Minecraft lead designer Jens Bergensten took to the main stage of Minecon on the final day of Minecon 2016 to go through the changelog of the upcoming 1.11 update for Minecraft. Dubbed the ‘Exploration Update’, most of the additions are aimed at adding more things to do in the game outside of mining and, well… crafting.
All of the new features were also demoed in brief videos, each seemingly minor tweak met with rapturous applause from the thousands in attendance. No need to worry about the community staying passionate, then. There’s no solid release date for update 1.11, but a snapshot of the update will be available to try out on 28 September. Anyway, here’s what’s up in Minecraft’s next feature haul.
Llamas
By far the fan favourite announcement of the whole convention, the revelation that llamas would be coming to Minecraft is, bizarrely, huge news. Apart from looking like llamas, the new mobs will have a number of bespoke features to make them stand out. For starters, they’ll be able to spit, which despite being incredibly rude and obnoxious is also an effective means of ranged attack.
Jens also said the player would be able to “swag them out with carpets,” which are essentially saddles but with some added visual flair. You can also attach satchels to llamas in order to use them like pack mules. Better still, if you use a lead on a llama, all nearby llamas will automatically form a caravan behind the llama you’re leading.
Woodland Mansion
New places for treasure and dungeon crawling are always welcome among the Minecraft community, and the addition of incredibly difficult, procedurally-generated mansions should give players plenty more to do when they reach the end of the game. The Woodland Mansion dungeon type will be very rare, but will offer some intriguing rewards courtesy of its three new hostile mobs: Evoker, Vex and Vindicator. As menacing as those names are, the mobs are actually just outcast variants of the game’s adorable Villagers. More on them below.
Evoker
Basically a Villager in black robes, the Evoker has two unique moves, both of which are tough to beat, putting Evoker on par with some of the game’s proper bosses in terms of sheer difficulty. Firstly, Evoker can cast a wave of pillars that deal a lot of damage if the player is caught by one. Evoker’s other ability is that it can summon a small, impish mob called Vex.
Vex
Tiny, sprite-like ghosts that float around vexing the player – hence the name. They don’t do much damage, but these guys are summoned in high enough numbers to make up for it. They’re also too quick to shoot with a bow and often out of reach for melee weapons, making them very difficult to get rid of even if you’ve dealt with their summoner.
Vindicator
The final and most conventional of the new hostile mobs is Vindicator – which is a great name to have if you’re basically just a villager with an axe.
Totem of Undying
Giving you reason to stalk a Woodland Mansion, the Totem of Undying is a rare drop from the new Evoker mob. You can equip the Totem of Undying as a consumable item in one of your hands, so that should you receive a fatal blow, you’ll instead use the item and be granted a temporary boost to your stats – ensuring that you can survive any near-death experience. Extra handy for Survival Mode.
Cartographer and Treasure Maps
Villagers get more useful by the update, and 1.11 is no different, turning some of them into cartographers, who the player can buy maps from. Those maps can be used to hunt for treasure – because literally everyone loves treasure. Treasure maps will show a top-down view of where the treasure is, and will also have a handy reference point that will let the player know the rough direction and distance they are from a tasty heap of loot.
Location Console Command
Finally, a more official way of finding your way around a gigantic Minecraft world. The new slash command will give players the coordinates to key locations in the world, which players can string into the command if they’re looking for something more specific.
Shulker Box
A Shulker Box is a new kind of chest made from Shulker Shells. Doesn’t sound like news, does it? However, if you store items in a Shulker Box and destroy it, you’ll be able to pick up the same box and place it elsewhere without the items moving or vanishing.
That’s everything coming up in the new Exploration Update. You’ll be able to give the new features a try on 28 September when the snapshot goes live, and help Mojang find all the bugs before 1.11’s full launch.
Microsoft announced at this past weekend’s MINECON event in California that the next big update for “Minecraft” will launch October 2016.
After revealing earlier this year that a Boss Update was coming, the company finally revealed that “Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition Beta,” “Minecraft: Pocket Edition” and “Minecraft: Gear VR Edition” are all set to receive the updates on October 18.
New slash commands will also be introduced so players can tweak the game itself by summoning, teleporting and more, while the Add-Ons will enable users to play around with the game creating new monsters to fight, making villagers run away for them or chase them, and simply having fun making chickens that explode.
