Minecraft and Norse mythology may seem like two very different things, but the two are coming together with the new Norse Mythology Mash-Up Pack, a new DLC release that brings together some familiar pieces together with the blocky goodness of Minecraft.

The mash-up pack includes locations like Hel, the Great Hall, and Yggdrasil from throughout the annals of Norse mythology. You can even dress up as important figures from the stories themselves, like the very same ones you may remember reading about in one of your history classes (the parts you fell asleep during.)

For instance you can dress up as Thor and Odin, or even Heimdall and Sif. There are a few creatures up for grabs as well to complete the package. Enemies get several interesting skins as well, transforming familiar baddies into antagonists based in Norse mythology.

There are plenty of large, fanciful environments found in the expansion as well that really look as though they could transport you, even temporarily, to a faraway place and time. You can see it all in action in the official trailer, and you can download the DLC pack right now across all Minecraft platforms.

If you like reskinning Minecraft with lots of different looks, be on the lookout for a new Festive Mash-Up DLC pack, which is releasing later this week just in time for the holidays. It will transform your favorite world with candy canes, Santa hats, reindeer, and more!

Minecraft welcomes new Norse Mythology DLC pack

Nearly six months ago, the first episode of Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two released. Jesse’s story carried on from the first season as he/she met new friends, went on exciting new adventures and came face to face with strong, fearless enemies. It was all about to come to a head in this final episode, so just how would Jesse and friends defeat the Admin once and for all?

How exactly do you defeat the Admin?

We left Jesse and friends at the end of the last episode as they’d managed to make their way back to Beacontown. After sneaking into the town through some tunnels, we then get a real look at what has happened to Beacontown and see what it had been turned into by the Admin posing as Jesse. Even in block form, the town still manages to look run down and almost abandoned, a shell of what it used to be like. This is reflected in the especially dullen look of this episode, with the darkened skies, colours and streets.

Once inside Beacontown, your aim is to get to the primary terminal to enter the word of passage. In order to get there, you are given a number of different choices along the way that may help or hinder you depending on what you pick. The game offers you lots of chances to make decisions that, whilst they may not affect the ultimate outcome of the episode, will determine how the other characters in the game react to you. This gives you the choice of whether you can trust old and new friends with what you decide to do.

Aside from these smaller choices scattered about the episode, you also have some big decisions to make when it gets to the end of the episode too. No matter what you’ve done earlier in the episode or the season, these choices stand alone and can be made however you see fit. The ultimate last decision you make will decide how the episode ends, and either choice rounds things off nicely while still leaving the story open for potentially more episodes, as the first season ended up having.

No-one ever said it was going to be easy

This episode is another that is quite short compared to other episodes in the season, but it still ends up being largely focused on conversation. For the rest of the time, you have the expected bit of wandering about, combined with a bit of crafting and also a little bit of puzzle solving. A puzzle towards the end of the episode might cause you a little bit of a problem as you aren’t really given much help, but this offers a nice change from the conversation filling the rest of the episode.

With this being the finale, you’d be expecting some kind of boss fight to occur and you’d be right. The boss fight does not disappoint for the large part, taking place across a number of different locations with the boss having a handful of different forms as well. It’s an impressive boss fight and while the game does tease you for a little while that there may not be any fight at all, it is an enjoyable one that only has one outcome.

Another thing that this episode does well is to tie up some of the loose ends from previous episodes. Old friends that have made appearances in other episodes reappear and allow their stories to tie up, and people that you may have lost or left behind along the way also have their stories finished off. This is a nice touch and the episode perfectly brings everything together, which makes it feel like the ideal finale it is aiming to be.

Finally, the six achievements of the episode will unlock with natural progression through the story, offering the expected 200 gamerscore upon completion.

Summary

“Episode 5 – Above and Beyond” is an appropriate end to another good Telltale season. The episode does a brilliant job of bringing everything together and tying up a number of loose ends across the season. The episode is scattered with important choices and either choice at the end offers closure for the gamer. Aside from the episode feeling a little short, there’s not a lot wrong here. It may not be non-stop action, or blow you completely away, but it is a solid end to an enjoyable season.

Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two Episode 5 Review

People can step back in time and experience what it would have been like to live in Roman Exeter thanks to virtual reality and the video game Minecraft.

The city’s rich history – and the treasures at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery – are now part of the hugely popular and addictive Minecraft game.

A new map shows what Exeter’s Roman fortress could have looked like and is available to download for free while playing Minecraft. This joins another map, also inspired by RAMM’s collections , designed to represent 18th-century Exeter when the city walls still stood.

Minecraft is like a form of virtual Lego and has fans of all ages. Players build towns or cities together in virtual groups and complete buildings by selecting blocks with different textures and uses. They can also download existing buildings, or whole conurbations and change them and add to them.

This map is produced as part of the A Place in Time Project, a partnership between the universities of Exeter and Reading, Exeter City Council and Cotswold Archaeology. The Minecraft maps include recent discoveries and new interpretations of archaeological evidence found in the 1970s and 80s.

The Roman map shows the barracks and military buildings of the Roman settlement in what is now Exeter, and includes links to Roman objects excavated in Exeter. Players can use these to find out more about the objects in the game.

RAMM worked with digital producer Adam Clarke AKA Wizard Keen and blockworks to produce the maps. The first is based on the Hedgeland model, which was constructed between 1817 and 1824 by Caleb Hedgeland and is one of the earliest surviving models of any town in Britain. The model is the only surviving record of many of the city’s buildings and streets. It is on permanent display in RAMM’s Making History gallery.

