“Minecraft” players have developed all types of ways to test their abilities to battle the merciless and blocky world of “Minecraft.” The famous sandbox game is one of the most played games by kids nowadays. “Minecraft” is also available on android apps on Google Play.
Soon the famous sandbox game or “Minecraft” will be playable on Oculus Virtual Reality Visors. As stated on ourprevious report, Oculus rift support for the game “Minecraft” means that Redmond will use its most loved brand to make PC owners upgrade to the latest desktop Operating Service.
Virtual reality in the game “Minecraft” is a dream for fans. According toTechRunch, the virtual reality version for “Minecraft” will be available in the next few weeks. But the said game will only run on Windows 10 Edition Beta. And it was supposed to be released with the 0.15.6 version of the beta.
On other news, the main element for survival in vanilla “Minecraft” is through hard core mode. The difficulty of hard core mode is up to max by increasing the strength and spawn rate of mobs, but most importantly by instituting permanent death.
According toKotaku, the hard core mode feature has been around since the 1.0.0 update. But before that, players developed their own rules for a hard core mode, and these were based on an honour system rather than game mechanics.
Players who have previewed the Virtual Reality “Minecraft” experience seem to generally enjoy it. So it is likely to be a launch Virtual Reality fans follow pretty closely. It could even be big enough to drive some additional headset sales.
Aftermonths of waiting,Minecraftis now available on the Oculus Rift, via a free update to the game’s Windows 10 beta edition. You could already playMinecrafton the Rift via a mod calledMinecrift, but this is the first official version of the game for desktop virtual reality — a Gear VR version was released in April. (Vive users can stilluse a mod calledVivecraft, which also supports the Rift.)
TheMinecraftteam saysthat Windows 10 users will see some features that aren’t in the Gear VR version. That includes support for a mouse and keyboard, as well as graphics settings that take advantage of VR-capable computers’ power. Since the game can be played both inside and outside a headset, it will preserve some settings for each mode separately, so players can tweak in-VR movement or graphics without affecting their flatscreen game experience later.
Of course, one of the biggest differences between the Rift and the Gear VR is the Rift’s Touch motion controllers, which are set to come out later this year. Microsoft doesn’t mention whetherMinecraftwill eventually support motion controls, but an image of Touch ontheMinecraftVR pageappears to have been removed since we last checked in July — so for now, enjoy your controller or keyboard.
For years now, masochisticMinecraftplayers have developed all sorts of ways to test their mettle against a merciless and unforgiving blocky world.
For vanillaMinecraft,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’sactual 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 Yogscasttried their handat 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 andMinecraftlore. This map proved so popular that it spawned an entiregenreof 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 ofMinecraftto 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, andone particularly hilarious gameset 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 isMindcrack’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 thatMinecrafthas to offer, this is a great place to start.
It would be impossible to discuss anything aboutMinecraftwithout 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 ofMinecraftsurvival 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 vanillaMinecraft.
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’reMinecraft-tough, I strongly recommend you give it a try and test your mettle.
Even with so many mods and customs maps forMinecraftplayers, the most interesting survival challenges are the ones that the players impose on themselves within the restriction of vanillaMinecraft.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.
Onethreadfrom early inMinecraft’slifespan 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-formMinecraftplay. Other construction based challenges add increasing degrees of difficulty, likeThe 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’snomadic survivalseries 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 ofMinecraft.
Recent updates toMinecraftallow players to tweak settings which opens up even more brutal survival opportunities, too. One of the best ways to ramp up the difficult ofMinecraft(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 isSwampcore, 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 thatMinecraftis too easy, I strongly encourage you to give this a shot.
Though it rapidly departed from this vision, Notch initially conceived ofMinecraftas more of a survival horror game. He described a much scarier, more desperate version of the game in a 2009 Tumblrpostthat envisioned a challenging scrabble for life in a hostile game world.
Over the years, thecommunity proved to have a mind of its own regarding whatMinecraftwas ‘about,’ but thanks to the popularity of survival challenges, that original vision for a more gruelingMinecraftcontinues to live on through fans.