So players can find out more, Microsoft will make available free downloadable examples of Add-Ons on Minecraft.net once the update has launched on October 18. A FAQ and how-to video are also available now.
For years now, masochistic Minecraft players have developed all sorts of ways to test their mettle against a merciless and unforgiving blocky world.
For vanilla Minecraft, the core element of the survival challenge is Hardcore mode, which cranks the difficulty up to max by increasing the strength and spawn rate of mobs, but most importantly by instituting permadeath. This feature has been around since the 1.0.0 update, but before that, players developed their own rules for a hardcore mode, and these were based on an honor system rather than in-game mechanics. Eventually, Minecraft’s actual hardcore mode stopped challenging more ambitious players and they had to come up with more inventive ways to add difficulty to the game.
In 2011, the popular YouTube channel Yogscast tried their hand at a “Survival Island” custom map, which spawns you on an inhospitable patch of dirt and tasks you with staying alive. The original map gives you the bare minimum that you need to survive—one tree, some food, and a place to dig. Staying alive long enough to grow or hunt more food while dodging creepers and zombies is brutally difficult even on regular difficulty, and requires solid grasp of game mechanics and Minecraft lore. This map proved so popular that it spawned an entire genre of play, and it remains one of the most challenging ways to play even in 2016.
The popularity of the survival island gave rise to a growing number of survival-challenge maps. Many of these, like the ever-popular Skyblock (and offshoots like SkyGrid, OceanBlock, etc.), tasked you with surviving on a tiny island in the sky with limited resources and challenged you to use your knowledge of Minecraft to combine materials to create the items you needed. This differed from ‘Survival Island’ in that you couldn’t just dig down to find more dirt and ore — you needed to use the items provided by the chests in very specific ways (like combining lava and water to create obsidian) in order to survive and thrive. Though these maps have fallen out of favor after years of mod madness, it’s sort of amazing how difficult the game can be with a few self-imposed restrictions and limited resources.
Survival challenges have since thrived on YouTube — a search for any of the challenges I’ve mentioned above will yield at least one video to watch, if other people’s suffering is your thing.
The Yogscast, again, has some of the best survival series around, including a set of videos about their crack at SkyBlock on Hardcore, a multiplayer series, and one particularly hilarious game set on the back of a flying whale. Graser10 is also a great source of survival challenges, and he has uploaded intense videos where he races to kill a Ghast in 25 minutes, starting from scratch. SethBling has some videos worth checking out as well, including one of my favorites (to watch, not to play, because you’ve got to draw the line somewhere), The Floor is Lava.
One of the coolest long-running series is Mindcrack’s Ultra Hardcore, which places a bunch of YouTubers on a limited map with natural regeneration turned off and player combat encouraged. The PvP element is at least as important as the survival element here, but if you want to see the most brutal survival mode that Minecraft has to offer, this is a great place to start.
It would be impossible to discuss anything about Minecraft without mentioning mods, and in this case, there are plenty that are aimed at the survival challenge crowd. Mods like ‘Better Than Wolves’ makes the game more realistic and adds challenges like different move speeds on different surfaces, whereas mod Blood and Bones, ramps the difficulty up across the board. Some mods, like TerraFirmaCraft, take the idea of ‘survival’ to the extreme. TerraFirmaCraft actually closely mirrors the feel of Minecraft survival without adding too many extra mechanics. Instead of being able to mine and gather by punching things, in TerraFirmaCraft you have to painstakingly gather sticks and rocks to make tools, plant seasonally, eat from multiple food groups, and agonizingly make your way up the tech tree in order to achieve the same security that you might reach in an afternoon in vanilla Minecraft.
I fancy myself a pretty hardcore player, but TerraFirmaCraft made me feel like a filthy casual. I starved to death almost immediately after starting the mod, because I had planted incorrectly and failed to lay up enough food for the winter. If you think you’re Minecraft-tough, I strongly recommend you give it a try and test your mettle.
Even with so many mods and customs maps for Minecraft players, the most interesting survival challenges are the ones that the players impose on themselves within the restriction of vanilla Minecraft. Having to work within the constraints of the original game has produced some truly grueling, inspiring, and jaw-dropping challenges, many of which have been documented with screenshots or via YouTube. You could spend weeks digging through all of the challenges that players have set up for themselves and others, but I’ll dive into some of the best here.
