Category: Minecraft

A few things about the new snapshot – upside down stairs and a new mob called the Iron Golem. The video above calls it the “Defensive Villager Mob” which while correct is just called the Iron Golem. In addition to them naturally protecting the villagers, the golem can be crafted with 4 iron blocks in a T shape with a pumpkin on top. As shown below:

Jens has hinted at a project over at Mojang calling it “Anvil” and it’s a new format for minecraft maps.

Some of the major changes are:

• Maximum build height has been increased to 256 (was 128)
• Empty sections of the world are not loaded into memory
• Block ids have been increased to 4096 (was 256) by adding a 4 bit data layer (similar to how meta data is stored)
• Block ordering have been changed from x/z/y to y/z/x in order to improve compression
• Packets for sending chunks have been updated (a full 128-high chunk is smaller than the old format, and a chunk with lots of empty space is much smaller)
• Biomes are saved per x/z column, which means they can be altered by tools

The next snapshot, and Minecraft 1.2, will automatically convert worlds to the new format. The files of the current format (“McRegion”) will remain in your save folder, if you need to restore them for some reason. Check out the full Mojang blog post here.

Some of the changes made are:

• Bow Enchantments
• Golden Apple recipe
• New language translations.
• Slightly smoothed color transitions between biomes
• Reduced brewing time to 20 seconds
• Added spawn eggs to creative (the colors of the eggs even look like the mobs)
• Added world type options (currently only super-flat and default)
• Removed collision box from ladders
• Sheep eat grass and regain their wool
• Plus many bug fixes!

For more changes check out this Reddit thread. Also, the JOB Minecraft server will be updated this evening around 7pm Central Time (US).