Mojang are sometimes really good at trolling Nah, but I like how their snapshot naming scheme can sometimes make it sound as if a snapshot is basically a re-release of the same thing. Earlier this week we had 18w08a so obviously 18w08b is simply a minor update, right? Nope! Something fishy got into Minecraft this week! (as well as my macaroni dish this evening ) Water biomes, ravines and more entities! Earlier this week we got a snapshot which basically introduced ocean ravines and fixed a few bugs. Not very special. And now they extended on that. Heavily. As you can see above the ocean floor now also generates with ravines, entrances to underwater caves and there are even fish swimming around! The regular gray fish as we knew it is gone and has been replaced with (or renamed into) 'cod'. So now we have cod, salmon and pufferfish and they all swim around in the ocean (also shown above). You can really sense that this is all in beta stage because of the entities (= the official name of the things which wander around in your Minecraft world); they don't even have their official name yet: /execute as @e[type=cod_mob] run say blub, blub! In case you're wondering: if you try the same thing for a squid then it will mention "Squid" which is its official name, same goes for cows, horses and llama's for example. When you jump into the water you'll first get blinded for a brief moment because your eyes have to adapt to the underwater area. It doesn't take long and I actually enjoy the change because it really creates that atmosphere of diving into something different. Also noteworthy (this was changed in an earlier snapshot but I didn't mentioned it yet): if you run out of air and then head to the surface your air won't be reset right away. Right now you can simply pop up for one second and then your air reserves are refilled. Not anymore: now you need to wait a few seconds to catch your breath. Fish buckets! Fish can be grabbed with a bucket (not while in creative) and then you get a cod bucket, salmon bucket or puffer bucket. This is basically what its name implies: a water bucket with a fish in it. If you place it again the water block gets placed and the fish will start swimming: My first attempt at an aquarium That's right: aquaria are now becoming very real in Minecraft. Catching fish with a bucket: just think of it as eggifying but instead of a stick you use a bucket, and instead of a spawn egg you get the bucket + fish back Now, this obviously begs the question: what happens when you try to fish the fish again? The fish is going to hide! Nah: nothing special happens. The fish will swim around and totally ignore your bobber while eventually the normal fish cycle starts. So what can we expect from these fish mobs? /data get entity @e[type=minecraft:cod_mob,limit=1] Well, nothing too special here but one thing did caught my eye: the FromBucket property. Because I messed with "bucketed fish" I decided to teleport myself a good distance away and check again, and for sure: this property is only set after you used a bucket on a fish. Which makes this a really interesting feature for map makers. (edit): This property is also used by the system to prevent these fish from despawning. On a side note: this is also one of the many examples why I'm so enthusiastic about 1.13. Up until now we had to rely on NBT editors such as MCEdit or NBTExplorer to get this kind of information. Now all we need is to use the /data command. But Mojang still has plenty of work to do The ocean now has tons of new biome types. From warm ocean, shallow ocean to cold ocean. Only... I think it's a bit awkward if you suddenly come across 1 patch of ice in the middle of an ocean. Especially if it's surrounded by warmer types. Just a patch of ice out of the blue Even so... Not to get us waiting for the weekend to be over or anything, but Mojang already teased us that this snapshot was "only the small version". This snapshot is merely leading up to yet another snapshot. So bigger things are incoming! Darn you Mojang for ruining my weekend before it has even started!