One thread from early in Minecraft’s lifespan institutes a series of restrictions and milestones that must be met before advancing to the next stage, called the City Construction Challenge. This forces the player to slowly, carefully, and deliberately build their settlement (rather than, say, digging straight down and making diamond armor right away). It’s not especially unforgiving, except in the sense that it’s time consuming, but it’s fascinating how it produces a radically different result from most free-form Minecraft play. Other construction based challenges add increasing degrees of difficulty, like The Tree Spirit, which forbids you from ever leaving your home tree, or the no-craft challenge, which tasks the player with defeating the Ender Dragon without ever using a 3×3 table.
Survival challenges run from the simple to the irritatingly complex, but adding just one self-imposed restriction can radically change the way you play the game. A ‘naked’ playthrough, where you don’t wear armor, or a fists-only attempt, or a vegan playthrough, or a pacifist playthrough, or a nomad playthrough, can feel like entirely different games (Logdotzip’s nomadic survival series is a particularly awesome example). One of the most interesting restrictions you can place on yourself is limiting yourself to no mining — meaning that you only look for ore and gems in natural caves or ravines, rather than strip-mining everything (which is much easier and safer). This forces you to explore and encounter more dangerous foes, extending what many (myself included) consider to be the most interesting and exciting part of Minecraft.
Recent updates to Minecraft allow players to tweak settings which opens up even more brutal survival opportunities, too. One of the best ways to ramp up the difficult of Minecraft (especially if you’re playing in Hardcore mode) is to set the game to be always nighttime, vastly increasing your risk of running into mobs and removing any sort of reprieve from the onslaught. Turning off natural regeneration forces you into a sort of ‘Super Hardcore’ mode—the only way to regain health is through Golden Apples or Health Potions, meaning that you need to know exactly what you’re doing or you’re going to die very quickly. From personal experience I can tell you that ‘always night’ and ‘no natural regeneration’ are not for the faint of heart.
These changes have also spawned an entire subcommunity of hardcore fanatics who hang out in /r/flatcore. These players know that setting the world to flat not only adds a whole new set of challenges to the game, it also works exceptionally well as a framework for adding other restrictions on top of that. The best variation that I have found is Swampcore, which places you on an infinite flat swamp with an eternal thunderstorm. The only place to get stone is from lava pools and the only way to find villagers to trade with is by curing the zombified ones who come after you.
Swampcore wrecked me when I tried it. I was repeatedly overwhelmed by zombies and creepers, carelessly dug into lava and was melted, and generally had a rough time. It was madness. If you think that Minecraft is too easy, I strongly encourage you to give this a shot.
Though it rapidly departed from this vision, Notch initially conceived of Minecraft as more of a survival horror game. He described a much scarier, more desperate version of the game in a 2009 Tumblr post that envisioned a challenging scrabble for life in a hostile game world.
Over the years, the community proved to have a mind of its own regarding what Minecraft was ‘about,’ but thanks to the popularity of survival challenges, that original vision for a more grueling Minecraft continues to live on through fans.
After enjoying years of undisputed dominance as the king of unlimited exploration, Minecraft has a new challenger in—you guessed it—indie darling/gaming messiah/space sim extraordinaire, No Man’s Sky. Boasting an explorable universe with an inconceivably large number of planets (2^64, or 18 quintillion, but who’s counting?), it seems that No Man’s Sky has seized the title of “biggest game” from Minecraft once and for all.
But how much bigger is No Man’s Sky, exactly? YouTuber and guy with way more patience than me, ibxtoycat, set out to answer exactly that question in a recent video. Both games are billed as functionally infinite, but functionally infinite is not actually infinite, so let’s break it down.
Any given Minecraft overworld is 60 million blocks by 60 million blocks, just on the X and Z axes. If you include the blocks above and below, you end up with an absurdly large number of blocks: something like 921 quadrillion. If you bear in mind that each Minecraft block is a square meter, you’re talking a surface area the size of Neptune. It would take months of in-game walking to reach the edge. (It’s worth noting that on older editions of Minecraft the edge of the world gives way to the ‘Far Lands,’ a procedurally generated zone of weirdness that is theoretically infinite, but increasingly likely to crash your game the further you go.)
As big as 921 quadrillion is, it’s dwarfed by No Man’s Sky’s 18 quintillion, which is a little over twenty times larger. That means that for every block in the Minecraft overworld there are twenty planets in the No Man’s Sky universe. And each planet, even if it’s small, is several thousand kilometers across. That’s a whole lot of real estate.