Rob Guthrie is a lapsed academic who writes about history, video games, and weird internet things. Follow him @RobertWGuthriefor pithy Tweets and lukewarm takes.
No Man’s Skyhas been out for a week now, and the Internet has devoured the gameto a degree the developers never predicted. It’s a huge hit—although,as expected, the game has been divisive because the real game we can play now is quite different than thesuper-hyped versionofNo Man’s Skywe imagined. For one thing, a lot of earnest and eager fans expected the game to be some kind of aMinecraftkiller. It was probably never to be in the first place, but one thing’s for sure—No Man’s Skyisn’t aMinecraftkiller. And that’s for a pretty obvious reason. The games just aren’t that much alike.
WhyNo Man’s SkyIsn’t AMinecraftKiller
‘No Man’s Sky’ is a space exploration game unlike any other, for better and worse.Hello Games
O, the halcyon days of 2015, when the hype aboutNo Man’s Skyreached its maximum levels compared to the amount of actual information we had. Absent much detail about the gameplay inNo Man’s Sky,players andlazy journalistsprojected every little thing onto the game, from imagining it was a massive multiplayer game of space alliance building likeEvE Onlineto dreaming up a game where we all could build massive planetside installations of our own design, a sort ofMinecraftset on infinite earths.
Of course, it turns outNo Man’s Skyisn’t anything like that. For one thing, it doesn’t have base-building, one of the core components ofMinecraft(although the feature iscoming in a future patch). For another, while you can tear down many of the environments inNo Man’s Sky,you can’t put them back together like you can inMinecraft.NMS has loads of destructible environments, but not only is there no base-building… there isn’t much building at all.
After all,No Man’s Skyis a game aboutmoving continuously… not about standing in one place and slowly building up a world. And whileNo Man’s Skydoes have a developed crafting system, what you create is about helping you move forward faster and more safely—not about helping you build a cooler and better base.
When it comes down to it,No Man’s Skyisn’t aMinecraftkiller because it doesn’t really compete withMinecraft.The games set out to do very different things. Tons of indie gamesdopursue similar angles asMinecraft,and are far more in its purview:Don’t Starve, Terraria, Starbound, Stardew ValleyandevenSuper Mario MakerandFallout 4are closer toMinecraft’s wheelhouse.No Man’s Sky,on the other hand, does a great job at what Sean Murray and Hello Games always said it would do.It has its problems—some of them big ones—but it’s a stunning science fiction visual epic sandbox.Minecraftis an open world base-building adventure sandbox. They just aren’t even in the same realm.
Last fall, we announced that we were working with our partners at Oculus to developMinecraftfor VR. Finally, the time has come where we are ready to have everyone experienceMinecraftin a whole new way through virtual reality on Oculus Rift. Starting today, as a thank you to our community, we’ll be releasing a free update toMinecraft: Windows 10 EditionBeta which will enable gameplay using Oculus Rift devices. We’d like to welcome you to the game all over again, because it’s a fantastic new experience in VR, even if you’re aMinecraftveteran. For new and experienced players, we hope the VR experience inMinecraft: Windows 10 EditionBeta will illuminate just how powerful, evocative, and utterly immersive VR can really be.
We at Team Minecraft have worked hard on makingMinecraft: Windows 10 Edition’s new VR feature a comfortable, engaging VR experience. The Windows 10 DX11 performance has been optimized even further to augment the VR experience, and along with the VR features we added previously tothe Gear VR EditionofMinecraft, there are a ton of new options. There is innate support for keyboard and mouse (for those who know their keyboard that well!), and a variety of VR control options for immersive comfortable turning with the Xbox One controller. We’re also supporting MSAA in VR for crisp visuals, and there are new render distance settings that will put your powerful VR graphics card into good use. Many VR-specific options which affect comfort or rendering performance are recorded separately, so you can customize your VR experience, and still retain your traditionalMinecraftexperience exactly how you left it… when you left the real world, for the world of VRMinecraft!