I'm not looking forward to this update. Do to all my farms use water to move mobs/items Great write up though! Thanks Shell
Well, not really having a good weekend right now. For some reason my Internet connection is acting up, which is probably related to a massive outage which happened last week (massive is a red spot almost the size as one third of the Netherlands) and the best thing is that if you want to get your Internet by cable then you have the choice between one provider! yaaay! Protecting citizens against monopoly or cartel forming? Yah, those rules don't apply right now because "reasons". </rant> Fortunately there's still Minecraft and boy am I enjoying the directions Mojang are headed into! What I like best about this whole thing is that it becomes very clear that Mojang are seriously "eating their own dogfood". No, I don't mean that literally It's a saying often heard within development and systems administrative environments. It basically means that you build a certain product (or environment), and then use that exact same product to help you build even more parts for it. For example: programmers of a Java IDE who use that same IDE to develop new features for it. Minecraft is not much different Do you remember the structure block? Don't worry if you don't, it's not something you'd use during normal gameplay. It's a "system block" which allows you to save and load (import/export) structures on your world. The cool part is that Mojang didn't just add that to please us players, nope, they're heavily using it for themselves as well. Something which becomes quite clear when looking at the latest snapshot: 18w09a: The latest snapshot introduces new generated structures which can be found on the ocean bottoms or, in some cases, just on the water surface (if the ocean floor isn't all the way down to y30). And if you're wondering how I managed to find one above ground... well: They're all generated structures, which can be loaded using a structure block Every time Mojang announces something like this then the first thing I do is open the Minecraft jarfile to skim through its contents. The result can be seen above. There's some really cool variety here. In total there are 48 structures, but some of them are simply the same thing but with another layout. For example: ruin/big_ruin1_cracked ruin/big_ruin1_mossy ruin/big_ruin1_brick So basically this is the same structure but with the main difference that it's either mostly build from cracked bricks, mossy stone bricks or plain stone bricks. This separation is used for most ruins. And I can predict with 80% certainty that there will be treasure chests inside! Why? Well... Because Mojang showed me See that structure block in the corner of the ruin? That's something which is a part of the structure. It's a so called "data block" which are mostly used by Mojang to mark locations where something needs to be automatically generated. And all those data structure blocks have a very specific script name: chest. Therefor it's pretty certain that we'll eventually see loot chests appear there. Also: do you notice the magma blocks? That's going to become very interesting. When this update hits then you will no longer be able to jump into a boat, press forward and just wait until you crossed a big pond because if you're not careful you could get sucked into a bubble column (generated by magma blocks) and that would drop you straight to the bottom of the sea. Who knows: directly into such a sea ruin perhaps. Here's hoping there won't be any hostile fish around! Speaking of fish... We have another block too, though I'm not too sure what to think of this: Coral blocks; blue, pink, red, yellow and purple. Right now these are listed under building blocks but I can't help wonder if they won't eventually get moved to the "decorative" tab instead. Seems to make more sense. These blocks need water to survive. If you place one o fthese down in an area where there's no water then you'll immediately end up with the gray variant on the right: dead coral. At the time of writing you can only find these in your creative inventory but the next step is probably to add them to the world generator. Personally I'm hoping that we'll need silk tools to pick these up because I can't help think that silk touch is often being overlooked or ignored (I still think you shouldn't be able to mine magma blocks without silk touch ). As said: I really like where this is going, and you got to give Mojang some credit here: they're really going all out to make the sea bottom much more lively.