Sofia Romualdo, a researcher at the University of Exeter, who is working on the project, said: “The beauty of these new maps is they allow people to explore real places in different ways that are fun and educational.”

You can now take a stroll around Roman Exeter on Minecraft

“‘Mom, you are crouching again!”

“I can’t help it!” I said. “I can’t figure out how to stand up straight.”

Sure enough, my character was tramping across the green block landscape slumped forward like a sulky teen who just broke up with her boyfriend.

We got an Xbox for Christmas, the goal, of course, being to insinuate ourselves into the lives of our children so that even their virtual reality is not safe from their parents’ antics.

“Just get in the house and stop wandering off!” advised my 10-year-old, who was teaching me how to play Minecraft. By “teaching,” I mean yelling at me continually as I stabbed at buttons.

But I didn’t go inside the house he had built for us. I was feeling rather full of myself, having just slaughtered a pig with a few swipes of my bare, block hands, earning my household pork chops. I was now off to chop down trees for an addition.

There was only one problem.

“I can’t figure out how to put this pork chop down,” I lamented.

My boy was too busy killing a spider with glowing red eyes to help me, so I just went with it.

I chopped down that tree with a pork chop. Who knew the other white meat could be so versatile?

“I got us more wood for the house!” I announced.

I only got a grunt. It was starting to get dark in our virtual world, and my son was killing another spider.

I moved across the screen, getting stuck in holes, stuck under tree branches, falling off cliffs.

The first-person vantage point of the game, like all modern offerings, messes with me. I grew up on a steady diet of old-school Nintendo, not this herky, jerky Blair Witch Project-meets-Luigi madness. Still, I wasn’t ready to give up. I wanted to make my boy proud, and that’s when I saw the llama. Eager to get the sort of accolades earned by my pig slaughter, I chased down the llama, and by “chased” I mean I stumbled and crouched across the screen until the llama was eventually cornered by some square blocks of earth. Then I began mowing down the animal with my pork chop.

The llama, however, was not going down without a fight. It kicked me and made angry llama noises. But I kept at it and eventually I killed that llama.

“I killed a llama!” I chirped. “What do I get for killing a llama?!”

“Ummm, you get nothing,” said my kid, giving me a look that said, “what kind of sicko kills a llama?”

“OK, now we have standards?” I said. “That’s the line we don’t cross? Llamas? It is not like it was a unicorn or something.”

I sulked back to the house to call it a night.

I jumped into bed and pushed a button, destroying the bed in one swipe.

“What did you do?” he yelled.

“I don’t know … I just pushed a button. I was trying to … ” I said, looking down at the controller that had, no lie, 11 buttons! Plus two joysticks and an up-down-side-to-side tossed in for good measure. “I am sorry … I …”

I stopped talking and walked to the corner with my pork chop.

“I am just going to crouch over here till morning.”

COLUMN: Minecraft mom

Alice Maz was part of a small group of players who came to have near-total mastery over the internal economy of a popular Minecraft; Maz describes how her early fascination with the mechanics of complex multiplayer games carried over into an interest in economics and games, and that let her become a virtuoso player, and brilliant thinker, about games and economics.

Maz’s long, fascinating essay about her business ventures in Minecraft are a potted lesson in economics, one that shows where financial engineering actually does something useful (providing liquidity, matching supply and demand) and the places where it becomes nothing more than a predatory drag on the “real economy” of people making amazing things in Minecraft.

Back when I was working on For the Win, my YA novel about gold farming, I read pretty much every book and academic paper on the subject of games and economics, and Maz’s essay is among the best pieces of writing on the subject I’ve encountered. It’s especially interesting because all the economic activities are aimed at dominating a server, but Maz never talks about whether, how, or if any of the in-game wealth can be converted to cash money, giving the whole thing a kind of abstract clarity that is sometimes obfuscated in the literature on in-game economics.

Diamonds being not the most valuable but certainly the most valued item in the game, both for their utility and their price stability, the server was littered with buy chests for them. These were mostly of the fling and a prayer sort, offering prices low enough that anyone selling to them was a noob or a fool. But not so low that I couldn’t sell them Charlotte’s. I bought from her all I could afford, bankrupted every single person who had a buy chest at any price, then went back for more. Buy chests in the market shops, scattered on the roadsides, nestled in secluded towns no one remembered the names of, I hit them all. If you were buying diamonds at the bottom of the ocean, I would find you and take all of your money.

At the same time, I dropped my sell price in the market to 16M and did pretty good business for a few weeks. I had the advantage of one of the two best plots there were, the other belonging to Emma. (This I’d gotten via inside knowledge that Zel’s to-be partner was shuttering his store and gifting the plot to a friend. I offered to swap my plot as the gift, help with the deconstruction process, and advise on pricing in the Emporium in exchange, thus getting the prized location without it ever going up for sale.) QuickShop provided a console command to show the closest shop selling an item, and these two plots, though behind hedge walls and not immediately visible, were the closest as the crow flies to the market’s warp-in point. So anyone using the command–and this was most people, traipsing through the market looking for deals being a rare activity mostly limited to speculators–got directed to me or Emma for anything either of us sold.

