By Adam Smith on September 12th, 2011 at 4:06 pm.
I’ve been waiting for the Minecraft 1.8 update for a long time. I want all this adventure stuff in my Minecraft now, damn it. Especially those creepy Endermen. Well, lucky me because the update is out! Sort of. While it wasn’t due for an official release yet, a version was leaked by one of the testing groups. The pre-release version has now been officially sanctioned, provided it’s downloaded from this link here. Play the game, and find bugs and report them. It’s like a job that’s fun. Let us know what you discover and if it seems like it’s been worth the wait. And bear in mind, I won’t get to play this for at least another couple of days, so your tales of adventure could nourish me. Go forth!
12/09/2011 at 16:09 HexagonalBolts says:
Actually it was due for an official release a few days ago, and now that date has been moved to today, so hopefully we will see it soon! It seems to be very buggy though (for example, dieing and dropping ‘XP orbs’ will bring a multiplayer server to a grinding halt, now known as ‘the ballocaust’).
It has totally been worth the wait, the new cave formations and mountains are fantastic and there seems to be a lot more coming.
I wrote about it on the forum a couple days ago, if you want to keep the features a surprise then don’t read on!:
The cave systems and ravines are so cool. Upon starting I wondered over to an edge a few meters away to see a 100 block drop into a misty mine filled with spider cobweb and abandoned support struts. The new lighting system and mist in the caves are both really beautiful. Biomes are now more distinct and the geography seems to be much more varied and interesting. You now need to eat food to survive and when your hunger is satiated then you heal – I think it’s a great system. Certain kinds of animal seem to stick to certain areas (for example, there only ever seemed to be sheep in barren shrubland we made home in)
12/09/2011 at 16:14 Zelius says:
Unfortunately, the actual release today has been delayed. Jeb says they’re still fixing bugs and doesn’t know when they’ll be done.
Source: http://twitter.com/#!/jeb_/status/113218083346321408
12/09/2011 at 16:23 Dana says:
It will be done in two days. No more, no less. Trust me.
12/09/2011 at 16:26 DD says:
“the ballocaust” I dont think I have ever laughed so hard reading about bugs. Except maybe when reading about Dwarf Fortress…
12/09/2011 at 16:39 Eclipse says:
minecraft is possibly the most bugged game I ever saw, I mean, some bugs make really no sense. I remember a bug that happened only facing north, something like “staying over a sand block while facing north and doing action X causes the server to crash”. Or I remember something that involved doing a totally unrelated thing that made all the glass in the map disappear. Crazy shit, I bet the code is shaped like an horrible spaghetti monster with the most horrible hacks around to make everything work
12/09/2011 at 16:42 nootron says:
Haha. I laughed my ass off watching the Yogscast when Lewis died and Simon absorbed all his xp orbs and then compared it to the Quickening from Highlander.
12/09/2011 at 16:47 Urthman says:
minecraft is possibly the most bugged game I ever saw
You’ve been a beta tester for a lot of games, I take it? And this is the buggiest game you’ve ever tested?
12/09/2011 at 17:02 HexagonalBolts says:
The bugs aren’t all that bad, I think Dwarf Fortress is more of a mess. Some of Minecraft’s problems seem a bit thoughtless though – I mean, at what point was making the player drop thousands of tiny physics-enabled orbs upon death ever going to be a good idea and not crash the game?
12/09/2011 at 17:03 Gnoupi says:
@Eclipse – I take it that all future productions from moonloop will be 100% bug-free or refunded?
I don’t get that kind of criticism, especially if you’re in the profession as well. Bugs happen, especially if you don’t have dedicated QA and that you keep adding features during your beta.
12/09/2011 at 17:22 killerkerara says:
minecraft is possibly the most bugged game I ever saw
You haven’t lived until you’ve played Soldner.
12/09/2011 at 18:24 tossrStu says:
Soldner.
12/09/2011 at 18:29 LionsPhil says:
Soldner.
