Rock, Paper, Shotgun

While we slept off traditionally fatal turkey venoms or, you know, did non-festive things, Mojang took over Disneyland this weekend. No, no, Notch and co didn’t buy Disney (yet; that won’t happen for another couple years, at least), but they did host MineCon at Disneyland Paris. And though I imagine there was plenty of magic and childlike wonderment involved, they did – at certain points throughout the show – put on their business Mickey Mouse hats. Shockingly, Minecraft got the bulk of the attention during those rare instances, and 1.5 – now dubbed The Redstone Update – was the main attraction.

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I had a choice of headlines for this – perhaps that Minecraft has become the ninth best-selling PC game of all time, that it has now shifted over 8 million paid copies in total or that Notch heralded that last with the cryptic phrase 69I960EHE0A4A0IVG0EHE02500R4R0G1T30PLJ00V6V0EHE0V1U01V10U5U0VGV0V4R. But I think you’ll agree, Minecraft outselling The Sims 2: Pets is the news we’re really here for.
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Block by block, like an insidious cubist curse, Minecraft is taking over the gaming world. World of Warcraft was the most recent game to suffer assimilation, in a frightening 1-1 recreation. Usually this sort of labour of love is made by the fans, but Ubisoft are cutting out the post-launch months of people on forums suggesting that someone does it. They’ve hired Far Cry 3 Minecraft modder Michael Lambert to build it for them, creating a free map and texture pack that will be out before the game it’s based on.
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This is basically staggering. Have you ever considered building a ship in a bottle? Well, this is sort of like that – except someone essentially decided to build a bottle around a full-sized war galleon. In short, this is all of  World of Warcraft‘s Azeroth (read: no Outland, Northrend, or Pandaria… yet) recreated to 1:1 scale in another slightly popular game that prominently features “craft” in its title. Apparently, that herculean construction effort necessitated 68 billion blocks. And yet, one person managed it all by their lonesome. But how?

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If I’m being honest, my favorite part of Minecraft isn’t the mining or the crafting or the building or the rampant chicken-punching. Instead, my truest joy is simply wandering around an ever-expanding world, taking in the often awe-inspiring sights and sounds of blocky nature. One day, I will venture to New Zealand and go on a trek for the ages. Until then, I have Minecraft. But after a while, even those procedurally generated delights start to lose their luster. Enter the brand new “Biomes O’ Plenty” mod. It adds just about every geographic configuration you could possibly imagine – short of outer space and the inside of David Bowie’s mind. Details after the break.

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Well, I suppose it’s not really secret anymore, since today we learn via Mr Hogarty, who is some kind of Minecraft community sentinel these days, that the current version of Minecraft contains a new super-tough mob, the Wither. It seems that the thread-headed aberration, which is super tough and fires bolts which can destroy blocks and “wither” you, is locked up in the code pending a forthcoming version of the game. Needless to say, enterprising Minecraftians have figured out how to spawn it in the game, so you can see it below. The video also summarises a bunch of other stuff from forthcoming Minecraft features like, uh, potplants.
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