This all made me a lot of money. I drove a portion of profits into bolstering my diamond and beacon reserves, bought basically any building material I thought I’d ever need in bulk, and still watched my marble balance grow. Up til the diamond bonanza, I’d been making money on a dozen different side hustles. A bit here, a bit there, doing better than most, but regardless the day-in day-out of working the market took up the majority of my time on the game. That made me rich; this is what made me wealthy.

But soon 16M became 14M, and 14M became 12M. A few people started to notice Charlotte’s store, and she restocked faster than I, or anyone, could recoup enough to buy out. Mostly though, it was clear to everyone the price of diamond was falling, even if they had no idea why. I diversified into selling enchanted diamond equipment of all types, priced just so that I could break even on the enchant and move the component diamonds at the same price I sold them for raw. A few of the buy chest people I’d tanked tried recovering some of their money by putting up at a loss the diamonds I’d sold them, but they still couldn’t move product faster than a trickle. Eventually even Charlotte had to cut her prices to keep selling. It was bad.

The internal economics of a popular Minecraft server are an object lesson in everything great and terrible about markets

A post by a Reddit user has revealed some new information about Destiny 2’s playerbase and how much it has dropped off since the game launched in September.

The user, named “stevetheimpact,” used Bungie’s application programming interface from its web site to find when players last logged into the game. The chart below shows a steady decline in players since launch, with it recently reaching an all-time low at the end of 2017.
Image via u/stevetheimpact – Full size

According to stevetheimpact, the total player count dropped from around 1.3 million at launch to just over 321,000 at the end of year, which is a drop of 75.37 percent.

The percentages were even higher on each individual platform, too. PlayStation 4 player count dropped from 712,431 to 158,523 for a drop of 77.74 percent, Xbox One dropped from 594,987 to 127,428 for a total of 78.58 percent, and the PC player count dropped from 194,607 at launch on Oct. 24 to 35,892 at the end of the year, which is a drop of a whopping 81.55 percent.

The chart comes with warnings, though, as stevetheimpact says they were not able to account for players returning for the Curse of Osiris DLC in December, but the final endpoint shows the correct player dropoff regardless.

While this information is not official or entirely accurate, the Bungie API does not lie when it comes to data. In 2018, fans of the series will be looking for reasons to boot the game back up again.

This chart shows how much Destiny 2’s playerbase has dropped off since launch

It turns out Steam’s 2017 releases may not be as addicting as one might hope. A new report from GitHyp reveals that Steam’s top 10 most-played games for the year were all released before 2017 even began. That is, except for one title: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.

GitHyp regularly tracks Steam’s most-played games, calculating how many players hop online per day, when playercount peaks, and how many players are currently online, among other values. And according to GitHyp’s statistics, PUBG ranks in first place with over three million players. No other games from 2017 can be found on the top 10 list, and it’s not until 12th place that another game from this year emerges—Divinity: Original Sin 2.

Listed below are the top 10 games for 2017, along with the approximate playercount tallied for each.

1. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds ~3 million players
2. Dota 2 ~1 million players
3. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive ~800,000 players
4. Payday 2 ~250,000 players
5. Grand Theft Auto V ~170,000 players
6. H1Z1 ~150,000 players
7. Warframe ~120,000 players
8. ARK: Survival Evolved ~1000,000 players
9. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege ~100,000 players
10. Path of Exile ~100,000 players

Last year was great for gaming overall, and as the second Steam Awards reveals, games like Cuphead and Sonic Mania certainly proved PC gaming has plenty of great hits to look forward to during even a slower year. But as far as Steam games go, sometimes great titles from the past few years are just hard to beat.

Steam’s top 10 games for 2017 were all released before 2017, except for one

In an announcement that likely surprises exactly no one, Nintendo confirmed that the Switch is now the fastest-selling console in U.S. history, thanks to data compiled via internal sales info.

The console has officially beaten out the original Wii’s sales numbers from when it launched in the US as well, leading to a ridiculously successful launch and what will remain a bustling part of the console’s life cycle.

Since the console’s launch back on March 3, 2017, it’s managed to amass over 4.8 million units sold in the 10 months since its debut. Those are impressive numbers, and it’s not just localized to Nintendo consoles. Those are the best numbers, period, for all video game consoles in the U.S. The old record holder was the Wii, with four million units sold during the same amount of time.

With titles like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey out on store shelves, it’s clear Nintendo is going to be able to keep up the momentum with solid games and system-sellers that get people to pull the trigger on the Switch in general. Those games themselves managed to accrue some impressive review scores and sales numbers as well, meaning the Switch is and will likely remain a powerhouse in terms of moving units and making mountains of cash.

If you still don’t have a Switch, it might be time to admit that it probably does live up to the hype. If you’re a big first-party Nintendo fan and enjoy ports, it’s an interesting system that’s definitely worth picking up.

The Switch is now officially the fastest-selling console in U.S. history

The original Star Wars: Battlefront II launched back in 2005, over 12 years ago. It’s just gotten a new patch for PC users, if you can believe that. The new Star Wars Battlefront II may have just hit physical and digital store shelves near the end of 2017, but there’s still love out there for the original game, too.

The patch is a pretty small one, but it proves there’s still a loyal fanbase surrounding the original sequel. According to Disney, it’s a mass of bug fixes, which resolve issues with Steam username displays, ping calculations, and the game’s lobby and matchmaking. There’s admittedly not a lot to it, but it’s enough to let fans know their concerns are still being heard, and this beloved title is still being supported.