Another week full of snapshots. Last week (w10) we even got 4 of them in total! Many players are worried that the Aquatica update could destroy parts of their buildings. After all: if water can now flow through transparent blocks then what is going to happen when you relied on this mechanic (blocking) for your buildings? Maybe you build an underground base and you're blocking the water with a sign, then what? So that got me thinking and we decided to build "Waterworld" using 1.12.2: It's a really simple setup: a pillar, stairs to block the water and it ends in a small area where I'm using a sign to keep the water out. Then I loaded this into 1.13... let's see what happened: As you can see: nothing special happened here. The base as I build it has been fully kept the way it is. Water still doesn't flow through the ladder, the water below in my base itself still gets blocked by signs, so all is well. You don't need to worry about 1.13 suddenly flooding your buildings, because the block behavior will be completely the same. So what about those transparent blocks some people may now wonder... Simple: All the transparent blocks now got a new property called "waterlogged" which basically determines if a block gets "overrun" by water or not. And it defaults to false (sort off; only if a block doesn't have this property yet). So basically: blocks from versions before 1.13 won't have any water running into them, but blocks which got placed with 1.13 do see water getting in: Left: slabs placed by Aya (under water), Right: slabs placed by me in 1.12.2 So if you place slabs in a water block then the slab will no longer remove all the water, instead it will be placed underwater. If you want the old behavior then all you have to do is pick up the water using a bucket. Of course the only problem now: how do you build an underwater base in 1.13 when all transparent blocks can no longer block the water? Simple: use trapdoors: Trapdoors can now be placed under water, and they block water as well. Not only can these be placed underwater, they even block the water too as you can see. So instead of a sign use a trapdoor and you'll be fully set. A few other small changes: pufferfish can actually inflate and deflate themselves. So they become larger and smaller. Which can be quite tricky because if you chase after a pufferfish (because you might think it's a harmless tropical fish) then it can suddenly inflate itself and even poison you! Shulker boxes have a new purple texture, but also keep their default texture. Currently a default shulker box is called purple_shulkerbox, but in 1.13 there will be a difference between a purple shulker box and a default one. Also fun: you can remove the color of a shulker box using a cauldron, just like you can do with leather armor. Default shulkerbox, purple shulkerbox and a magenta shulkerbox Banners can be used as markers on a map! If you place a banner and then right click on it using a map then the banner will be added as a location on that map. Better yet: if you gave the banner a name (so you renamed it using an anvil) then this name will also be displayed, as you can see above. The markers will become a part of the map. So if you copy the map then this will include the markers as well. When a banner gets removed then it will also be removed from the map. And speaking of maps.... New treasure maps! X marks the spot Remember how I mentioned that I was expecting chests to show up in the ocean ruins? Well, now they have and if you're lucky then you can find a treasure map in there. The map will point you to a location (see above) where you can find a buried treasure. This is a single chest which contains some nice stuff: Harrddy mateys, them's some treasure here! It is comparable to the mansion and monument maps which you can get from villagers. And there you have it... Aquatica is now really becoming a thing!
Yeah it would be. But of course make it a limit. Like if you place a banner then only you can see it. And if you want friends or group members to see it then that could be a part of your settings to enable or disable.
Shell's 1.13 mini guide The stick of truth block! There is one feature in 1.13 which isn't officially supported by Mojang. In fact: if you rely on it and it makes your game crash or corrupts your world then the best of luck to you. The problem though is that this tool is actually very handy to have so I figured I'd set up a mini guide. The debugging stick This is a tool which is only accessible to you using commands: /give @p debugging_stick. It's an enchanted stick which can do some pretty fun stuff: it can change the properties of certain blocks: The iron bar on top of the stone is an impossible block Many blocks, I've assembled a small collection above, have one or more properties. A property is basically a setting which tells the system something about the block. A good recent example is "waterlogged" (as mentioned in my previous post). If that setting is true then the block shares its space with water. If you want to change this in a normal way you'd have to use an empty and a water bucket (to add or remove the water). But if you have the debugging stick then all you have to do is select the property which you want to change, and then change it. Easy! If you look at the screenshot then the iron bars on top of the stone block is actually impossible to make. It wouldn't react to a chest like this and instead show a small gap between the chest and itself. Unless of course you change its