Well it has only been a little over a month since the official release of the 1.7.4 Minecraft update and already Mojang have shown great interest in pushing on forwards in the development of 1.8. This time we are seeing the enchanting system and villager functions getting a well needed makeover, the addition of a few new blocks, and big changes to improve the adventure gamemode.
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First of all, Mojang have introduced three new stone types! Granite, Andesite and Diorite! All three can be found in their natural state in newly generated chunks in 1.8, and quite easily! I loaded up a single player world seed and found them in great abundance in caves, on the surface, and often two or three of the types in the same place as illustrated in the screenshot. The raw stone can be placed in a crafting table in a 2x2 grid as illustrated to create the polished type as illustrated.
For those folks on servers that have reset for the giant 1.7.4 biome shake-up, there is good news! These new stone types can also be crafted from already available resources so get mining! Those double chests full of cobblestone will be handy! Combine two quartz pieces with two cobblestone to create Diorite, Diorite with cobblestone to create Andesite, and Diorite with quartz to create Granite! Hooray! New blocks being added to the game always brings about new and interesting block combinations for building, and perhaps we will see these stone types in slab, brick and stair form in the future. Mojang in their wisdom have also introduced some lovely new crafting recipes for blocks somewhat rare to the survival worlds out there.
Chiseled stone bricks have only been attainable through raiding of jungle temples, and mossy stone bricks through the raiding of end portal strongholds.... UNTIL NOW! Two stone brick slabs combined together in a crafting table now creates the chiseled stone brick, and a stone brick combined with a vine creates mossy stone brick! This continues to throw more tools into the survival builder’s arsenal for the creation of our masterpieces!
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Another interesting block has been added to the game as well. Nine slime balls arranged in a crafting bench creates the new Slime Block! This block has some pretty interesting properties, allowing for many crazy and ingenious uses in the future I am sure. Firstly, when landed upon from any and all heights, it negates all fall damage and provides a trampoline-like bounce. Unfortunately it does not apply to items, but does apply to all kinds of friendly and hostile mobs, as well as players. If a player or mob walks across them though it decreases movement speed dramatically, similarly but more slowly than soul sand.
There seems to be a bug at present where moving from soul sand onto slime blocks causes you to vibrate but I’m sure that will be polished before official release. These blocks also act quite differently to any other in their structure. They are translucent and therefore let light through them like glass but do not obey the non-solid block rules, so torches and carpets are able to be placed upon them. Placing them on grass will not destroy the grass, and grass will spread beneath them!
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All baby versions of the friendly mob types have also been slightly modified to be able to grow up faster similarly to how horses work. In the current snapshot you need to spam the item required to breed the animal type on the baby you wish to grow and you will get the same green sparkly effects that bonemealing plants produces. Eventually the animal will change instantly rather than the usual 20 minute maturing time. Game difficulty is now stored within each created world rather than on a character and can be permanently locked in case of accidental changes wiping out customised hostile mobs from your single player worlds. A slight nerf to the automation of mob farming has been implemented as well with zombie pigman and iron golems no longer dropping their gold nuggets or iron ingots unless they are killed directly by players. Mob softeners can be used but that at least still requires the presence of a player to do the deed!
The first of the big reworking has been done to the villager NPCs. Unfortunately when a villager is now struck by lightning they will turn into a witch much in the same way as a pig turns into a zombie pigman. Previously players have endlessly complained about the rip off trades some of the villagers offered and Mojang have decided to address this, generally making the trading a little less crazy in some instances though more specialised in others. Instead of the 5 villager types we know in 1.7.4 (farmer, librarian, butcher, blacksmith and priest), they have been further broken down into 11 new, more specialised occupations - Librarian, Cleric, Butcher, Leatherworker, Armorer, Toolsmith, Weaponsmith, Fisherman, Farmer, Fletcher and Shepherd.
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This split has allowed the addition of more trades such as rotten flesh (FINALLY A USE!!), redstone, lapis, different enchanted books, tools, weapons and armor, and raw materials such as colored wool. The first few trades I saw seemed to be pretty basic and generic with no overly powerful trades, so Mojang may have put in place a tiered trading system where the better trades are further into each villager. Have you already got yourself perfect trading villagers and sad about losing them? Worry not! Villagers currently spawned in previous versions of the game will keep their trades the way they are, but any new ones introduced by breeding or discovering fresh villages will be split up as described above.