In fact, this is a revitalization for the game, when it got a new update to add multiplayer support in October 2017, with cross-play for Steam and GOG buyers added in as well. It was likely added in not only as a response to the fervor for the game since the new Battlefront II released, but to curry fan favor after EA dropped the ball on the fan experience with all things related to loot crates when the new title launched.

It’s always pretty heartwarming in some way to see older games still receiving support. And given how in many ways the original Star Wars: Battlefront II is superior to the new game (though they both have their high and low points) it’s refreshing that you still have options in terms of which game you’re going to spend time with your friends in.

Star Wars: Battlefront II gets a multiplayer update more than decade after launch

Minecraft features several expansive lands for you to explore, depending on what kind of terrain is generated when you start a new game. Depending on what biome that spawns when you start playing, you can find special areas known as villages, which are small clusters of homes that villagers call home.

Villagers are more than just interesting NPCs, though. They’re integral for trading items with, and they add a unique dimension to Minecraft that lends a certain “human” element to the game. Suddenly, Hanging out with villagers, watching them interact with each other, and reaping the benefits of their homes and communities are a unique part of Minecraft as a whole. If you’re interested in scouting out villages in Minecraft, here are some simple ways to find them.
How to Find Villages on Foot

It’s pretty simple to find villages as long as you have a certain “biome” that you’re playing in. You can head out to search for them on foot just like you’d be exploring normally, or fly around in Creative Mode to search for villages in a much simpler, more expedient manner.

If you choose to search the game on foot, you should first start with a special seed in-game that will start you out closer to a village at the very beginning. Seeds are simply codes that you can enter before generating a Minecraft world that you have control over. If you use the same seed twice, you’ll generate the same kind of world twice, so if you find one that you enjoy using, you can stick with it and will always see the same world generated with the same code.

You can find different seeds all over the internet, so find one that you’re interested in using, and you can spawn a new world where you’re potentially near the villages this way. Make sure you tick the “Large Biomes” option when you make your new world, which should allow for additional space for villages to appear. While ticking options, also make sure “Generate Structures” is selected, or otherwise you just won’t see any villages or buildings whatsoever. This is an important part of the process, so double-check your options before generating a world.

When you’ve arrived in the world, take a look around the savannah, taiga, desert, and plains areas in your new world. These are some of the only places you’ll be able to find villages in the game, since they’re flat, grassy, and easy for the villages to appear in. But just because you find these areas, that doesn’t mean you’ll find a village. They will spawn completely at random, so it all comes down to luck when you’re trying to seek one out. It may take some practice and patience, but eventually you’ll happen upon one of the villages when you least expect it. You’ll know it when you see the small little buildings and taller, tan humanoid creatures milling about. Congratulations on your new discovery!
How to Find Villages in Creative Mode

If you want to find villages in Minecraft without having to run around and do all the dirty work, you can always opt to play in Creative Mode instead, where you can fly around the world rather than explore it on foot. You can jump straight up into the air and look around the world you’ve created in tandem with the suggestions in the “explore on foot” part of this guide.

This way, you can look around at your leisure, empowered to roam the skies and look down on the world below you for any latent villages that may be hidden. Creative Mode obviously doesn’t have all of the same features as Survival Mode, but it does make it exponentially easier to seek out villages when you get a bird’s eye view of all of the areas below you. It won’t matter much if you find villages, however, if you don’t need to trade or interact with the villagers, so this option is really more suitable for exploring and seeing what’s out there instead of actually using their trading skills.

How to find a village in Minecraft

How to Play Splitscreen Multiplayer in Minecraft on PC

One of the biggest appeals of the console versions of Minecraft is that you can play splitscreen multiplayer, inviting a buddy along for you blocky adventure. While the PC version doesn’t have built in splitscreen, it is possible to play splitscreen multiplayer, in a way. There’s one mod in particular that fans have been using for years, and it’s fairly simple to get.

The mod in question is the Joypad Mod, which allows you to assign a controller to the game while playing on PC. The mod has support up to version 1.13, but the splitscreen feature only works correctly up to version 1.12. That means you’ll need to change your game’s version to an earlier one when you want to play splitscreen, and will only be able to play worlds assigned to that version. If you don’t know how to change versions, there’s a handy walkthrough from Mojang on that.

Now with that out of the way you just need the mod itself, which can be found in various places like MC-Mod. Here’s a rundown of how to install the mod.

1. Make sure you have already installed Minecraft Forge.
2. Open Minecraft launcher then select Forge profile.
3. Find your .minecraft application folder:
   On Windows, open Run from the start menu, type %appdata%\.minecraft\ and click Run. On Mac, open Finder, hold down ALT and click Go then Library in the top menu bar. Open the folder Application Support and look for minecraft.
4. Place Joypad Mod into your Mods folder. If you don’t have one, create it now.
5. That was all, enjoy!

The site also gives you a basic walkthrough on how to set up splitscreen. Basically what you need to do is run two different instances of Minecraft on your PC, then assign the controller to one instance and the keyboard and mouse to the other. After that, adjust the two windows however you want on your screen, having each take up half of the screen, and voila, you have yourself splitscreen multiplayer.

If you need further guidance there are some handy video tutorials that you can use for installing Forge and the Joypad mod.

Minecraft: How to Play Splitscreen Multiplayer on PC

On the Sunday prior to Gamescom 2017, Microsoft pulled a couple of console announcements out of the bag.

There is an Xbox One X Project Scorpio Edition for die-hard fans to pre-order for day one. And a special version of the 1TB Xbox One S was unveiled too – a console bundle that will get Minecraft fans a-frothing.