In the accompanying video, you can learn more aboutMinecraftin VR, and our journey to create it. We hope you have as much fun with it as we did making it!
It’s enthralled an entire generation and sold more than 100 million copies, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that for some hyper-skilled players, the open-ended, Lego-like building game Minecraft has become an actual, money-earning occupation. Just as the most-talented Lego architects earn a living showing off their blocky creations, there’s good money to be made by anyone with the skills to craft Minecraft‘s cube-shaped digital blocks into beautiful sculptures and stunning worlds.
This March, Warner Bros used a slice of its $165 million Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice marketing budget to hire several YouTube stars and a company called BlockWorks to create Minecraft renditions of both Gotham City and Metropolis – with the former including a Batmobile that players could drive around the virtual city. This was business as usual for BlockWorks, which is headed by Cambridge University architecture student James Delaney. The professional mapmakers previously built a Minecraft map of Tomorrowland for the Disney film of the same name, which likewise was played by popular YouTubers to the delight of hundreds of thousands of fans. They’ve also built worlds for Microsoft, The Guardian and the Royal Institute of British Architects, among many others.
It’s been a meteoric rise for Delaney and his three co-founders. “I started playing Minecraft about four or five years ago,” says Delaney, who isn’t scheduled to graduate from Cambridge until 2019. “I was just a regular school kid. I was interested in architecture, and it sort of grew from there.”
The four friends played just for fun. Then they noticed that Minecraft-focused YouTubers and the larger, more popular multiplayer servers were starting “to get a decent amount of payment” from donations – by 2013, many servers were pulling in tens of thousands of dollars every month.
Back then, these Minecraft-centric industries were just getting started, and in order to grow they needed a constant stream of new and interesting worlds to play with. Delaney sensed the opportunity. “We thought if we provide these guys with really good builds, there could be a business here,” he explains.
That was three years ago. Now that team of four has become 42, and BlockWorks is a legit business – albeit one for which the “office” is split between Skype and a private Minecraft server. Delaney is managing director, which sounds like it would be hard to juggle with his studies. But he has a handle on it. “The good thing about university is that you spend half the year on holiday,” he says.
BlockWorks’ business is anchored by Minecraft‘s corporate owners, Microsoft, which reached out to Delaney and his team in June last year after nine of them published a 31,752,348-block map that depicted a futuristic civilization deep beneath the surface of the ocean. The tech giant has since commissioned BlockWorks on several projects, including the elaborate map that starred at this year’s Microsoft’s E3 briefing and a set of replicas of the seven wonders of the ancient world – the latter so that school kids could visit them in Minecraft: Education Edition.
When not building Minecraft maps for Microsoft or big-name brands and YouTube stars, the team at BlockWorks busy themselves with projects such as Ireland 2066 and Climate Hope City. These were both conceptual builds with an educational bent – Ireland 2066 was made to inspire school-aged children in conceiving their entries for a competition celebrating the past and future of Ireland, while Climate Hope City was a collaborative effort with fellow Minecraft professional creative Adam Clarke and The Guardian to envisage a fully-sustainable city using only existing green technologies. This sustainable city build ranks among Delaney’s favorites. “They didn’t give us a plan,” he says. “Just design and build a sustainable city, which is kind of an architectural student’s dream.”
BlockWorks is the most prominent Minecraft “build team,” as they call themselves, but there are dozens of others. Most are led by teenagers or 20-somethings like Delaney – though at least one well-known professional mapmaker, Adam “Wizard Keen” Clarke, is over 40 – and the rewards run the gamut from pocket change to checks big enough to keep full-scale creative agencies in business. Delaney only knows of three or four build teams that operate at the upper end of the scale, however.
“You’ve got kids who might be really great at Minecraft,” he says. “They’ve been doing it for four years, but they’re still just doing it for fun. Maybe occasionally they make a few hundred dollars from a server that wants to have a really nice looking spawn [starting area for players] from them. Then on the other side of the spectrum you’ve got people who are taking it incredibly seriously and they’re working with some of the largest companies in the world – huge advertising budgets.”
