Westeros Recreated in Minecraft

An ambitious group of Minecraft players have painstakingly recreated several portions of The Game of Thrones continent of Westeros. To play it you'll need to join their server, as well as download custom texture packs. To get updates on the team's progress you can also follow them on Twitter.

Click the image to view a gallery of pictures from the Game of Thrones world.

This isn't the first world to be remade in Mojang's game of blocks, and it won't be the last. For more on Minecraft, be sure to check out our exhaustive coverage, as well as our ever-growing wiki.

Source : ign[dot]com

Mojang to release Minecraft 1.3 on 1st August

In a blog post, Mojang announced Minecraft 1.3 will be available on the 1st of August.

Version 1.3 will include many sweeping changes to the popular game.

“The most dramatic change is that we’ve kicked out single-player, and made it a shell on top of multi-player. There are two major benefits to this: first, it’s required for the modding api if we don’t want to have multiple implementations of every mod, and second, if we fix a bug in single-player, we know the bug is fixed in multi-player, too. Previously we had to fix bugs both in relation to single-player and multi-player.”

Other changes include adding emerald ore that can be used for currency in villages to purchase and sell goods, the ability to write in books, the addition of trip wire to create contraptions, “added new stairs, new half-slabs, cocoa plants and tweaked dispensers, leaves, cauldrons, levers, gravel, pressure plates, cookies, buckets, boats, minecarts, ice, furnaces… Plus you get magic orbs from mining and smelting (and not just killing monsters)!”

Also added is a bare bones “adventure mode,” which is promised to be more fleshed out in version 1.4.

There is one glaring problem caused by the restructuring of multi and single player modes, however, resulting in an increase of computing power needed since “…the game needs to be able to both simulate and emulate the world, which take many more CPU cycles. We’re working on optimizing rendering, but those improvements will not be included until Minecraft 1.4.”

Furthermore some features and bug fixes that were supposed to be in 1.3 have been pushed back until version 1.4. Notably they failed to fix a lighting glitch that makes some blocks appear black, and failed to provide the user with an API for modding due to time constraints.

Version 1.3 brings about a ton of changes that should prove to keep Minecraft players very busy, until version 1.4 is released sometime in the future.

A list of all the changes between versions can be found on Reddit.

Source : ign[dot]com

Add More Ores, Biomes and RPG Gameplay to Minecraft

For many people, the idea of playing Minecraft without mods is like eating spaghetti without sauce – you just don’t do it. In the past we’ve highlighted other mods that make work easier or add in video-game themed worlds, but this time around we wanted to focus on those that add depth to Minecraft. From new quests to more ore types and biomes, here are a few inspired user-creations that might just make your Minecraft experience a bit more exciting.

First things first, though. If you're new to mods, we suggest you pick up Forge. Forge makes it so many Minecraft mods can work together at the same time, and also makes installing mods a bit easier. You can find Forge right here on a site dedicated to the tool.

Crazy Ores

The first mod you should check out is called Crazy Ores, created by Minecraft user Andy608. While normal Minecraft leaves you with relatively few treasures to dig out of the earth, Crazy Ores adds nine more materials to find, along with corresponding recipes to turn them into tools, glass panes, golems and more.

Video by YouTube user: GodzGamerz Check Crazy Ores out for yourself.

The Legend of Notch

If, like me, you've spent countless hours playing MInecraft and are tired of only having elaborate structures to show for it, you should check out The Legend of Notch. While it's still a work in progress, this mod adds a host of RPG elements to Minecraft, including new materials, a class-based leveling system, new mobs to fight, and a large number of special abilities. You can also play with a number of new weapons, each of which has its own stats, abilities and durability to worry about. Even cooler, it randomly generates towers throughout the world and has a dwarf village you can visit.

Video by YouTube user: Eifel Mods Check The Legend of Notch out for yourself.

Millenaire

While some people go through the hassle of creating a server so they can play with friends, many more of us just by ourselves. Such an existence can get a bit lonely, and while you'll run into the occasional NPC village in Minecraft, user Kinneken -- with help from a number of other users -- designed the Millenaire mod to further populate the world. Install Millenaire and you'll get access to more randomly generated villages, which, according to the creator have, "loose 11th-century Norman, North Indian and Mayans themes." You can trade with the villagers, helping them to grow and flourish so they can craft cool items and even build you a home in return.