The Xbox One S Minecraft Limited Edition Bundle not only comes with a copy of Minecraft and the Redstone Pack expansion, the console itself is designed to look like a collection of Minecraft blocks.

Pocket-lint

It has been laser etched, to give a tangible texture to the front and sides. And the underneath of the machine is translucent, with redstone elements running underneath.

There are also some Easter Eggs, we were told during a Gamescom briefing, which Minecraft fans will discover in use. Sounds and effects from the game series are also used by this particular Xbox for certain actions.

Up close, it is quite a fetching, if garish, machine that looks best when mounted vertically on the included stand.

We particularly like the included controller, which is designed around a Creeper.

A separate Pig controller will also be available.

The Minecraft Xbox will be available from 3 October priced at £349.99. Pre-orders on Microsoft’s Xbox website are open now.

Xbox One S Minecraft Limited Edition Bundle preview: Jeepers Creepers

Gamers rejoice! Christmas might be over, but there are some really great gaming deals out there in the post-Christmas run-up to the New Year. If you’ve been looking for an excuse to treat yourself, then the slashed prices might be just the excuse you need to justify it.

We’ve been keeping an eye out and have come across this cracking Xbox One S deal that will have you shouting “Jeepers Creepers!” – especially if you’re a Minecraft nut.

The Minecraft limited edition Xbox One S 1TB console we’ve previously previewed is available to buy from Argos for just £234.99. This bundle includes the custom designed grass block console, the iconic green Creeper wireless controller, Minecraft system sounds, as well as a download of Minecraft and the Redstone Pack as well as unique skin packs.

• Click to get this deal from Argos

The Argos deals page also includes another bundle that includes Yooka-Laylee for free as well, saving another £17.99.

What are you waiting for? Grab yourself a deal and get building! Don’t forget with Argos you can order online and collect in-store today too, so you don’t even need to wait to get gaming.

Mega console deal: Xbox One S limited edition Minecraft console bundle for £234.99

People can step back in time and experience what it would have been like to live in Roman Exeter thanks to virtual reality and the video game Minecraft.

The city’s rich history – and the treasures at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery – are now part of the hugely popular and addictive Minecraft game.

A new map shows what Exeter’s Roman fortress could have looked like and is available to download for free while playing Minecraft. This joins another map, also inspired by RAMM’s collections , designed to represent 18th-century Exeter when the city walls still stood.

Minecraft is like a form of virtual Lego and has fans of all ages. Players build towns or cities together in virtual groups and complete buildings by selecting blocks with different textures and uses. They can also download existing buildings, or whole conurbations and change them and add to them.

This map is produced as part of the A Place in Time Project, a partnership between the universities of Exeter and Reading, Exeter City Council and Cotswold Archaeology. The Minecraft maps include recent discoveries and new interpretations of archaeological evidence found in the 1970s and 80s.

The Roman map shows the barracks and military buildings of the Roman settlement in what is now Exeter, and includes links to Roman objects excavated in Exeter. Players can use these to find out more about the objects in the game.

RAMM worked with digital producer Adam Clarke AKA Wizard Keen and blockworks to produce the maps. The first is based on the Hedgeland model, which was constructed between 1817 and 1824 by Caleb Hedgeland and is one of the earliest surviving models of any town in Britain. The model is the only surviving record of many of the city’s buildings and streets. It is on permanent display in RAMM’s Making History gallery.

Sofia Romualdo, a researcher at the University of Exeter, who is working on the project, said: “The beauty of these new maps is they allow people to explore real places in different ways that are fun and educational.”

People who don’t play Minecraft can discover objects from Roman Exeter on the Exeter Time Trail website .

Full information on downloading the Roman maps is on the Exeter Time Trail Minecraft page .

You can now take a stroll around Roman Exeter on Minecraft

The year is basically done, bar the overeating and unison tweeting about Muppet Christmas Carol, so what better time to chase down some of Xbox’s top people and see what they thought? Not just of this year and their person highlights, but also what’s getting them hot for 2018. Coming up we’ve got some of the people behind Halo, Gears, Forza and Xbox One X itself, talking about what’s been, and what’s coming.

Rod Fergusson, Studio Head of The Coalition

What’s been your 2017 Xbox highlight?
My 2017 Xbox highlight was the Xbox One X launch and having Gears of War 4 be the very first Xbox One X Enhanced game available this year! It looks amazing at 4K with HDR and all the new rendering features, plus the ability to play in performance mode so for the first time you can play Campaign and Horde at up to 60 FPS.

What’s one thing you won’t forget about 2017?
I’m assuming you’re just talking about gaming… For me it’s just what an amazing year it has been for games both in terms of quality and diversity from Cuphead to Assassin’s Creed Origins, I have a huge backlog of great games to get through during the holidays!

What are you looking forward to in 2018?
For 2018 I’m looking forward to The Coalition studio renovation finally finishing, watching the eSports player talent in Season 2 of our Gears Pro Circuit, launching our new Gears comic book series and continuing to support the Gears community with some really cool content.

Matt Booty, Microsoft Studios & Minecraft CVP

What’s been your 2017 Xbox highlight?
Launching the Minecraft Marketplace, which created a place for players to browse, download and play cool community creations from within the game itself, and also created a place for creative and entrepreneurial community members to become a partner and market their work. Minecraft has always been about community and the marketplace feels like a natural extension to bring to Minecraft not just on PC but on mobile and console as well. The same is true for our partners who host servers in the marketplace. We’re just getting started with the marketplace and will be announcing a lot of new content and more partners in 2018.

