So I looked at the new 1.9 snapshots..

I heard that shields were going to be in 1.9.
1) Get 2 shields.
2) Put one in your 2nd hotbar.
3) Place 2nd shield in main hotbar.
4) Use both of them at the same time.
5) +30 Shield, -9001 Attack. =P

*Cough cough* OP *cough*

i dont think it works like that

Yah, I think they should add a Skyrim mode; where you can also bash with your shields I tried:

The problem that as soon as you hit the secondary option you'll only use 1 shield at a time. So one is used, one takes damage (the green one in my example) and that's it

Well, I think you can see what is happening here. I'm being pushed back by the zombies and can't really do much about it. Also note that my shield is now already half way its durability, so that also gets used up pretty quick.

And this ended in the obvious ending, especially when a witch snuck up on me from behind

Nope!
Dinnerbone reworked particles so they are no longer entities. Because of that, the particle limit was raised by a tremendous amount while causing nearly no lag anymore!

New command blocks! Also now zombies lift their hand and party when they are targetting you

Considering the theories we shared about lingering potions here's a new one: how are we ever to get our hands on them without the Enderdragon?

I'm pretty sure that the respawn mechanic can be blocked, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's what Aikar is going to do considering that the End is a non-resetting world. Yet without the dragon you also won't be able to obtain the dragon breath component, and without that... No splashpotion conversion

Unless of course they'd make this available in the Empire shop, but that could create an interesting change considering that we wouldn't be able to get this anywhere else

Another option would be making it a relatively cheap token reward.

Now, after several pretty cool new features I'd like to share a possible upcoming change which I think is not for the better. In fact; I really dislike this one. Note: I didn't discover this on my own, a friend told me about this (someone who actually reads the changelogs more carefully than I do).

Maps

Thing is: I really enjoy map making in Minecraft. I like how you need to gather materials from all over the world in order to make one... While mining you get redstone and iron, used to make the compass. Then while farming you get sugarcane, used to make paper. And while hunting & "lumberjacking" you get leather and wood (hunting cows? hmm) which you can use to create item frames. The result can often be a pretty cool map (I'd show you nice examples, but I don't have anything EMC specific).

Now, I hope we all know how to make a map, if not:

Now, in the old days you'd get a map with a zoom level of 1. This means so much that one pixel on the map actually represents one block in the world. Here is an example of a single player map, using one of my favorite world seeds:

Pretty straightforward I think. You can clearly see the terrain, and it even shows you the extreme hills area (lower right corner) which I'm actually mining in. Just to give you guys a little impression, here's is the actual area:

The stones in the middle show the gray area in the map above.

Now, this has changed dramatically, and in my opinion it's not a change for the better, not at all. Nowadays maps have a default zoom level of 4 (1:4). Resulting in a larger map, but less details. Here is a new map which I generated using the snapshot:

Dunno about you guys but I think this map is a lot less useful than the one above. You hardly see any details at all. Where I was able to pick out some trees above I can surely forget about that one here.

Fortunately there is some good news, but also some bad news. The good news is that a new recipe got added which allows you to zoom in on the map:

The bad news is that although maps focus on the center whenever you're zooming out, zooming in focuses on the corner of the map. The lower right corner to be exact. Resulting in this:

I fail to see how this is useful

For me this pretty much ruins the fun of mapmaking because creating a 4x4 map or larger (4 item frames which all contain a map) is pretty difficult as it is. But on 1.9 you can forget about (edit): easily creating cool 1:1 maps so that you can actually see where you are. Simply because you can't go to the other area and try to get this one in the lower right corner, that's not how maps work

As you can see: on the left I'm holding the previously made map in my '2nd hand', so that I have a mini map while walking around. The white round dot shows you that I left the map and am now outside of its scope. The map on the right is one I just generated. But as is clearly visible: this shows a whole new terrain. So if I were to zoom in on this one I would not get the original map which I've showed you guys at the start.

So yeah; the ability to zoom in looks nice and all but is in fact utterly useless

(Edit): A little bit too much negativity on my part: you can of course still walk down in order to generate the map. But the easy option to shift-click after which all loaded chunks are shown has become pretty much useless if you'd like the current 1:1 zoom level.

This is one of those possible changes which I do not like about the upcoming version. Fortunately for me it's a somewhat moot point; ever since I've played on EMC I've hardly used maps at all. But even so...

Kewl..

You say the lower right corner, while that's where the scissors are in your screenshot. Have you tried putting them in another corner?

"The player can hold 2 shields at once, but it does not affect the damage taken."- http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/15w33c

I also checked out this snapshot recently. It seems like it will be a really fun update, and while having chances of making traversing the Overworld even easier, it opens up the End completely. There's a chance of people now being able to really branch out from the Overworld and focus on the End. Maybe I'm just a noob, but I tend to focus on one realm at a time: the Overworld, the Nether, then the End. What I mean by that is, making the Overworld easily traversible, then the Nether, and then the End. Of course the end is a biiiit difficult with the Ender Dragon flying around, after that, it's rather pointless. 1.9 makes the End a lot more interesting, and gives us reason to want to stay there.

Shulkers kind of make Feather Falling a necessity now though. And for someone who is absolute rubbish at parkour, those parkourish buildings aren't very nice to me. I went into survival and tried to go up one without creative flying, and it took me ages. So yeah, it will make the End a lot more intriguing.

In short, I am very excited for 1.9. I think I'm going to start a brand new survival (cheats disabled) when it comes out.

I think it would be good to change this into a general 1.9 thread instead of just 15w31a. SkyDragon isn't active anymore, after all. This could be the follow-up to his thread.
On-topic: you can push persons again! Now that's a very big change. It'll make it much easier to "kill" people on EMC.

Ayups, but to no avail. No matter how you try it always focuses on the lower right corner. Which I think is pretty annoying and plain out useless. BUT... As someone else told me: I'm pretty negative about all this but I am going to give this a fair chance. Heading over to my favorite area and actually try to make a 4x4 map using the 1:1 zoom level. We'll see how that goes.

To my knowledge Sky is still pretty active on the forums. Even so, I do agree that this thread has gone way beyond looking at one single snapshot so I asked the staff if they could change the topic for me (to remove the specific snapshot version).

Yeah, I also noticed that Mojang has indeed looked at Skyrim a little bit: when blocking there is a slight chance that you'll also 'bash' an opponent which makes them take some damage from your shield.

Another thing which I haven't addressed yet but also changed: commandblocks. Not that interesting to me because I hardly use them (best I once did was use them to provide people using my "redstone tutorial worldsave" (project from another server) to obtain a bit of starting gear.

To be honest I'm hoping for more crafting recipes and things we can do or build. Purpur blocks is a good thing, and the water splash potion is also pretty nice: seems usable to put out larger fires.

What snapshots are the end things with the purpur and such...And I only have The following snapshots, and I wanna now how to get more

15w36c
15w36b
15w36a
15w35e
15w34d
15w33c
15w32c
15w31c

Thanks

Parkour cheating: old school elevators ;-)

I imagine that the end would be reset just once for this. To make it fair, the ender dragon would have to be killed ahead of time and the ender crystals destroyed.

I would love to see the primary end island be the outpost and you just teleport some blocks out to build.

To be honest, with 1.9, I just do not want to see the main End Island destroyed. I want it to be beautiful.

Huh? What do you mean? I'd recommend using the latest snapshot, as long as it doesn't end with an a, but I don't know what you mean by

The latest version or 15w36c?