Minecraft has been getting few features for many years now, and that’s one of the main reasons why it’s played by over 90 million players each month. While a lot of gamers prefer to experience “Survival Mode,” many others like the freedom “Creative Mode” offers. Unfortunately, copying massive structures isn’t easy and you have to use third-party file editing tools to quickly clone buildings. Luckily, that’s about to change.
Today, the developer Mojang, now under the banner of Xbox Game Studios, announced the availability of the “Structure Block” in the Minecraft: Bedrock Beta. According to a post on the game’s website, “Structure blocks are a really handy editing tool… they’re an incredibly helpful way of copying and pasting builds all over your Minecraft world. To use them in this beta, make sure you toggle the Use Experimental Gameplay option in the settings.”
You can customize how many blocks you want your Structure Block to cover, and depending on those dimensions, everything will be saved. You can then easily copy and paste the building anywhere. You can even clone any number of times. For example, let’s say that you want to create a row of houses in a city you’re building. Now, you can just make one and then copy and paste the rest! This is incredibly useful and has been a much-requested feature for years now.
Aside from the Structure Block, you should also see a new creature roaming the world. It appears to be a fox and looks absolutely adorable from what we’ve played so far. Minecraft is part of Xbox Game Pass so you can play it right now.
Researchers at Iowa State University have unlocked the secret to creativity, and that secret is Minecraft. Kind of. The researchers got two groups to play Minecraft, another to play “a NASCAR racing game”, and another to watch TV. Then they all drew aliens and had their creativity judged based on how far their drawings strayed from boring human anatomy.
The group that played Minecraft without further instruction were judged to be the most creative – but the group that played Minecraft while being told to “be as creative as possible” were the least. What’s going on there, then? ‘Not sure’, say the researchers.
Here’s co-researcher and psychology professor Douglas Gentile, telling you about the thing he understands more than me.
The most interesting part has to be how urging people to be creative wound up restraining them. Rather than give one explanation, Gentile suggests a couple:
“Maybe creativity’s like a muscle, and they tried really hard in the game and then it was worn out by the time they got to the alien drawing task. Maybe they didn’t like being told how to play, and so were kind of subtly rejecting our instruction. We don’t really know, and followup studies will have to look at this. But it does look very similar to much of the other game research, that what you practice you can get better at, but in fact how you do it might matter just as much.”
So, no firm conclusions – but a promising avenue for further research. His ‘exhaustion’ theory does remind me of those case studies that suggest willpower functions like a resource, with judges being more likely to reject parole applications the closer they get to lunch. Then again, the idea that being told to be creative winds up restricting your thinking has an appeal of its own.
I’m also interested in exactly how they assessed creativity. That alien drawing task is a smart way of going about measuring a process that seems absurdly hard to assess scientifically, but it has its limits. You could draw a single straight line and presumably score maximum points for creativity, which (delightfully) seems both wrong and very accurate.
Dragon Quest Builders 2 makes me feel like a creative genius. It accomplishes this bold feat through use of brilliant game design. In summary, no, it is not a “Minecraft Clone.” I use plenty of fancy words to elaborate on that in this video.
Somehow I arrived at adulthood without ever learning to enjoy creativity. Every time my life requires me to be creative, I make a face like Judge Dreddand complain throughout the exercise.
Well, 2016’s Dragon Quest Builders made creativity fun. By meticulously laying out learning tasks as goals along the winding road of an adorably paced epic adventure set in a deep cut of the Dragon Quest universe, the game lent me the joy of being effortlessly creative.
As I note in my video, an ungodly percentage of comments on Dragon Quest Builders 2‘s trailer accuse the game of being a “Minecraft Clone.” This is like calling Breath of the Wild an “Adventure Clone.”
Dragon Quest Builders 2 is a full-length Dragon Quest game, which just so happens to supplement its cutscenes, exploration, and combat elements with cutely robust city planning mechanics. And, yes, perfectly fleshed-out, endlessly rich Minecraft building.
I see Minecraft as pretty much productivity software for nurturing children’s creativity. I wish we’d had it when I was in elementary school. All we’d had in my house was a bucket of off-brand Legos. We only had one of the flat green pieces, and it was frustratingly small. The biggest structure I could ever build was a port-a-potty.
Dragon Quest Builders 2 is bigger, longer, deeper, and magnitudes more narratively exciting than the first. It has online co-op building. Its controls are spectacularly riddled with gargantuan quality of life improvements. For example: your townspeople can build for you, if you lay out the blueprints and dump the materials in a nearby chest. It’s hilariously satisfying to watch them build.
If you played the first Dragon Quest Builders and loved it, yet the previous paragraph enthralls you, I personally cannot conceive of the possibility of this game disappointing you.
Dragon Quest Builders 2‘s in-game social aspects allow me to view thousands of other players’ creations—and effortlessly travel to and tour their islands, if I want. It fascinates me to see how creative other players can get. I realize I’ll probably never build a shockingly complex cathedral in Dragon Quest Builders 2. Though given that what initially hooked me about playing a “Minecraft Reskin” was its Dragon Quest wallpaper, I find it fittingly satisfying that my village, viewed from the top down, looks perfectly like part of an 8-bit Dragon Questmap.