property like I did here.. So how does this work? It's actually really simple: Give yourself a debug stick: /give @p debugging_stick. Leftclick on a block to select the property which you want to change. Keep in mind that not every block has a property which can be changed. Rightclick on a block to change said property. The default is 'facing', so in which direction the block is placed. But why would I want to use this? Well, first of all don't worry too much about the unstable part. Although not officially supported Mojang has actually improved on this stick quite a bit over the past months. So if you click on a block which doesn't have any properties then it won't try to change those anymore (which it once did and that would often result in a crash). As to why: if you're a map maker then the debug stick can really help you to make a map (Ok, pardon the bad pun, but it's true!) That looks kind of weird... I know not everyone likes the new terracotta blocks, but this is simply a example. But if you don't enjoy terracotta then keep in mind that the same thing could happen with chests, slabs, stairs, and even that iron bar I showed above. SO... Here I placed some terracotta blocks from the same position. Let's say for the sake of argument that I embedded these in a wall and behind that wall is a lot of redstone stuff which I really don't want to mess around with. Because if I break one block I actually have to reset the whole machine and re-place 24 blocks of redstone dust. But this looks just stupid. And I can't change these blocks unless I make more space for myself. Perhaps I can use commands but.... yeah, now what? Simple: Grab your debug stick, change all the blocks until they face the right direction and voila: now you can have them show the pattern which you want them to. This is just the most obvious variant but do keep in mind that you can basically move them anyway you want. I can have them facing inwards, outwards, etc. As I said it doesn't stop here: placed a cauldron and you want it to be filled up? Debug stick to the rescue. Or maybe you want to place a stair block in an upside-down position but as before: you just finished building the entire floor so you really do not want to break and re-build that just to have 1 block placed right. The debug stick is all you need... Slabs... who doesn't enjoy slabs? Do you want the slab to be placed on top, bottom or maybe you want a double slab block? Guess what you could use instead of replacing the block? So yeah, there you have it! Remember: the debuging stick is an upcoming feature, and right now only available in the snapshots (which is why I posted this guide here). Figured I'd mention this to avoid any unwanted confusion. Isn't Minecraft awesome?
Ship wrecks (or would that be wrecked ships?) and drowned zombies! 18w11a has arrived and I didn't really expect this because one of the reasons why there were so many snapshots last week was because the developers would be pre-occupied with other things this week. But despite that... Seems something went a bit wrong here... Comparable to ocean ruins ship wrecks are generated (multi-part) structures which contain some loot. Up to three chests can be found here which contain a variety of loot amongst which the now well known treasure maps. Fun fact: did you know that treasure maps actually generate when being placed in a users inventory? I knew there was something about the process (otherwise Aikar couldn't control this on the Empire) but never paid much attention to it until now. And we also found a funny bug with these: The map as it was generated when I discovered it The same map after I gave it to Aya (who is in survival mode) Peculiar, don't you think? What lurks beneath the sea? Answer: the drowned, which is a new mob. A drowned is basically an underwater zombie; if a normal zombie stays underwater for too long then it will turn into a drowned. Right now these drowned are the only way how you can get yourself a trident in survival play. As you can see in the screenshot some drowned spawn with the trident which gives them both melee and ranged attacks. This can make them quite dangerous if you're near the shore because they can throw their trident easily out of the water, and after you've been hit you probably won't see them in the water (but that's probably solved by using certain texture packs; most provide better transparent water). And well... the trident is a pretty rare drop. After Aya defeated the above army she still didn't get any tridents other than those stuck in the ground and walls (which cannot be picked up): But what drops from the sky? The phantom, that's what. They said it would only attack above certain heights but you can forget about that, at least for now. While we were busy with investigating the drowned (this is shortly after that huge fight above) all of a sudden Aya found herself getting attacked by these which even (I kid you not!) dove into the water to attack! Apparently they attack as a group (you can see 2 more in the sky) and during their attack they just dive at you. It's a bit comparable to the attack of a Vex. And the loot you get? Not that special, at best you get some leather after you killed it but that's just about it. Of course that could still change. But yeah, that's roughly the latest snapshot for you. It's getting dangerous out there!
A new mob, for a new weapon A new map, useless on EMC because within five days of reset, they'll be looted And maybe not broken farms? Alright....