There’s a lot to be said here about quality vs. quantity—after all, you can meaningfully interact with every single block in the Minecraft overworld, whereas No Man’s Sky is filled with great stretches of empty nothingness and desolate planets that force you to come to grips with the horrible vastness of the universe. But there’s no question that No Man’s Sky is not just bigger, but considerably so. That being said, the distances involved are so inconceivably vast that it is unlikely to matter. The difference between needing two lifetimes and a thousand lifetimes to fully explore a game world is pretty much academic.
Whether or not either game has the staying power that will allow players to eventually exhaust their near-infinite depths remains to be seen (but hey, people are still playing Desert Bus, so who knows?). But for the time being, they should be enough to keep you busy.
A war is raging on one of the longest-running servers in Minecraft, 2b2t. Some of the battle is fought with diamond swords and lava buckets, as you might expect, but the rest of it unfolds with racist memes, shocking gore and porn, as well as monstrous contraptions designed to make the server literally unplayable. It’s not just a war for imaginary space: it’s a war for what kind of server 2b2t wants to be.
Warning: the pictures in this post contains content that readers may find objectionable.
While some know 2b2t—short for 2 builders 2 tools—as one of the oldest servers in Minecraft, 2b2t’s own denizens insist that there are older servers out there. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that 2b2t might be the server that’s gone the longest without a reset, meaning that the world has structures that are at least five years old.
2b2t is simultaneously a desolate wasteland, and a monument to builders past. Inside 2b2t, you can find time-consuming builds erected by players come and gone, or you can walk through the ruins of a base that has been ‘griefed’ or destroyed by vengeful vandals. It’s at once both beautiful and kind of horrifying.
What makes 2b2t unique (and what most veteran citizens are most proud of) is that 2b2t is known as the worst server in Minecraft. According to redditor and 2b2t legend, Sato, all the other stuff—the history, the lore, the amazing builds—is “just a bonus for the people to find out if they played long enough.”
Not only are there are no moderators on 2b2t, the admin, Hausmaster, is mysterious and hands-off, doing only what is required to keep the server running (and sometimes barely that.) There are rules to prevent players from unleashing disruptive hacks, but modded clients and cheats are almost mandatory if you want to stay alive for long (I stubbornly refused to use one and it took me an entire day to successfully escape spawn.)
As for etiquette, if you can build it, it’s yours, and if you see someone, you can kill them. Some of the builds are wondrous and awe-inspiring. Others contain large swastikas, phalluses, burning crucifixes, and other delights. One player, for example, built a whole village called Hitlerville.
2b2t’s chat is a mess of 4chan-style edgelordiness, trolling, shit-talking, and general chatter. When I played, the chat was mostly obnoxious spam and weirdness, but from what other visitors have said, it can get much worse. People gleefully try to trick you to do things like click on links to gross porn and screamer videos. It’s not uncommon for players to lie to you, with the intent of sending you to traps or terrible locations. At the very least, you’re likely to get insulted by other players just for existing.
For a long time, the server rolled along, mostly uninterrupted, for almost six years. Every now and then there would be an infusion of new players when 2b2t came to the attention of a new group of people, either through an article or through word of mouth, but for the most part, the community stayed small. By some accounts, there were only 30 or so dedicated users in early 2016.
In early June of this year, however, something happened that would shake 2b2t to its core. A YouTuber called The Camping Rusher learned of the existence of 2b2t, and subsequently made a video of his breathless exploration of the world he found there:
TCR has almost a million subscribers, and that video now has over two million views. 2b2t’s playerbase, even at the best of times, only numbered a few dozen—so as soon as that video went live, the worst server in Minecraft started to get inundated with new players. Most of these players were of course fans of TCR, meaning they considered themselves ‘Rushers,’ not shitlords or trolls.
At first, these newcomers were mostly tourists, taking in the same breathtaking and bizarre sights that TCR had so gleefully exposed in his video. But really, conflict with 2b2t veterans was inevitable. The server buckled under the strain of so many players—even a tiny fraction of Rusher’s fanbase could completely overwhelm 2b2t’s hardware and make it unplayable. And if the server managed to survive the overload, most of its roster was filled by Rushers, not veterans.
Long-timers of 2b2t are usually hostile to most newcomers (which they call ‘newfags’), so they took to killing Rushers whenever possible. Rushers, who outnumber the original players heavily, responded by destroying bases, resources caches and dismantling large monuments that had stood peacefully for years. This prompted veteran players to start treating Rushers more seriously, as much as giving a shit about anything went against the spirit of the server.