12/09/2011 at 18:51 Teddy Leach says:
Soldner.
12/09/2011 at 18:54 Mollusc Infestation says:
Just Cause 1?
12/09/2011 at 19:57 Hendar23 says:
I can’t speak for MP, but I’ve played SP for dozens of hours and never encountered a single bug. Not one.
12/09/2011 at 20:01 bluebogle says:
From what I understood of it, it wasn’t an official release date, just a suggested one. And for people saying it’s buggy, well duh, it’s still in beta. If there weren’t bugs to fix, it would be done.
12/09/2011 at 20:53 Mollusc Infestation says:
Beta status aside, Minecraft has a history of many and often long persisting bugs, especially in multiplayer… at least, that’s how it feels when you spend hundreds of hours playing it. I find it difficult to be objective at this point.
12/09/2011 at 21:00 Sivart13 says:
I mean, some bugs make really no sense.
Bugs that have to do with standing in a certain direction usually involve someone not testing their trigonometry functions in all four quadrants.
12/09/2011 at 21:13 frymaster says:
in this case I actually think it’s more likely to be a sim bug.
the blocks are processed in a certain order, which means there are some things, normally based on quirks, that literally won’t work rotated 90 degrees. What direction a minecart will choose to go when it encounters a T-junction is the non-obscure example that springs to mind
12/09/2011 at 21:47 steviesteveo says:
At this point playing with orientation is a bit of a feature. It’s very useful for a few things that the game works in the way it does.
Ultra impressive Minecraft hacking is pretty why YouTube is there at this point.
12/09/2011 at 16:12 westyfield says:
Come on, grab your friends!
12/09/2011 at 16:21 Insidious Rex says:
We’ll go to very distant lands
12/09/2011 at 16:28 DarkWolf says:
With John the dog and Adam the human
12/09/2011 at 17:01 Altemore says:
The fun will never end!
(Surely Horace would be a better Jake!)
12/09/2011 at 16:15 kuran says:
Its a bit buggy.. :( The additions have gotten me hyped though.. although I still wish there would be more than one coder at a time working on this. Given their budget and commercial success, we should have had many more additions to the game. In an ideal world, that is.
12/09/2011 at 16:40 MadTinkerer says:
That’s why it was a pre-release version. The latest tweets indicate that they’re working on fixing the bugs before the final proper 1.8 release.
Which is good, because on top of the game crashing bugs, NO SNOW ANYWHERE would suck.
12/09/2011 at 18:10 Sheng-ji says:
I think that pre release was set up to test certain aspects – he just devalued the probability of snow biomes to 0 because he wanted thet version to have tonnes of swamps, oceans and whatever that pine forest one will be called. It’s also why I think there are mines literally everywhere. I think release of 1.8 will be very different.
12/09/2011 at 19:44 HexagonalBolts says:
awww… but I love the mines…
12/09/2011 at 16:16 Heliocentric says:
I’m happy to wait for the real thing.
12/09/2011 at 20:40 Bfox says:
Yeah, I don’t fancy doing horrible beta testing for free for someone’s game who’s going to make loads of dosh off…
(Horrible as in endless crashing and bugs, not that the gameplay of Minecraft is bad.)
12/09/2011 at 22:09 psyk says:
Don’t report any bugs.
12/09/2011 at 16:17 JimFixIt says:
A Beta version of the beta then.
Looking forward to this I’ve been holding off playing Minecraft for ages waiting for this update. Now can I wait a bit longer for the official release?
12/09/2011 at 16:41 MadTinkerer says:
It was supposed to be released today, but evidently there have been more vitally important bugs found than they anticipated. But any day now we’ll have the mostly bug-free version.
12/09/2011 at 23:28 Mozai says:
It’s not beta, despite marketing putting “beta” on the end.
“alpha” is when it’s usable, but not everything is usable.
“beta” is when it’s got all the features that are supposed to be in the final.