18w14a The last snapshot was called 18w11a which means that it has been 3 weeks since the last release. In case you didn't know: the last letter ('a') indicates the snapshot number, the number before it shows the week number (so: week 14 is todays snapshot, week 11 was the previous one) and finally 18 shows the year. SO... surely Mojang would have something special for us in store after 3 whole weeks right? I'm sure they added tons of new stuff, let's take a look! Tadaah! Yeah, todays snapshot may seem a little underwhelming (they even removed the debug screen (F3)! ) but there's more than meets the eye here. What you're seeing up there (assuming you opened the spoiler, please do so) is a so called Phantom Membrane. It's an item which gets dropped by Phantoms (those creepy dinosaur-like flying mobs which attack you if you didn't get enough sleep) and from this snapshot on it's also the official ingredient to repair an Elytra. No more leather! But there's more... you can also use it as a brewing ingredient (which is bad news for me, now I'll have to expand my potion brewer even more! ) and that gets you a potion of slow falling. Using the membrane as a brewing ingredient What this does? Excellent question! I quickly build myself a small experimental setup and asked for some help... And the end result? Well... What goes up... ... must come down again But once Aya drank the potion things went a whole lot different! The potion gives a pastel-cyan color particle effect. Once you're up in the air you will slowly decent down to the ground. Also giving you time to type and chat, and even (slowly) steer into the right direction. Another fine landing! So yeah: these potions will definitely keep you safe from falling to your death. But there's more... See, these potions do something very specific: they slow down your fall. So you descent in a much slower way than before. Now, what do you do when you need to cross a gap? You jump over it, right? So what is jumping exactly? You basically run towards it, jump which makes you go up (together with a forward motion) and then, while still going forward, you descent (go down) again and hopefully you'll land at the other end. Simple, right? Why I'm telling you all this? Easy: remember what I said about this potion? It slows down your descent. And jumping means going up and then down. So could this potion have any effect on jumping? Let's find out! Fortunately for us there was a nice beach nearby, and since Aya is quite the athlete I asked her to help do a few jumps. It's really easy: she runs towards the red line and then makes a jump. So here she managed an approx. 5 blocks distance. Not too bad. Now with the potion: Surprised? It's really quite easy... When you make a jump then you make 2 movements: you go forward and you go both up and down. The forward motion stops as soon as you hit the ground again. But because this potion slows down your fall quite dramatically it takes much longer before you hit the ground, therefor you'll also move forward for a much longer time. And finally Mojang also added some nice advancements. The fun part was that we discovered these by accident. Aya discovered a fish in a bucket and decided to set it free here. Unfortunately it turned out to be a puffer fish and in 1.13 these fish are actually quite lethal because they can poison you. And if you remain close to a pufferfish (even if you're not in the water) then this could eventually kill you, which is what happened to Aya. But she got her revenge There are 4 new advancements in total: If you catch a fish the normal way (using a fishing rod) you'll earn "Fishy business". If you grab a fish using a bucket (as Aya did above) then you'll get "Tactical fishing". Throwing a trident at something earns you "A throwaway joke". And finally something I haven't checked for myself: Hitting a villager with lightning gets you the "Very, very frightning" advantage. There's also a nasty bug with this snapshot: the debug screen doesn't work. Which is seriously annoying And there you have it!
Well, fortunately Mojang can be quick when it comes to fixing bugs. 18w14b has just been released and the debug screen is back. And to compensate us for all the trouble they even added sea pickles into the game And I'm almost done with designing a new fishing game, probably the dumbest game ever devised According to Aya the 'real' way to fish is using the trident. So basically harpooning fish which - if you hit them - come floating up into the water so that you can pick them up (you get a fish item like the ones we currently have in the game). That got me thinking so I added a recipe which creates the option to combine a fish with a bucket in order to get a bucket with a fish. Which you can then release to start the game again Kill fish, get fish items, then craft "fish in a bucket" which you can then use to release (respawn) the fish again. I need to think this through a bit more but who knows: could make a fun mini-game and all it takes is one datapack
The ranged trident attack certainly makes them dangerous but what about their speed? Do they still move as slowly in water as regular zombies?