FitMC, a self-proclaimed veteran leader and popular YouTuber, has lead some of the most successful responses to Rusher aggression, calling Rushers “clowns” and “punks” and generally mocking their playing ability.
The Camping Rusher, to his credit, seems to want to preserve the server: he has discouraged his fans from destroying cool builds or from being too disruptive. He even donated a large chunk of money to 2b2t to offset the effect of his fans overwhelming the server’s hardware. Still, the newcomers were not a good fit with the existing culture of the server: they’ve tried to make certain areas ‘friendlier’, and often treat the server as a loose Factions-style map. Nothing The Camping Rusher could do would make 2b2t’s veterans respect the presence of newbies, and they’ve even taken to calling Rusher a ‘Jewtuber’ in retaliation.
Eventually, to deal with the server strain, a queue was set up that could manage the constant influx. That queue gives veterans priority over newcomers, though you can pay a $20 monthly fee to access a separate queue. This has cooled tempers somewhat, but the original denizens of 2b2t aren’t backing down. They’ve formed a loose coalition of veteran players that exist only to oppose Rusher and his followers. Some pretty epic content has resulted from this conflict, such as fights with real stakes.
A lot of bases have griefed and a lot of caches have been destroyed, but in terms of in-game resources it’s essentially a stalemate—Rushers have a significant numbers advantage, but vets have had years to build up resources and defenses, with stores of diamond, ender pearls, and food to draw from even if they die.
Unable to deter the Rushers with simple murder and destruction, some veterans of the server have resorted to more devious means of attack. The denizens have worked to make spawn completely uninhabitable. To wit, when I tried to play, it took me three tries after my most recent death to find anything but barren rock before I starved to death.
Veterans have also begun construction of massive resource-eating machines that lag the server, hoping to make the server unusable for TCR and his fans. One recent strategy involves placing objectionable content, like genitalia and loli paintings, around spawn points and the major thoroughfares in an attempt to get TCR’s videos taken down. At the very least, the lewd content makes it hard for new YouTubers to continue publicizing 2b2t, since nudity puts videos at-risk of violating YouTube’s terms of service.
Of course, the problem with an ‘anarchy’ server is that, well, there aren’t any rules. Even some of the old-timers, though they have no fondness for Rushers, disagree with the suggestion that there’s a war, or that there are even sides. To them, it’s always been ‘everyone for themselves,’ and banding together at all violates the spirit of 2b2t. Most players will at least agree that something has changed with the onset of the Rushers, and that the result is less than good — they’re raging against the morphing of a 4chan subcommunity that’s coming into conflict with a much larger YouTuber fanclub.
To some degree, it feels like writing is on the wall: The Camping Rusher recently started university, where presumably he’ll have less time to mess around on 2b2t. The queue is onerous, and escaping spawn is a chore. Veterans are wearing down the enthusiasm of the Rushers, thanks to a huge homefield advantage. In the process, the experience is creating entirely new 2b2t-ers out of Rushers, because any fan who sticks around long enough is bound to have a tolerance for profanity, lack of rules, and general edgelording. 2b2t might be at war, but when the dust settles, 2b2t will have recruited more people to keep the spirit of the worst server on Minecraft alive for years to come.
After a summer of test runs, the full version of Minecraft: Education Edition will officially launch on November 1st. When it goes live, the service will require a $5 yearly membership per user or a district-wide license, but the Early Access edition is still free until November.
According to the MinecraftEdu team, over 35,000 students and teachers around the world have been playing around in Minecraft’s sandbox since the program went live at the beginning of the summer. With the official release, the team has built out a few new education-focused features like a “Classroom Mode” that offers a top-down look at the Minecraft world via a companion app. In the app, teachers can manage world settings, talk to students in-game, give out items or teleport their kids around the map from a single interface. As the main Minecraft world evolves and gains new features, so will the education edition, and educators are encouraged to submit feature ideas and feedback.
Finally, for any teachers who haven’t stepped into Minecraft‘s blocky world yet, education.minecraft.net offers some starter worlds, tutorials, free lesson plans in subjects ranging from storytelling to city planning, and a mentoring program to connect them with other educators. At launch, Minecraft: Education Edition requires OS X El Capitan or Windows 10, plus a free Office 365 account to use.