“And so the scale of work in what is a relatively niche industry is absolutely enormous. I don’t know if I can give any figures,” he continues. “But enough to make a profitable business.”
Take GoCreative, for example, which was founded by a German teenager and Brandon Relph, an enterprising 15 year-old from the UK. Relph made £10,000 last year building scene recreations from a film and scale replicas of famous landmarks – all the while maintaining good grades at school and setting aside only a few hours a night for his Minecraft-centric business. GoCreative is now a small multinational company with around two dozen employees and commissions coming from the education and non-profit sectors as well as entertainment and tourism. In March, a charity that aims to combat declining honey bee populations hired them to help visualize the science in Minecraft. They created a model that depicts gun-toting ants assaulting a giant, peaceful beehive.
Another successful group, Everbloom Studios, has an origin story similar to BlockWorks’. Co-founder Matthew Banks parlayed his love of Lego and model making into a Minecraft addiction early in the game’s life. He got good just as Minecraft was entering the stratosphere, and he and a few friends he’d met online started getting offered money to build maps for multiplayer servers. Their first paid project, published in February 2013, was a small Nordic-style seaside town where players could rest and recuperate before heading back out to battle against the wilderness. (It was also where their character would “spawn” on arrival to the server or respawn upon death.)
Fast forward to today and they have 40 members, 25 of which handle building (10 work on videos and the rest fill “niche roles”). Everbloom still gets “over 90 percent” of its work from servers. They build player hubs, starting areas, and maps for special mini-games. Popular mini-games include a Minecraft spin on laser tag or The Hunger Games, castle battles, boat races, Minecraft renditions of popular sports, and much more.
The most profitable commissions come from brands, though. Or rather, they did – until a recent Minecraft policy shift that shook the world of pro builders.
A change to Minecraft‘s Commercial Usage Guidelines announced at the end of May prohibits companies from commissioning Minecraft maps or modifications that are meant for promotional purposes – so no more Minecraft adaptations of a big set-piece from the latest blockbuster movie and no in-game Verizon smartphones. In essence, anything that exists solely to promote a brand is off-limits.
“We want to empower our community to make money from their creativity, but we’re not happy when the selling of an unrelated product becomes the purpose of a Minecraft mod or server,” wrote Owen Jones, Mojang’s director of creative communications, in a blog post explaining the new rules. Glixel reached out to Microsoft for more detail on these new policies but did not receive comment.
Build teams at the lower end of the market won’t be affected much – they weren’t getting these lucrative promotional commissions anyway. But for those at the top it means uncertain times ahead.
Banks says they’ve had to scramble to find companies and organizations that can pay for builds that won’t be construed as marketing.
Their best bet going forward may be education, which is where Delaney says BlockWorks now gets the bulk of its commissions. Minecraft and Minecraft: Education Edition are used in thousands of schools around the world, and one flavor or the other is now a standard part of the curriculum in many schools across Scandinavia, the U.S., Australia, and elsewhere. These schools often need help designing and building the maps for Minecraft-centric lesson plans to help teach kids about everything from biodiversity and deforestation to sustainable living and city planning.
Some things are clear-cut no-go zones. Disney definitely can’t pay a build team $10,000 to make a map of the climactic scene from the next Avengers movie. But there are grey areas. Can museums fund the creation of maps based on exhibitions they’re running? Or could that be construed as promotional? One such project, Tate Modern’s Tate Worlds, which features Minecraft re-imaginings of famous paintings, has already been taken down from popular server Hypixel because of the new rules, according to the map’s builder.
The bottom line, as far as Banks is concerned, is that no matter how the blurred edges turn out under the microscope, this sets a worrying precedent for the future of professional Minecraft map making – and shows the precariousness of economic ecosystems built around corporate-owned games. And it could chase away – or force out – some of the best builders.
Banks says that if the build scene contracts, the servers will suffer – and so, in turn, will the game as a whole. “Minecraft is only limited by the creativity of the people who play it,” he argues. “The only danger it faces is if the ability for its player base to be creative is taken away.”