Video by YouTube user: NeilZar Try Millenaire out for yourself.

TerraFirmaCraft

TFCraft is for the survivalists out there. Resources aren't scarce in Minecraft's Survival Mode, so user Bioxx designed this mod to make your miner's life a bit more brutal. On top of adding custom textures, TFCraft changes up the way recipes work, adds a bunch of new resource types, and ups "the number of biomes from 16 to over 130". For instance if you're in a swamp you might dig up peat instead of normal dirt, or gneiss stone instead of cobblestone. Both cobblestone and dirt also respond to gravity, and can cave in on you if you're not careful. Every task in TFCraft's survival is a challenge, with even the smallest of tasks like creating fire becoming a much more elaborate process that involves considerations such as the type of wood you're using and the heat level of the fire.

Video by YouTube user: DireWolf20 Try TerraFirmaCraft for yourself.

Better World Generation 3

While every world in Minecraft is randomly generated, it's not uncommon for many of them to look remarkably similar. To combat this, user ted80andmodderkip created Better World Generartion 3, a mod that allows you to create a more diverse range of starting worlds. You can create worlds based around the Minecraft Beta and Alpha terrain types, a deserted island, or even a series of floating land masses. It also adds additional biomes and NPC towns, and should shake things up for anyone bored with the standard Minecraft world generation.

Video by YouTube user: Gosyboy Try Better World Generation 3 for yourself.



Source : ign[dot]com

Minecraft Review

Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition:
I’m a jealous of gamers who are getting their first hit of the gaming-crack that is Minecraft. Those who download this diamond will be rewarded with a totally unique and wonderful gaming experience. 4J, the developer of the 360 version of Minecraft, have done an amazing job translating Mojang’s PC and Mac game over to the 360, but it’s not an exact translation. New gameplay elements and trappings have been added for consoles, but a lot has been taken away as well. Minecraft remains a once-in-a-lifetime game, but the 360 version suffers more for what’s missing than it gains from its additions.

The basics of Minecraft are represented well on the 360. The low-tech-looking sandbox gameplay is in place, as is the self-directed search for survival and material goods. You punch trees, collect ingredients from a blocky, 3D world, craft increasingly complex tools, delve deep into endless, dangerous caverns, and create a space that’s safe from the inexplicably terrifying 8-Bit skeletons, spiders, zombies and creepers that spawn at night. Once you’ve got basic survival locked (a huge accomplishment), you can move on to creating a beautiful home, a 1-to-1 scale re-creation of The Defiant from Deep Space Nine or anything else you can imagine… Or you could just walk around in the woods and shoot arrows at skeletons. In other words: If you’re the right kind of person, this barely guided, creative experience will become more like a way-of-life than a video game, for a time, anyway. Eventually, most 360 gamers will run across the boundaries of Minecraft, both physically and conceptually, long before PC players will.
Let’s start with the positives: The 360 version of Minecraft adds two much-needed and appreciated elements designed to make Minecraft more user-friendly: Tutorials and a map.

Building Blocks Of Minecraft Learning
The original Minecraft lacks any in-game documentation, leaving you at the mercy of your own ability (and online wikis) to figure out how a relatively complicated game works. The 360 version of Minecraft, gives you a tutorial level that walks you through the basics of how to get wood (heh, heh), mine rocks and build basic shelter to keep from being eaten alive when night falls and the monsters come out. It also includes a little village and an impressive castle to give you something to aspire to in your Minecraft-ing.

The learnin’ continues into the game-proper, with context sensitive menus to identify any new items you find. Crafting has been streamlined, and trial-and-error has been eliminated. No great loss, as almost every PC Minecraft player uses a wiki anyway. All of this will be very helpful to beginners, but it’s not so exhaustive that it takes away from the discovery elements of Minecraft or feels like school.

Along with the docs and hints, the 360 version of Minecraft gives players a map at the start of each game, for free. Getting something for nothing in Minecraft is almost sacrilege, but it’s much appreciated here. Maps are craftable in the PC version, but not until you’ve found some redstone deep in the earth and crafted iron to built a compass, which means you have to figure out how mining and smelting works before you’ve ever figured out where you are.