What’s one thing you won’t forget about 2017?
When German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the Xbox booth at Gamescom and got a demo of our Minecraft: Education Edition and talked with the team. We’re lucky to work on a franchise that spans countries, ages and genders and brings players together in so many amazing ways.

What are you looking forward to in 2018?
Three things: The Update Aquatic, the Nintendo Switch Bedrock Release and the Super Duper Graphics Pack. The Update Aquatic will fill the Minecraft oceans with coral, kelp, fish, dolphins, shipwrecks and new water physics. The Nintendo Switch update will bring Switch players in to the Bedrock community and offer them cross-platform functionality and Marketplace content. Nintendo has been a great partner, and we’re excited to work even closer with them in the new year. The Super Duper Graphics Pack is getting a lot of our development attention right now, and it will include graphical enhancements like refined lighting, shadows, water effects, and character detail, plus customizable options and sliders.

Bill Giese, Creative Director of Forza Motorsport, Turn 10 Studios,

What’s been your 2017 Xbox highlight?
My 2017 highlight would be launching Forza Motorsport 7 on Xbox One and PC in October, and then shipping the game again on Xbox One X in November. This game is a labor of love for the team and seeing the feedback from the community has been incredible.

What’s one thing you won’t forget about 2017?
I’ll never forget when we announced the 2018 Porsche 911 GT2 RS on stage at E3 in June. For the first time in history, a car was revealed alongside a game announce. Working with Porsche has been a dream come true, and they were integral to helping us deliver a once-in-a-lifetime moment.

What are you looking forward to in 2018?
I cannot wait for fans to see what we have in store – 2018 is going to be a huge year for the Forza community. We have some spectacular announcements and new experiences coming up. I’m excited for those announcements and Red Dead Redemption 2; everyone should be looking forward to that game.

Kevin Gammill, Xbox One partner group program manager

What’s been your 2017 Xbox highlight?
The release of Xbox One X – the world’s most powerful console – was a significant milestone for the Xbox team and we couldn’t be more thrilled about the excitement and demand we’re seeing from our development partners and fans. Having over 90 Xbox One X enhanced titles available and 75 more already announced and adding support as we move in to 2018 required strong collaboration between our engineering teams and our partners. It was also an incredible achievement for the team that we were able to deliver the Fall Update for Xbox just prior to the release of Xbox One X, which not only brought a new streamlined dashboard and UI design to the Xbox One family of devices based on user feedback, but also enabled gamers looking to upgrade their console to easily transfer their existing games and settings to Xbox One X, so they could immediately jump in and play as soon as the console released.

What’s one thing you won’t forget about 2017?
Playing a number of Original Xbox games such as Fusion Frenzy and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic with my twins boys on our Xbox One X.  Our engineering team really took advantage of the power of Xbox One X by improving the pixel count as much as 16X, and the games look and play great. It was only after hours of gameplay together that I told them these are games that are over sixteen years old.

What are you looking forward to in 2018?
I’m looking forward to improving my PlayerUnknown’s Battleground skills and hopefully winning a few chicken dinners along the way, continuing to expand the Xbox One games portfolio with unique services like Xbox Game Pass that deliver great value to Xbox gamers, and listening to valuable feedback from both our development partners and Xbox community to improving the Xbox One platform. It is going to be another great year to be a gamer.

Greg Stone, Senior Producer at 343 Industries

What’s been your 2017 Xbox highlight?
My highlight has to be the launch of Xbox One X and how it delivered on the promise of true 4K resolution and HDR gaming in the living room. It’s just mind-blowing to me how much better the enhanced games look on the console. It truly is as powerful as advertised and virtually my entire game collection looks and plays better on Xbox One X, especially Halo Wars 2 and Halo 5: Guardians.

What’s one thing you won’t forget about 2017?
There are so many great memories from 2017. We released Halo Wars 2 in February, put out new DLC on a monthly basis for 6 months straight and shipped our incredible expansion, Awakening the Nightmare, in September. We are extremely proud of the success that Halo Wars 2 has seen and energized by the positive response from our amazing fan base. A tremendous amount of effort and care went into making Halo Wars 2 and it was a pleasure working with our development partners at Creative Assembly to bring the latest installment of the Halo Wars franchise to life. Launching a new game is always a milestone and it’s something I will cherish when I look back on 2017.

What are you looking forward to in 2018?
I am really looking forward to the release of Sea of Thieves in 2018! The team at Rare was gracious enough to invite us to play Sea of Thieves during their Mixer live stream from Gamescom. We had a blast scavenging dark caves on a haunted island for buried treasure and sending opposing pirate ships to a watery grave. I’m going to be participating in my share of looting and plundering when it launches next year.

Matt Salsamendi, Co-Founder of Mixer

What’s been your 2017 Xbox highlight?
2017 has been a huge year for the platform. When we rebranded from Beam to Mixer, we started on a journey to connect gamers all across the globe in the most interactive way possible. Along with the rebrand, the introduction of co-streaming was huge for me and the community on Mixer. The ability to watch a PUBG stream, and not only see the action, but see everyone’s unique perspective in squad views totally changed the game for me.