Good question! Based on that massive fight Aya started with the drowned my estimate is that a drowned moves at the same speed under water as a zombie does above. While a zombie usually moves slower. However, that's all estimated and based on brief observations. But as I said I think this is an excellent question, so I'm going to build a small test environment and do some actual testing. I'll get back to you about that
18w15a - They have arrived! Hi gang! Obviously Mojang must have read my previous review and just had to prove me wrong about the amount of work they can put into Minecraft, because this snapshot is really packed with features. The water world is really starting to take shape, and it seems Mojang is really not holding anything back to make our watery experience the most enjoyable as possible. Dolphins! The most anticipated feature has finally been realized: dolphins are now a thing within Minecraft. You can find them in oceans which aren't frozen and they're usually together in a group. They will swim around, sometimes jump out of the water, and they're even curious enough to check what you are up to (mostly if you're in survival mode, they tend to ignore players in creative). And they are extremely playful: Here I threw a sea lantern into the water and it immediately started to drift to the surface. But as soon as the dolphin noticed that it immediately swam after it and nudged it downwards. Then it followed it once more and nudged it again. And while it was playing another dolphin joined and soon they were playing together. This is seriously fun to look at. Of course there are also some hiccups here and there. When I was at the surface and looked into the water some dolphins came up to me and started jumping out of the water. Where one of them was apparently so happy to see me that it started spinning in the water. So: its snout kept pointing to a certain spot in the water while the dolphin was spinning sideways really fast around that in a cicle. Even up to a point where it started taking damage and eventually died. I guess we now know how dolphins commit suicide Water "biome colors" Water now has a different color and texture based on the biome its in. Here you can see a swamp biome and well... it should be obvious enough: the water has a very specific green/yellow'ish color. Not exactly very appealing to dive into, wouldn't you agree? It's those darn witches dumping their magical waste into the waters I tell you! As you can see the green and blue somewhat intermingles and gradually changes from one color into the other. This is controlled by a new video setting called 'Biome blend distance'. It basically determines how large the section between the biomes should be, where the default is 5. If you make this shorter then the blend will be much less smooth. And if you set it larger then it will be much smoother. It's a really interesting setting. But that's not all... In previous snapshots we actually got a "nightvision-like" effect as soon as you dove into the water. This became annoyingly obvious once you placed the new under water light source called "sea pickle". Instead of actually lighting up it would merely display a brownish color. Comparable to the effect you get if you have the night vision effect applied and you place a light source in an otherwise dark room. But no more! Finally we can fully enjoy the sea pickle and other underwater light sources: Here I placed some sea pickles at the edges of the prismarine path, you can clearly see the light effect. Sea pickles are really special because you can actually control the amount of light they emit. Which isn't possible with any of the other light sources, making this very exciting! They basically behave in the same way as turtle eggs: if you place one then... you placed one But if you try to place another at the same location then it will combine with the previous one. Up to 4 items in one spot. And the more sea pickles you place together the brighter the light level will become. One sea pickle... Two sea pickles. Sea pickles spawn naturally on the bottom of warm ocean biomes. And that's not all: you can actually grow them. If a pickle is on top of a coral block you can use bonemeal on it to make it 'grow'. So basically: make it generate another pickle next to it. Up to 4 in total (same as if you'd place it yourself). If you then try to bonemeal it again it will spread to another empty coral block if one is available. But I am really excited about this block because when used properly you can really create moodful sceneries. Maybe place a few on the bottom of the ocean apart from each other: players will probably easily gloss over it because of the faint light, which could make this an idea way to highlight the entrance to an underwater base (for example). And speaking of light sources... Water now blocks less light than before. So it allows more light to come through towards the bottom, this makes it easier to see underwater. But what if your base is really deep below the ocean? Up to a point where it's seriously pitch black? Maybe a turtle helmet can help but even that can get you so far... But fear not, because we now also have.... The conduit (aka: the "underwater beacon") This was seriously difficult to figure out, but... I managed. Here is step 1. "Surround it with either prismarine, prismarine bricks or sea lanterns to activate" the instructions said. So at first I did just that: placed prismarine on the bottom, the conduit on top, then more prismarine around it (directly against it) and.... nothing. Then I build the ring you see here and suddenly particles showed up, making it clear that I was on the right track here. Basically what you need to do is build three "rings" around this block. Just like with the enchantment table you need to make sure that