Sitting next to loved ones (or tolerated ones, anyway) and playing a game is an often overlooked source of fun in the age of online multiplayer, and in an open-world game like Minecraft, it’s like bringing your friend to a massive playground, except with more zombies.

Even with a four-player split screen going and other players in your server, navigating through Minecraft’s complicated menus is quickly mastered, if your television is big and HD enough. The menu system is about as serviceable as you could realistically expect from a 360, which is not to say it’s good or anything. Consoles just aren’t suited to complicated menus–a mouse and keyboard is the much preferable input solution.

“I Played Minecraft Before It Was Cool.”
So that’s all the good, but here comes the bad: Overall, console-Minecraft is based on an early version of the game. The PC version of Minecraft has evolved through updates to contain a whole lot more stuff than the 360 version, as well as noticeably improved lighting and graphics. A partial list of content that’s missing: Modding. The hunger mechanic that drives the PC version. The ability to raise animals from babies. Jungle cats. The jungle biomeme. Ruins in mines. NPC characters and villages. The enchanting system. The alchemy system. The End World, Ender Men, and the Ender Dragon final boss. And more. While some of these “later” additions aren’t all that great, and none are necessary for having a good time, on the whole, the PC Minecraft experience provides greater diversity and much deeper gaming, especially for more seasoned players. While 4J has said it’s interested in frequently updating Minecraft-360, those updates are not available at the time of this review. Let’s hope they’ll come soon.

It’s A Small World After All
The list of Minecraft features missing from the 360 is long, but the most egregious omission is the sheer scope of the PC version of Minecraft. While computer Minecraft’s procedurally generated geography is limited only by the amount of memory your PC has, the 360 version takes place on a 1024 by 1024 block level. That’s pretty big in terms of many games, but tiny in terms of Minecraft. It’s dispiriting to get to the edge of the map with so little effort, especially when the boundary has been so shoddily defined. A wall of lava or an un-climbable peak would have been preferable to Minecraft’s lazy invisible barrier. The absence of endless open spaces means that you can essentially never get really lost, and it also limits the amount of sheer raw materials in the world, potentially scuttling hugely ambitious building plans.

Speaking of resources, the PC version of Minecraft contains a creative mode where you have access to everything the game has to offer. It’s perfect if you prefer building with an infinite Lego set and don’t feel like being ravaged by skeletons. The 360 game offers only the survival mode. Big points off for that. And big points off for not allowing gamers to change difficulty in the middle of games, too.
On the whole, any Minecraft is better than no Minecraft, and the 360 version is a full, satisfying game, when not judged against the PC version -- even in slightly-gimped form, Minecraft is better than most games on earth.



Source : http://www.g4tv.com

Minecraft 360 - Finding the Missing Pieces Ads By Google » Blog Tags Today's Most Popular Videos »

Playing this week's Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition is like stepping into a time machine for fans of the PC game. The console port from 4J Studios faithfully re-creates Mojang's blocky world-building game, but it's an earlier version of that game, and a somewhat stripped-down one as well, in comparison to the original. It's still totally fun and addictive, but fans of the PC version will experience a somewhat unpleasant sense of deja vu the first time they play.

The most important addition that we'd like to see is of course the release of the various updates that would bring this Minecraft alongside the PC version in terms of in-game features. We're talking hunger and experience meters, jungle biomes, ravines, Nether Fortresses, Strongholds, abandoned mine shafts... lots of cool stuff that adds to the experience of exploring the world. This content is supposedly coming in future updates, though no release plan has yet been revealed.

There are other features though, elements from the PC version of the game that don't necessarily fit into one of the capital-U Updates, but are nonetheless essential to delivering a proper Minecraft experience. We're going to take a moment now to highlight those, in the hopes that mentioning these absent features will somehow magically transport them into the Xbox 360 game.

Or, you know, 4J will take notice and do something about it. Magic would be cooler though.

On-The-Fly Difficulty Adjustment

Jumping in and out of Minecraft's Peaceful difficulty -- which stops monsters from coming after you -- is a hallmark of the PC version of the game. Sometimes you just want to explore and not worry about dying 56,015,963,831 miles from your spawn and losing all of your hard-gathered resources in the process. You can adjust the difficulty of a saved world on the Xbox 360 anytime you load it up, but there's no option for doing that in-game, like you can in the PC version.

