Well the latest and greatest update for Minecraft is officially out, version 1.3.1! I haven’t played with it yet, owing to work, but I have high hopes for the direction the developers are going! Here are my favorite parts from the change log:
- Single-player now runs a server internally
- Publish the single-player instance to LAN
- Automatically detect LAN worlds in multiplayer screen
The major changes to the internals of how Minecraft runs are a really great idea. The biggest benefit of running single player as an internal server is certainly on the developer side. Both Mojang, as well as mod developers, no longer have to bother with re-implementing something they created for one mode in the other.
Secondly, the automatic hosting over LAN sounds like it could be awesome – as long as you don’t forget to turn it off. Finding someone else’s single player world out on public WiFi could be fun, but when hosting in public watch out for griefers.
- Added adventure mode (work in progress)
- Added new creative mode inventory with search functionality
- Added writeable books
- Added “large biomes” world type
- Hill biomes are slightly taller
- Mobs are much less likely to glitch through blocks
Large biomes and taller hills sound like they will be really cool, since it did seem a bit strange moving from biome to biome within a few minutes. However spawning in the middle of an ocean would probably mean just deleting the world with those enabled.
Some of these changes are pretty exciting, though I’m waiting to see what this means for the current generation of mods. I’m becoming quite attached to the Tekkit pack and don’t think I’ll be playing much vanilla anytime soon! It sounds like the long promised modding API is actually under development, no word on a time frame though, so things are looking good.
The next episode of my Tekkit series will go up in the morning, so until then, happy gaming!