The Dragon Quest Builders series has taught me that all I really need from a game is Dragon Quest towns. Dragon Quest Builders lets me make my own towns. It’s unlimited Dragon Quest towns. This is enough to convince me that I probably don’t need another video game for at least a couple of weeks.
I go into specific detail about a few of the game’s systems in my video, so if that sort of thing excites you, you could slam your Builder’s Hammer down on the thumbs-up icon on our YouTube channel.
Here’s how the first half hour or so of my experience with Harry Potter: Wizards Unite went. I opened the game, went through some basic tutorial stuff and walked around for the course of four levels or so.
“Well,” I thought to myself. “Maybe Minecraft Earth will make this work.”
Minecraft Earth is Microsoft and Mojang’s upcoming walking game, and itwill be the second ultra high-profile game to try and recapture the magic that made Pokemon GO one of the most profitable mobile games in history. Sure, there have been plenty of other titles in the meantime with varying degrees of success from franchises like Ghostbusters, Jurassic Park and The Walking Dead. But there’s big and then there’s big, and these games are big. Harry Potter was big based on the scope of the franchise and the fact that it was coming from the same developer as Pokemon GO. Minecraft Earth is big because, you know, Minecraft.
Minecraft Earth CREDIT: MICROSOFT
We recently got to see some gameplay from this thing, and it looks cool. It looks similar to those other games on some level, but it also looks like it’s on a much better track to translate this property than what Wizards Unite did with what it had to work with: it helps that Mojang understands what makes this thing tick down at its bones.
Things kick off with a closed beta coming up “in the next two weeks”, according to a recent announcement. It will start on iOs and move to Android “soon” afterwards. From the website:
The closed beta will launch for iOS in the next two weeks, with the Android version following soon thereafter.
As with most closed betas, the number of participants will be limited in numbers and locations. This is to make sure our servers are able to keep up with all the exploration, creation and, hopefully, surviving that is going on around the world. To learn about the current availability of the beta, follow Minecraft Earth on Twitter!
As is also common with beta versions, your progress will occasionally be reset as we test and develop various features of the game.
If you are selected to participate in the closed beta (congratulations!), you will receive an invitation email to the email address you have associated with the Microsoft Account or Xbox Live account you submitted in your registration.
If you are selected (congrats again!), you will need to play at least once every 7 days. If you don’t, we’ll give your spot to someone else, as space in the beta is very limited.
Sponges in Minecraft are pretty darn absorbent—a single sponge block can suck up a total of 65 blocks of water before it becomes completely filled and needs to be dried out in a furnace.
But is 65 blocks really enough? Minecraft is full of swamps and lakes and inlets and oceans and sometimes all that pesky water gets in the way of what you’re trying to do, whether it be a construction project or the investigation of an underwater monument.
A modder named Quanted on Reddit wasn’t happy with the absorbency of Minecraft’s vanilla sponges, so they created their own modded sponge. And boy can it sop up water. A lot of water. All the water?
When placed in water, the modded sponge spreads in six directions, replacing water blocks with empty air (and leaving a lot of confused squids flopping around). The intention is for the sponge to expire after 150 blocks, but as Quanted demonstrates, the mod code can be tweaked for the sponge to simply keep absorbing water forever. You might need some of that water to put out the flames on your GPU, from the looks of it.
Quanted hasn’t released the mod yet, saying “this was just a proof of concept, but since a lot of people appreciate it I will publish this mod. This week I’m very busy, but then I will do my best to finish the mod and share it to the world.” That was a couple weeks ago and I haven’t seen another post with the mod arrive yet, but hopefully it will be available soon.
Spider-Man: Far From Home, which is now showing in US theaters, did pretty well on its opening day of Tuesday. So well, in fact, that its first-day haul of $39.2 puts this final installment in Phase 3 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe well on track to reaching the estimated $125 million the movie about your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is expected to take in over the course of its first six days in theaters.
Some estimates are even predicting a $150 million total haul for that initial six-day run, well above the Tom Holland-led Spider-Man: Homecoming, his first standalone film as the titular web-slinger.
In this 23rd Marvel film, we get a look at the post-Avengers: Endgame world in addition to getting to enjoy another Peter Paker-saves-the-world story, this time from script co-writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers. Recurring actors like Samuel L. Jackson and Colbie Smulders are back, with the addition of Jake Gyllenhaal as Mysterio, for the film which has already knocked it out of the park globally. Far From Home debuted in Asia last week and has collected $150 million already from China, Japan, and Hong Kong.
Among the more interesting new details that are revealed in Far From Home? How about a new name for Thanos’ genocidal finger snap from Endgame, for a start.
For a minute there, Marvel was letting it be known post-Infinity War that the moment in which half of humanity was wiped out would be referred to as “The Decimation.” This is a Spider-Man movie we’re talking about, though, and he’s such a happy-go-lucky hero (with these movies also having a bit of a sunnier tone) that maybe it makes sense the new movie is now taking to calling the finger snap moment … drumroll … “The Blip.” Kind of a silly name, but if you put that aside we do get an entertaining and great first look at the world kind of putting the pieces back together in the wake of the events of Endgame. Its box office success will surely be no blip, either, and there are also some pretty big end credits scenes you should stick around for.