“release candidate” is when you’re certain you won’t need to write any new code.
If the developers are saying things like “well, we haven’t put NPCs in yet, and we’re not sure what we’re going to do with the XP bar,” then it’s not feature-complete.
These aren’t marketing terms, they’re real technical terms that are being misused.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Stages_of_development
13/09/2011 at 01:13 MadTinkerer says:
Really, Mozai? And how do you define release terms for a product that is constantly and in perpetuity having new stuff added?
Minecraft is Beta as far as the original feature set that Notch was planning back when he was the only one working on it, and had no expectation of being able to pay others to work on it. 1.0 was exactly everything he had planned for 1.0.
12/09/2011 at 16:18 King Toko says:
Minecraft is geting better all the time but it be no where with out the modders. Everything geting added you could play months ago in mods.
12/09/2011 at 16:30 Askeladd says:
Then why don’t they make it open source and just improve on mod compatibility.
Its not the first time somebody complained about the speed of notch and his team.
12/09/2011 at 16:33 King Toko says:
I just hope the people with the ideas are geting the credit they deserve.
12/09/2011 at 17:15 wccrawford says:
If a mod crashes a game, people laugh and say it’s a mod.
If the game crashes itself, people get mad.
Plus, there are a LOT of modders out there, and only a few paid coders. They couldn’t possibly implement every idea people like, even if that was a good idea in the first place.
12/09/2011 at 16:30 fearian says:
I burnt myself out* on minecraft a long time ago having been playing since the indev days. I try every new release, but nothing has captured me like it used too.
1.8 has me, totally. It breathes new life into the game. If like me, you thought you where done with minecraft, give 1.8 a go.
That said, now that I’m addicted again, it has started crashing constantly on my pc and is unplayable. Oh cruel fate!
*After building a couple megastructures and then having to gen a new world, my heart isn’t in it for epic projects any more.
12/09/2011 at 16:40 TsunamiWombat says:
INB4 Notch gets the sniffles and takes a 6 week vacation, INB4 everyone complains about Notch not working on Minecraft. Witty nonsequiter, hipster comment about liking Minecraft before it was popular. Eat banana.
12/09/2011 at 17:42 FataMorganaPseudonym says:
I stopped reading at “INB4.”
12/09/2011 at 17:43 Lazaruso says:
That pretty much says it all.
12/09/2011 at 16:41 Kaira- says:
Are they still planning to release on 11/11/11 or slightly afterwards? Because if they are… they’ll have some serious crunch time ahead of them to crush most of those bugs that are already present in the game, not to speak of those that will undoubedtly appear after the official 1.8 release.
12/09/2011 at 16:49 MuscleHorse says:
I remember reading a tweet a while back saying they won’t be hitting that date anymore. Or did I?!? (I did)
12/09/2011 at 18:44 Hmm-Hmm. says:
Yeah, you did, MuscleHorse. Part of that was (I think) the announcement that they’d split the adventure update in two, the one probably being released this week being the first.
12/09/2011 at 16:41 King Toko says:
The main problems with the 1.8 update is that NPC villages are always nearly identical for example they have similiar layouts and they are ghost towns. Another problem is that Endermen are really weak and always seem to carry blocks for some reason. However ravines, rivers and giant mushrooms are cool.
12/09/2011 at 16:51 MuscleHorse says:
That’s their schtick. They come along and slowly unbuild your grand golden phalluses.
12/09/2011 at 17:22 Stupoider says:
Endermen are the natural solution to mob grinders, either you go out and smack some monsters or you’re forced to rebuild your mob grinder every few minutes.
12/09/2011 at 17:40 nemryn says:
I believe the proper term is ‘phalloi’.
12/09/2011 at 16:42 dangerousforays says:
I definitely burnt out on Minecraft (it didn’t help that it kept fatally crashing my computer), and never really wanted ‘adventure’ other than of my own making (I’d rather they have spent a month adding in a dozen new building materials than this).