What’s one thing you won’t forget about 2017?
E3, hands down. This was my first E3 as part of Xbox, and over 1 million people watched the briefing on Mixer. It was a huge, team wide effort. I remember the nights leading up, with the entire team focused on not only delivering the experience at scale, but also giving viewers a unique experience. We broadcasted the briefing in 4K, with less than one second of latency, all over the world, for more than a million people. On top of that, with Mixpot we were able to give away free games and loot to those that watched. It was a crazy cool experience.

What are you looking forward to in 2018?
There’s a few areas I’m really excited about. With channels like HypeZone launching, we’re increasing our focus on discovery for new broadcasters. I think that’s a huge opportunity, introducing an audience to those that are just getting started in streaming and giving streamers the tools to help create an entertaining experience for viewers. Also, the new mobile apps we’re launching are awesome and they’re some of the first steps we’re taking to bring the Mixer experience to more devices. I’m really excited about the ability for viewers to watch from anywhere, and have a differentiated experience that takes advantage of each platform.

Chris Charla, Director of ID@Xbox

What’s been your 2017 Xbox highlight?
The sheer volume of amazing games that shipped from ID@Xbox developers is definitely my #1 highlight, but as for specific moments I will say that E3 is always a massive highlight for me – just getting to see so many amazing games at our press briefing in such a short amount of time! It was really neat this year because for Bluehole (PUBG) and Pearl Abyss (Black Desert) it was their first time being part of an E3 media briefing so that was really fun to see. Also, being able to attend the launch party of Cuphead at Meltdown Comics in Hollywood and hang out with Chad and Jarrod and Maja outside the venue, next to a giant two-story painting of Cuphead, and just seeing all their incredibly hard work pay off with a bombshell critical and commercial success – it was just kind of an awesome moment! Then we went and got chili dogs at Carneys. It was like a perfect LA night!

What’s one thing you won’t forget about 2017?
Maybe this is a little inside baseball, but as a video game fan, getting the opportunity to talk to folks like Kareem Choudhry and Kevin Gammill about the tech inside the Xbox One X at various press events and other things where we were together was really awesome. We have some amazingly brilliant people working at Xbox and getting to hang out with those guys is pretty special!

What are you looking forward to in 2018?
Below. (And a lot more amazing games!)

Xbox’s 2017 highlights and what 2018 holds according to the people behind Gears, Halo, Minecraft and more

With new, innovative apps and programs dropping everyday, it pays to have a powerful computer. But forking out the cash for a pre-made rig can get expensive — especially when it’s perfectly feasible to build your own at a much lower price point. Of course, not all of us have the IT acumen of a Windows technician, but you can give yourself the necessary know-how with the How to Build a Computer Bundle — now on sale for $19.

Featuring five beginner-friendly courses, this collection will guide you through the steps and concepts crucial to creating a computer from scratch, or upgrading your current machine. You’ll start with the essentials, learning all about the functional roles of the various components and hardware that make up a computing system. Then, you’ll move on to more advanced concepts, like making hardware modifications, network cabling, overclocking your CPU, and more.

Plus, this collection also includes training on upgrading laptop hardware, thereby improving the versatility of your newly acquired skill set.

The How to Build a Computer Bundle is available in the Boing Boing Store for $19.

These courses will help you build your dream computer

Contrary to popular belief, mastering the fundamentals of robotics doesn’t have to be a mind-numbing slog through programming and electronics courses. SunFounder’s Nano DIY 4-DOF Robot Kit offers an intuitive and beginner-friendly way to break into the field by walking you through building your own programmable robot, and you can get it in the Boing Boing Store for $50.

Going by the name of Sloth, this DIY kit is compatible with the included SunFounder Nano board or an Arduino Nano board. It’s equipped with two legs that you can program to walk, kick, or even dance, and, thanks to its HC-SR04 ultrasonic ranging module, it can even detect and avoid obstacles intelligently. What’s more, this simple kit comes with a visual programming language, allowing any DIY-er to start from scratch regardless of their coding background.

The SunFounder Nano DIY 4-DOF Robot Kit can be yours for $50 when you order it from the Boing Boing Store.

Learn the ropes of robotics with this programmable dancing robot

Alice Maz was part of a small group of players who came to have near-total mastery over the internal economy of a popular Minecraft; Maz describes how her early fascination with the mechanics of complex multiplayer games carried over into an interest in economics and games, and that let her become a virtuoso player, and brilliant thinker, about games and economics.

Maz’s long, fascinating essay about her business ventures in Minecraft are a potted lesson in economics, one that shows where financial engineering actually does something useful (providing liquidity, matching supply and demand) and the places where it becomes nothing more than a predatory drag on the “real economy” of people making amazing things in Minecraft.

Back when I was working on For the Win, my YA novel about gold farming, I read pretty much every book and academic paper on the subject of games and economics, and Maz’s essay is among the best pieces of writing on the subject I’ve encountered. It’s especially interesting because all the economic activities are aimed at dominating a server, but Maz never talks about whether, how, or if any of the in-game wealth can be converted to cash money, giving the whole thing a kind of abstract clarity that is sometimes obfuscated in the literature on in-game economics.

Diamonds being not the most valuable but certainly the most valued item in the game, both for their utility and their price stability, the server was littered with buy chests for them. These were mostly of the fling and a prayer sort, offering prices low enough that anyone selling to them was a noob or a fool. But not so low that I couldn’t sell them Charlotte’s. I bought from her all I could afford, bankrupted every single person who had a buy chest at any price, then went back for more. Buy chests in the market shops, scattered on the roadsides, nestled in secluded towns no one remembered the names of, I hit them all. If you were buying diamonds at the bottom of the ocean, I would find you and take all of your money.