you leave 1 open space between the conduit and the prismarine. So: in the picture above I have one vertical ring around it, 3 blocks high where the conduit sits in the middle. To complete this structure you need to create another vertical ring, and then add a third horizontal ring (going around the middle). The result looks something like this, and you can immediately see why it's so useful to have one of these blocks: When active they give you the 'conduit' effect. This basically means that you: Can breathe underwater. Can clearly see underwater (so: you get a nightvision-like effect). And you can mine faster underwater. And as an added bonus, also shown above, hostile mobs will take damage when they get too close to the conduit. However, this only applies if you build a full structure. So: 3 rings around it. This block is insane. A fully activated conduit Right now the conduit effect will reach up to 94 blocks around it whereas hostile mobs take damage if they come within 16 blocks next to it (give or take, this is based on observation, and I could be off). This makes the conduit a very useful place to afk nearbye. I mean: you can't die from drowning, hostile mobs will take damage and eventually get killed... win-win. Note that this effect will only apply underwater. So as soon as you go up to the surface the effect will wear off. And as soon as you get back into the water the effect will immediately return. You can craft a conduit using 2 new items which got added to the game: Middle: 'Heart of the ocean', Edge: Nautilus shell. Yups: more shells are being added to Minecraft, and rightfully so! Now you guys can become shell users too! You can get a nautilus shell as a drop from fishing, and sometimes drowned will spawn with one in their hand. The heart of the ocean is currently only available from the creative inventory (as far as I could tell). Blue ice A new ice block variant got added: blue ice. You can see all three ice variants on the right. So: regular ice, packed ice and blue ice. It will spawn naturally within ice bergs and its said to be more slippery than regular ice. So Aya & me set up a test and you can see the result above. We used packed ice instead of regular ice because I didn't want to risk the ice to melt during the experiments. However... apparently there's a new bug because during the entire play session (at least one whole hour IRL) the regular ice blocks never melted. Even though we were in the middle of a desert (edit): Not a bug it seems, but I always get this wrong: Ice only seems to melt when it comes into contact with light sources other than the sun. Seems a bit off, but... that's the way it is. But we discovered more sillyness. Aya is really excited about the trident and is currently busy trying to figure out which enchantments she likes best. Unfortunately she died during one experiment while she had just thrown her trident which had the 'loyalty' enchantment on it. This enchantment creates a magical 'rope' after you throw the trident and it will pull the weapon back towards you: Aya hunting bunnies with the trident, you can see the black 'rope' and the blue trident in the distance. As a result Aya respawned and the trident kept floating and circling around her indefinitely. Without actually returning. I'm going to check if I can reproduce this behavior tomorrow and if so will supply a bug report (provided no one has done that already, which seems very likely). But that's what you can expect from a snapshot Finally: ink produced by squids actually has a serious use! I discovered this by accident but it's one of those many things which makes me seriously admire the depth this game has. It's mind boggling at times If you ever raided an ocean monument then you will have come across the (elder) guardians laser beam at some time. They look at you, they shoot the laser which slowly changes color as it intensifies and then wham! You take damage. However... if you manage to hide behind an object like a pillar or maybe some glass then the guardian will immediately release its gaze and swim away (that behavior seriously annoys me sometimes: it attacks you and then quickly runs away like a fishy coward! ). But did you know that the ink produced by a squid has the exact same effect? I didn't until now: I spawned the guardian to test the conduit, and I discovered something much more interesting Look at the middle. The guardian is looking in our direction right now, but if you look at its left side you can still see the bubbles which its laser produced. AND: you can see a black area created by the ink from a squid, and if you look directly above that black area you will spot a small red stripe: this is the actual squid which took damage from the laser. As a result of the damage it created the ink cloud and that directed the attention of the guardian away from the squid. Here is the moment right after the above picture: On the left you can see the squid from above, right next to what's left of its ink cloud. And in the middle you can see the other squid which got attacked by the guardian, and it too managed to dodge the attack by producing an ink cloud. I consider this to be seriously fascinating. Like I said: at first I thought that the ink was purely cosmetic; something which Mojang added to make squids look more realistic. But I never imagined that it would actually work within "Minecraft nature". Seriously amazing and highly impressive if you ask me! And there you have it! Seriously... 1.13, despite its 'bad luck' release number, is definitely on its way to become one of the best releases since 1.8 I think. Mojang isn't merely adding some stuff to the oceans. No, instead they're basically creating a whole new (water) world within the overworld. And it is looking seriously beautiful.... What lies beneath the ocean?