But I don’t think the Mojang team is stupid. This ‘leak’ feels too well timed. PAX Prime has gone by, fans are all charged up about 1.8, but they still have bugs to work out and a sloppy release would hurt their reputation. What better move than to release a [buggy] unofficial beta version of beta 1.8? Mojang gets to keep working on the ‘real’ version, fans get excited (see: OP) about having a somewhat illicit privilege to play early, and then Mojang gets even more free bug testing. It’s win-win-win.
That said, I’ll be playing League of Legends, Dragon Age 2, and waiting for the Firefall beta!
Edit: well, apparently I’m right: it was ‘leaked’ from the top. Starting to scratch my head about Mojang’s development workflow (is this a buggy prerelease within a buggy prerelease?), but apparently the fans are okay with it, so what can I say?
12/09/2011 at 21:22 Urthman says:
Why should Mojang hire bugtesters and QA when 2 million people are willing to pay to do it?
Only drawback: they whine A LOT more than a paid QA department
12/09/2011 at 21:43 grundus says:
No, they whine the same amount, it’s just that there’s way more of them. MATHS
12/09/2011 at 23:50 LionsPhil says:
Well in theory a professional tester will give you a reproducible bug report, whereas the Internet will just scream “IT’S BROOOOOKEN”
12/09/2011 at 16:50 Mollusc Infestation says:
I’m reluctant to enjoy 1.8 too much, as it’s my understanding that 1.9 will require a freshly generated map in order to have all the newest and shiniest of features. From my cautious explorations though, i’m loving the new biome code.
12/09/2011 at 16:52 MuscleHorse says:
I’m waiting on the texture packs to catch up because I’m a shallow and awful person. My brief foray into the world of 1.8 seems promising however.
12/09/2011 at 16:56 Bobby Oxygen says:
>”Play the game, and find bugs and report them. It’s like a job that’s fun.”
I’m guessing you’ve never worked as a game tester. It really isn’t much fun.
12/09/2011 at 17:54 Torgen says:
It isn’t so bad when you set your own hours and have no benchmarks to meet.
12/09/2011 at 21:57 steviesteveo says:
Yeah, being a tester would be totally fine if you only had to test something you were going to use anyway and you just had to test it by doing what you going to do anyway when you were going to do it.
Turns out that’s not what the job involves.
12/09/2011 at 17:00 Moonracer says:
Been playing this most of the weekend. It is quite impresive how much has changed. Here are some entertaining bug/features of 1.8 pre-release:
-Mineshafts pretty much consume the majority of underground constructions (they are seriously more common than caves most of the time). Not only that but they seem to be generated last, so they cut through and uglify caves, ravines and most importantly Strongholds.
-There is only One Stronghold per map. And sometimes they are completely underground (no sings of them on surface). Making it a real chore to find. Strongholds do look pretty cool.
-Vines are a nice aesthetic touch to swamp biomes, but they spread so quickly that they can and will consume a world. Especially on a persistent server world.
-World gen is vastly improved and the landscape looks amazing. Plus some biomes seem to be missing, so it will look even better when the proper 1.8 comes out.
-only real game breaking bug is that using a furnace can sometimes crash the game.
12/09/2011 at 17:02 Moonracer says:
Also, if you want to check out a Stronghold create a world with
seed: “Volcano” and go to coordinates
X:-840
Y:33
Z:131
12/09/2011 at 18:05 slingshot says:
Wow, thanks for that Stronghold location. That could be a whole adventure right there. Now I just have to find one in Survival mode.
12/09/2011 at 18:23 pmuschi says:
I created an account just to thank you for this. Wow!
13/09/2011 at 03:35 Moonracer says:
Here’s a much better Stronghold seed/location:
Seed: 404
X: 100
Z: -580
This one is practically intact and not riddled with mineshafts. Much nicer to explore.