Rent-A-Server

Players can't rent their own servers in Minecraft on PC, but they can create one using a secondary piece of software. That's not really an option with your Xbox 360 for a variety of reasons, but being able to rent server space and store a persistent Minecraft world somewhere in the cloud would go a long way toward creating the sort of multiplayer community that exists on the PC side. The max player count would also have to be upped from the current eight-player limit on the console side, but it would be cool to see some of the elaborate group construction projects from the PC world find life in the Xbox 360 version as well.

On-Screen Coordinates

In the PC game, you can press F3 at anytime to bring debug information up on the screen. It's a common enough thing in PC games, but it's especially useful in Minecraft since your coordinates within the world along X, Y, and Z axes are listed along with the rest of the info. For those who are serious about Minecraft building, having access to those coordinates is invaluable. Since the world is laid out along a blocky grid, being able to use numbers makes construction planning -- both aboveground and below -- much easier to deal with.

Creative Mode

This is a serious no-brainer. Minecraft didn't start out with the survival elements you see now that turn the experience into more of a "game." It was born as a sort of virtual LEGO set, and that prototypical take lives on in the PC version as Creative Mode. Loading up a new world in this way starts out just like any other. You're deposited at a random spawn point and the world then becomes yours to explore. The difference in Creative Mode is that there's no need for resource management. Your inventory is filled with an infinite supply of every block, resource type, and craftable item in the game. Also, you can fly. Creative Mode strips out the "game" portion of Minecraft and lets you focus squarely on the building.

Bigger Maps

This could simply be a hardware limitation, but you'll quickly learn as you explore your world that the overall map size in the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft is actually quite small compared to what you get in the PC game. Surely we can go bigger, right? Walk for 10 or 15 minutes in one direction in this console release and you're going to hit an invisible wall. Walk for the same amount of time in the PC game, and you'll just have that much distance to cover as you retrace your steps back to wherever you were carving out your piece of the world.


Source : http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/723634/minecraft-360-finding-the-missing-pieces/

EA 'destroying' gaming, says Minecraft creator

FIFA, Battlefield, and Mass Effect publisher Electronic Arts is "destroying" gaming, according to Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson.

EA is ruining the gaming industry, says Notch.

Persson sounded off today via his Twitter feed about EA's newly launched Indie Bundle, which is presently available on Steam. Notch said, "EA releases an "indie bundle"? That's not how that works, EA. Stop attempting to ruin everything, you bunch of cynical bastards."

Persson later said his studio, Mojang, is no longer indie (something he had alluded to earlier), and offered a more damning take on EA.

"Indies are saving gaming. EA is methodically destroying it," he said.

[UPDATE] After the publication of this story, Persson dispatched a tweet of clarification. He wrote, "I got into trouble on the interwebs again! The games in the bundle are good, I'm not questioning them. I'm questioning EA."

Persson is not the first to speak out publicly against EA. Earlier this year, readers of consumer affairs blog The Consumerist named EA the "worst company in America," following more than 250,000 votes.

The EA Indie Bundle in reference launched this week on Steam, and includes DeathSpank, DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue, Gatling Gears, Shank, Shank 2, and Warp for $20.98. The offer expires on May 9.



Source : http://gamespot.com/news/ea-destroying-gaming-says-minecraft-creator-6374907

EA 'destroying' gaming - Minecraft creator

FIFA, Battlefield, and Mass Effect publisher Electronic Arts is "destroying" gaming, according to Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson.

EA is ruining the gaming industry, says Notch.

Persson sounded off today via his Twitter feed about EA's newly launched Indie Bundle, which is presently available on Steam. Notch said, "EA releases an "indie bundle"? That's not how that works, EA. Stop attempting to ruin everything, you bunch of cynical bastards."

Persson later said his studio, Mojang, is no longer indie (something he had alluded to earlier), and offered a more damning take on EA.

"Indies are saving gaming. EA is methodically destroying it," he said.

Persson is not the first to speak out publicly against EA. Earlier this year, readers of consumer affairs blog The Consumerist named EA the "worst company in America," following more than 250,000 votes.

The EA Indie Bundle in reference launched this week on Steam, and includes DeathSpank, DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue, Gatling Gears, Shank, Shank 2, and Warp for $20.98. The offer expires on May 9.

Source : http://gamespot.com/news/ea-destroying-gaming-minecraft-creator-6374907