At the same time, I dropped my sell price in the market to 16M and did pretty good business for a few weeks. I had the advantage of one of the two best plots there were, the other belonging to Emma. (This I’d gotten via inside knowledge that Zel’s to-be partner was shuttering his store and gifting the plot to a friend. I offered to swap my plot as the gift, help with the deconstruction process, and advise on pricing in the Emporium in exchange, thus getting the prized location without it ever going up for sale.) QuickShop provided a console command to show the closest shop selling an item, and these two plots, though behind hedge walls and not immediately visible, were the closest as the crow flies to the market’s warp-in point. So anyone using the command–and this was most people, traipsing through the market looking for deals being a rare activity mostly limited to speculators–got directed to me or Emma for anything either of us sold.

This all made me a lot of money. I drove a portion of profits into bolstering my diamond and beacon reserves, bought basically any building material I thought I’d ever need in bulk, and still watched my marble balance grow. Up til the diamond bonanza, I’d been making money on a dozen different side hustles. A bit here, a bit there, doing better than most, but regardless the day-in day-out of working the market took up the majority of my time on the game. That made me rich; this is what made me wealthy.

But soon 16M became 14M, and 14M became 12M. A few people started to notice Charlotte’s store, and she restocked faster than I, or anyone, could recoup enough to buy out. Mostly though, it was clear to everyone the price of diamond was falling, even if they had no idea why. I diversified into selling enchanted diamond equipment of all types, priced just so that I could break even on the enchant and move the component diamonds at the same price I sold them for raw. A few of the buy chest people I’d tanked tried recovering some of their money by putting up at a loss the diamonds I’d sold them, but they still couldn’t move product faster than a trickle. Eventually even Charlotte had to cut her prices to keep selling. It was bad.

The internal economics of a popular Minecraft server are an object lesson in everything great and terrible about markets

The Star Control: Origins – Fleet Battles BETA is underway for those who have pre-ordered the game (currently priced at $29.99 on Steam). However, we were able to partner with Stardock Entertainment to give away twenty-five beta codes through the raffle method.

Just enter below and keep completing the actions until December 15th to increase your chances to be among the winners. Good luck!

Star Control: Origins is a science-fiction adventure game set in an open universe that puts the player as the captain of Earth’s first interstellar vessel on a mission to find allies to help save humanity from certain annihilation.

The beta unlocks the Fleet Battles feature, where you’ll assemble ships in a fleet and engage in battle with fleets controlled by either the computer, humans via the Internet or even friends sitting at the same PC.

You can literally design your own ships to use in combat using the Ship Crafting system, or you can download ships designed by others to play with. Ship Crafting not only allows you to decide what weapons and defenses a ship has, but allows total control of how a ship looks.

The goal of the Beta 1 series

The goal of the first beta of Star Control: Origins is to help us with balance, compatibility, eliminating cheese tactics and improving the user experience in designing ships and creating fleets.  There will be a lot of changes coming into these betas as we go forward.  For example, additional elements will be added to the combat arena such as salvage, temporary boosts to speed, crew replenishment, Precursor relics that help your entire fleet, etc.  The arena will be randomly chosen at the beginning of the fleet battle and we hope to have many different arenas available (and possibly an arena editor for players).

What we really want to emphasize is: DO NOT assume that beta 1 is representative of the final game.  It is a beta for a reason.  We think most people will really like Beta 1.  But every time I play it, I find something that has to be changed (the look of the planet or the variance in space backgrounds or a sound effect or a weapons effect or the way the planet interacts with something, etc.).  This is where you guys come in: Make sure that the final released version of the game isn’t a 1.0 but is more like a 1.5 of a normal game.

Star Control: Origins – Fleet Battles BETA Raffle Giveaway

It’s been a while since we covered Survarium, the Free-to-Play online first-person shooter made by Vostok Games, the Ukrainian studio founded by former S.T.A.L.K.E.R. developers.

The game, which is available on Steam Early Access, recently added its first cooperative story-driven mission with Update 0.50. To play this mission you’ll need access keys though, and we’ve got three thousand codes from Vostok Games. After you’ve picked a code from the giveaway below, follow these instructions:

• Each code gives 3 Access Keys to play Team Mission.
• If a player prefers to play Survarium via Steam he must enter the code on the game’s website using the Steam browser
• The codes can be used for old and new accounts
• One code per account. If someone else has already redeemed a code he will not be able to use it again
• Redeem codes here: https://survarium.com/en
• My account – Add promo code – apply code
• Bonuses of the codes are not awarded immediately, but within 5 to 30 minutes
• Expire date: December 24th, 2017

Story mission tells about a conflict between Black Market and The Renaissance Army and also unveils the mystery about secret experiments which lead to the creation of the Forest.

Specifically for this mission developers created a new map with lots of both open and indoors locations. Developers tried to add an element of exploration into the game, and also let players interact with the world of Survarium.

The mission is designed for a squad of three players, and to successfully finish it players need to complete a set of tasks. At least one of the players must reach each of the checkpoints: then defeated squad members (if there are any) are resurrected and may continue. If all squad members are dead, the mission is failed.

While going through the mission players will learn the storyline, but the player can also find stashes containing various trophies which players will receive when the mission is successfully finished.

Survarium PvE Giveaway – Get A Taste of Story Missions