12/09/2011 at 17:06 Stuart Walton says:
I hope 1.8PR has kept account of my XP and level because I’ve been playing it a lot and haven’t died, but the skill tree isn’t yet there. When I do die there’s going to be a massive ballsplosion.
Loving the swamp biome, really needs some crocs or gators to feel right.
12/09/2011 at 18:07 AtkinsSJ says:
And possibly Gaiters
13/09/2011 at 09:17 pblackburn says:
and Crocks.
12/09/2011 at 17:07 Prime says:
The new lighting is cool, if you’re the type who’s impressed by that (as I am). but so far the world I’ve started in seems to have hidden most of it’s resource wealth well away from me. The new Biomes are fantastic but it’s proving a lot harder to find minerals, even coal. I’m hoping this isn’t a result of the new Biome code otherwise mining just got a whole lot more difficult.
Still, early days and I’m having a blast with it. :)
12/09/2011 at 22:14 psyk says:
Put wood in the furnace and it produces charcoal that can be used instead of coal.
12/09/2011 at 17:19 Brise Bonbons says:
The new Biome code is great – I love the larger scale of everything. It will make building to suit the landscape (for example, hilltop cities) much easier, as well as just being more epic to explore.
The food system is not offensive, but nor do I find it especially exciting. As it is right now it feels like there is a ton of food but you need to eat so often it’s a chore.
I really like all the new combat systems. /thumbsup
I like the Endermen, but I don’t find them especially scary. They just seem like benign dudes working in the abandoned mineshafts that I avoid making eye contact with. Sort of like homeless people in a large city.
The abandoned mineshafts themselves need a lot of work. I find they’re too poorly integrated right now to really feel good. They just seem randomly thrown in, and they make it less fun to explore cavern systems. Spider poison is also a huge irritant. I find myself wishing they were spookier and more special; i.e. they could be more rare and be absolutely lousy with gold and iron ore, haunted, etc.
I think 1.8 seems like a solid move in the right direction, but it’s so bare bones that I’m just left waiting for 1.9 and the “real” update.
Ah well, there are plenty of other games to play until then.
12/09/2011 at 17:53 RagingLion says:
I hear those Silverfish can get a bit overwhelming.
12/09/2011 at 17:53 Teddy Leach says:
You sillies, it doesn’t suddenly run like crap now. It’s been running like crap for ages.
12/09/2011 at 18:26 Prime says:
Whatyoutalkinaboutwillis?
Run like crap? Not a bit of it. Runs like a dream on my machine.
12/09/2011 at 20:18 TheGameSquid says:
Not sure if Ted is joking, but there is truth to what he is saying. It doesn’t run like crap on modern machines, but because it’s a game written completely in Java, it does needlessly consume resources. I think it’s going to surprise a lot of people with Low-to Mid-End systems. It requires a lot more horsepower than you might expect, and it’s the type of game where you really do need to have the draw distance maxed out.
12/09/2011 at 21:57 grundus says:
My rig will play some pretty resource-intensive games at almost full settings (GTA IV and Arma II being two that I can’t max out, but with A2, who can?), yet I can’t play Minecraft with the rendering distance on far and get above 30fps. Well, no, I can, but when it draws blocks and creates new chunks, it kills the frame rate dead.
Maybe it’s because I’m using the MAC VERSION (gasps)
12/09/2011 at 22:17 psyk says:
Download optifine, works like a dream even on my crappy machine.
13/09/2011 at 16:19 Dozer says:
Run like a dream, you say? The kind of dream where you try to run somewhere but can’t because IRL your legs are tangled with the duvet and you feel like you’re wading through a bog?
12/09/2011 at 18:42 MythArcana says:
Wait. Play the game, find bugs and report them? Isn’t that what we’ve been doing for over 2 years now? I’ll wait for the final version before I dive into this…sometime in 2018 when it’s done.
12/09/2011 at 22:22 torchedEARTH says:
▼ ▼
11.11.11