bar additions and rearrangements. Your armor bar is not on top of your health bar and a food/meat bar has taken it's place. It seems when you lose health you have an auto-regen feature in place that replenishes your health when you are no longer being damaged in 1/2 heart increments. This is only possible if your food bar is not depleted.

New HUD additions

In fact, there have been alot of changes with food. When your food bar is depleting, you can eat more food to fill it back up and with that comes an eating animation. If your food bar is completely empty, you can starve to death. There are also more food types and food can finally be stacked as seen by the screenshots below. You can get raw chicken (from dead chickens) and raw beef (from dead cows) and rotten flesh from zombies. Both the raw chicken and beef can be cooked, but you can't cook rotten flesh. 

1. Cooked Chicken 2. Steak 3. Cooked Porkchop 4. Rotten Flesh

I'm not quite sure what that last, long, green bar is in your HUD at the time of this post. I do know that it filled up by little green orbs that dead mobs (aggressive or not) drops when you kill them. They seem to float towards you when you are somewhat close. When you max it out, it resets. I think this might be an experience bar of some sort, but I have maxed it out a couple times and nothing seems to happen, so this is likely a precursor for additions in future updates.

Orbs that fill green bar.

Another new function is a field of view adjuster found in the options menu. When you have it set at minimum that is the normal view and when you got it maxed it's called Quake Pro. A very appropriate title if you've played the two. If you haven't, it's basically a larger field of view with a slight fish eyed effect. Also, in the video options menu, you can now adjust brightness which is nice addition and I'm glad they finally put that in.

Normal mode (FOV minimum)

Quake Pro (FOV maxed)

The only new item I have found was the ender pearl. I found two of them just sitting on the beach, and not sure how they got there. I checked out the Minecraft Wiki page and wasn't able to find out much about them other than a possible a new mob, Enderman drops them. I can't confirm this though, as I havent even seen this new enemy type yet.

Ender Pearl
 If you've found any other changes in the game, give us a heads up and a screenshot if you can. I will keep updating this post as I can to experience more of the 1.8 patch, but right now it's time for me to study up for class.

Enderman (click the pic to enlarge)

UPDATE*


Got to fight the new mob Enderman. 
They are tall, lanky, black creatures that have unique powers. They walk around stacking blocks apparently and do drop Ender Pearls at death. As you can see they have the same purple effects that you would find near a Nether portal.

"Yea, I can transport.... What can you do?"

The most interesting quality about them though seem the ability to transport themselves around the map. I let one just walk into me and was damage free and when I turned around to find him I saw him like 20-30 blocks away from me all, apparently transporting across the water. I fought a couple others and found similar characteristics in that they would sometimes dodge a sword attack by transporting out of the way to try to attack me again. They were pretty easy to dispatch though, taking 3 diamond sword hits to fall. They also seem to be hurt by water as well. 




UPDATE 2*

Just finished going diamond mining (found 40-50 in about an hour) and realized that the debug tool has changed some. It still records your frames per second, and your position (x,y,z-coordinates), but the numbers that used to appear above all the AI's head has been removed. This used to be a great method when searching for food above ground and incredibly helpful in finding dungeons underground, but I suppose Notch found it to be a little too helpful.
 I'll continue to post updates as I find more to talk about.

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Minecraft Adventure Trailer

The upcoming release of Minecraft 1.8 adventure patch Mojave has released a teaser trailer. The update will feature NPC towns, a leveling up system, a new monster, and new items just waiting to be crafted and mined. It is rumored that the 1.8 beta update will be released on September 8th.

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Steam goes down a Notch?

In a recent blog post by developer Notch, the creator of the hugely successful Minecraft, he was asked at PAX about whether Minecraft would be available on the popular Steam platform.  Steam is well known for carrying a huge selection of indie games.  It’s a great platform that makes game shopping for the PC really convenient and easy.  They also feature great sales and have a "daily deal" that can discount a game as much as 75%.  Lately Steam has been at odds with EA and their online digital download service Origin.  It’s rumored Steam has refused to carry such titles as Battlefield 3 and other major EA releases due to the fact EA games tend to handle DLC in the game itself verses outside sources.

I am not sure how these rumors are effecting Notch's decision to hold off on releasing Minecraft on Steam but in his blog post he says "Being on Steam limits a lot of what we're allowed to do with the game, and how we're allowed to talk to our users. We (probably?) wouldn't be able to, say, sell capes or have a map market place on minecraft.net that works with steam customers in a way that keeps Valve happy".  In my personal opinion Steam has possibly been over stepping their boundaries, almost bullying companies into regulating how DLC is handled.  It seems to be using its market share to dominate the industry, almost forcing companies to offer DLC through there platform and in turn receiving a small percentage of each sale. 

Competition is good!

Every development company should be able to offer DLC how they want, and not be afraid of losing 5 million potential customers on Steam if they don't want to play by their rules.  If Notch is planning on making micro transactions for Minecraft available on Minecraft.net it's going to make it very difficult for the game to be released on Steam.  He does say in his blog they are talking with Valve about it.  Being optimistic Steam does offer games like Sims 3 which feature their own DLC shops not on Steam, but with the way things are going between Valve and EA, I wouldn't be surprised to see Sims 3 taken off Steam.

 "So there's no big argument, we just don't want to limit what we can do with Minecraft. Also Steam is awesome. Much more awesome then certain other digital distribution platforms that we would NOT want to release Minecraft on” Notch makes it clear, that he and Valve are not on bad terms.  He also says there is a certain inherent incompatibility between what the two companies want to do.  So in all likelihood we won’t be seeing Minecraft on Steam and I personally am happy about that.

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