Better get moving with that infinite villager breeder then huh? NOPE! Mojang have also reworked the way villagers breed! Throwing a few villagers into a room with a heap of doors no longer works. Now you have to provide the flowers, and chocolates, take them to a nice movie, play them some Barry White by candlelight... so much effort right guys? Seriously though.... villagers now have a "willing to breed" tag in their coding that requires enabling as well as the necessary door/village setup from 1.7.4 for them to reproduce. This tag can be enabled in two ways, both of them by trading. On a villagers first use of a trade there is a 100% chance of enabling the "willing to breed" tag, and a 20% chance on each trade there-after. This will consequently break every infinite villager breeder contraption but will also stop villages repopulating themselves in the wilderness, so we will have to see what solution Mojang has for that! Unfortunately, this is also complicated by the aforementioned witch transformation.
The other big area the Minecraft team has been working hard on is the enchanting system. The experience gain scale has been increased so that getting to level 30 now will take a little more effort, but level 30 allows you more enchants. A currency is now required to apply those enchants though with Lapis finally slotting into an important role in the resource scale (other than blue dye and a pretty decorative block). When you visit your enchanting table in 1.8 you will see there is a slot for Lapis as payment for the enchantment, but the rest looks pretty similar. The table will display three levels of enchants as usual but they will be greyed out until the Lapis payment is inserted into its slot. You will also notice a preview of ONE of the enchantments that WILL be applied to the item you are enchanting. This cannot be cycled out until an enchantment is made. In the instance of my screenshot I will receive Smite 4, but also was lucky enough to get Knockback 2 as well.
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If you do not like the enchantment you will be getting, you may apply an enchantment to another type of item (eg. axe, bow, shovel, etc) and the enchantments will reset. Also see that only 3 levels have been consumed during the enchanting process on a level 30 enchant. The number on the right hand side is the level you are required to have to access the enchantment. The number on the left is the actual cost in levels and lapis. Renaming an item is far cheaper as well. As pictured you will see I created one of the most expensive, more unrepairable swords in survival Minecraft and was able to rename it for only 6 levels of experience rather than 30. I have not experimented with repairing costs but they are just as astonishingly cheap and I will include a link to a YouTube video demonstrating. (note: the video is the property of Youtube user docm77, and not the property of myself or Crafthub and remains the property of the creator.)
The Adventure game mode has had a makeover as well with a heap of changes taking place. All block types are now unbreakable and cannot be placed by default, and the CanDestroy tag can be added to items so certain tools can be programmed to break certain types of blocks only. The @E selector has been added to many commands as well enabling the targeting of entities in general, or certain entity types by commands rather like the @A selector is used for players. This means controlling entities is much easier and more flexible for administrators, adventure mode mapmakers etc. as you are able to target problem mobs in an area. /Blockdata commands have been added as well allowing the modification of adventure mode chests or any other block that contains "data". For example when the command is triggered, an empty chest may then filled with food, a key, a pick or whatever is required. The "lock" tag has also been added to this function so containers can be "locked" until a player has an item with a certain name, or a certain trigger has occurred.
It has also added the ability for the @ commands to target certain cubic areas of a map rather than specific blocks. This allows for the ability to manipulate entities or players within certain areas not specifically based around the radius of the player or command block. The /tp command can now be modified for a players rotation, meaning they will face a specific direction when they arrive at their destination. The /Fill command has been added, and I bet you can guess what it does! This allows a certain cubic area to be filled with any type of Minecraft block. Simple. Easy to understand. Useful! Well done!
Currently there is a cap of 4096 blocks that can be modified with one command but this may be a modifiable number or may have the cap removed completely once any bugs with the command have been ironed out. The /Clone command has also been added and it does what you think it does! It takes the blocks in the area specified, copies them and places the clone where the command tells it. The addition of these WorldEdit style of commands will make modification of worlds much more user friendly and in the future I would imagine, eliminate the need for some of those kind of plugins altogether.
Last of all there have been some changes to the skin system! A new menu under the options tab will be put in place to enable / disable customisable skin layers to a player’s skin. Both arms, legs, cape, chest and head will have an independent layer each that can be turned on or off in game, allowing for on the fly changing between layers of skin! This is a screenshot from the Mojang website itself!
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- Pantzz