As I mentioned above I thought this was a very good question. SO, Aya and me "did something": The Zombie running track! 3 lanes, 3 zombies. Aya volunteered to play as bait (while armed with her trusty trident of course!) to lure the zombies towards her. So: in the lane at the bottom I'm spawning a drowned (that's why there's a prismarine brick block), the lane in the middle spawns a regular zombie (that's why there's a cracked brick block) and finally the lane at the top spawns another drowned but this time in water (there's also a prismarine brick block here, but you can't see it). However... looking back I probably should have build a fourth lane somehow in which the drowned would be completely submerged (so: in a 2 block high "water lane"). Maybe for next time Well, this wasn't exactly easy Here it looks as if the zombie was faster, but what happened here was that the drowned eventually noticed the ocean behind it and it turned around to go back. Then apparently the zombie also noticed that and it started to follow the drowned. As such we had to disqualify both But the second attempt gave us a much better result: As you can see the zombie and the drowned (at the right) are equal in speed. They both ran up to Aya and both ended up in a hole right next to each other. The drowned in the water (left lane) came in last; it took quite a long time before it finally reached the finish. Right now I think that this will improve if I can add some kind of "water lane". But yeah: drowned are generally speaking just as fast as a regular zombie. Both above as well as below water (so: when they're at the bottom of the ocean).
18w16a is here! Not much going on in this snapshot other than Mojang officially announcing a feature stop. What we see is what we're likely to get, from this point on they'll be focusing more on bugfixing than adding new stuff. But that doesn't mean that no new features can slip through The main new feature in this snapshot is the so called Buffet world type: This allows you to create a world which only consists of 1 single biome. You can you can also select a generator type. Don't be fooled here though: the world you're generating will always be created in the overworld using any regular blocks from said (over)world. The main difference is the biome and its applied behavior. In the example above I used the End generator with a Nether biome and the result was this: So what do we have here... End island-like structures which consist of overworld materials such as stone and lava. And because the biome is 'nether' you'll see zombie pigmen and ghasts appear, even though this is the overworld! This is not the most easiest place to start playing in Because this got quickly boring I created a new world: "Kamino". As you might know Kamino is the ocean world planet in Star Wars 'Attack of the Clones' where the clone army for the republic was being created: There's only water on this world... So there's only water here and nothing else, pretty cool right? What's also interesting is that despite all this you still have generated structures such as ocean monuments, ocean ruins and even abandoned mineshafts. Of course it's also pretty impossible to play this world in survival because you don't have access to any wood sources. Nor food for that matter. But I still think that this setting can be very useful for map makers. It's really easy to build a world based around 1 specific (un?)natural look ("biome") and then add your own stuff onto that to complete it. And we also have some new bugs it seems... I tried building a new conduit beacon which worked as intended (I got the conduit effect) but it no longer seems to harm any hostile creatures. That's a shame But yeah... it seems we're slowly but steadily getting near the final release date!
