Weekly Snapshot 12w19a

I took a look at the Minecraft Wiki and it turns out cookies now feed you 2 points, meaning it fills now exactly one . This is twice as much as they did before.

A bug I didn't mention before is that cocoa plants have a light level of 2, so they basically glow in the dark. Pretty useful when looking for them, but I think this isn't supposed to be...

That's about all for important news...

-ThOR

Weekly Snapshot 12w19a

So, another new snapshot.

The End and the Nether are fixed again, you can go and visit them now in the snapshots and seeing that they are generalted again, enchanting and repairing items works again and they added cocoa plants to jungle biomes.

These cocoa plants grow on the huge jungle trees (looking like evil parasite eggs), growing through 3 stages (green > yellow > orange) after which they can be harvested for 3 cocoa beans.
You can plant them yourself by right clicking on the jungle tree with cocoa beans in hand.

There is a small bug with it. When you are in creative mode and use the "Pick Block" function on them you get a strange texture which you can use to place cocoa plants almost everywhere. These will pop off (giving you cocoa beans) once something close by updates, but if left alone they will grow.
These plants are considered blocks, so you can stand on them and your way may be blocked by them (when in a treehouse (that you made yourself, they don't generate)).

More changes are a new "Large biomes" world type, torches that spawn around bonus chests, changed cocoa beans textures and specific names for the different sandstone and smooth stone blocks.

Official change log can be found on the Mojang website.
As always you can try the new feature out yourself by downloading the client (with listen server) and the (dedicated) server.

Still watching for new stuff to pop up,

-ThOR

New Minecraft Mechanic

In the latest Snapshot we all see a new step the Mojang team has taken for improving Minecraft. What the Bukkit team talked about when being hired now actually is making its way into Minecraft.

What am I talking about?
The separation of Server and Client logic.
This is important, as now the server and client often miscommunicate and double check each other for no real reason. This results in client side ghosts, lag in general, chunk errors, etc.
What is being done about it?
Well, they (Team Mojang) are actively dumbing down the client so it only is a graphical filter between the server and the player. The server will do all the calculation, while the client only shows what the server tells it to show.

Let me sketch very roughly how the client-serve communication currently works:
The server and the client both have certain chunks loaded and constantly cross check these with each other. When a player destroys a block this info will be uploaded to the server and this will send it out to other clients that some player destroyed some block.
In general this should work pretty fine, but it sometimes doesn't, because the info of those chunks exists both in server and client form.
A player destroys a block, the client immediately deletes it from the chunk (Why? Because it can...). While the info of that chunk is being send to the server the client may receive the previous chunk information from the server, saying no block has been destroyed, so the block reappears in the client. Then the servers receives the updated information, deletes the block and sends this back to the client.
On a fast server this may be hardly noticeable, but with a bit of lag this may result in many blocks reappearing and then disappearing (especially if the server works with a "list of forbidden blocks" to which each update must be compared to).

To solve this Mojang is making the client accept ONLY the info from the server as true. So the player destroys a block, this info is sent to the server and only if the server send a comnfirmation back the client will show the block as deleted.
This will decrease the number of times the server has to process conflicting information, the client will become faster as it only has to do quite basic calculations.

This change will also lead to a change in the way modding works. Currently mods for multiplayer and singleplayer are developed separately. If for example someone makes a mod for singleplayer he'll have to rework it a bit to make it also work in multiplayer. If some people even want specific API support (Bukkit, Spout, ...) for those mods you'd end up making 4 separate versions.
With the new version (and API) this will become a lot easier. Mods won't break when a new update comes out (unless the thing that's being modded gets changed by Mojang), and the one version will both work for single and multiplayer.

I just saw a new Snapshot has bee released, let me take a look at it...

-ThOR

Quick update: Cocoa plants

A small post: Cocoa plants will be included in the next snapshot!

That's all for now, thursday the snapshot will be fully released.
Till  then,

-ThOR

Weekly Snapshot 12w18a

This snapshot is highly experimental and actually shows a work in process. The biggest change is not in the actual gameplay, but more in the way the game works. More on this will be in an upcoming post.


Texture packs can be recommended and downloaded from a server upon joining. This addition will ask if you want to download the textures or not, you're not forced to use it. This is useful for servers with builds that rely on certain texture packs, but it won't stop people using x-ray texture packs.

Small changes are that cocoa beans can be found in jungle tree leaves (like apples in oak leaves), wooden tools can be burned in a furnace, Hardcore mode is available in multiplayer (you get banned upon death), tools of the same kind are switchable in the inventory (you know what I'm talking about), the Mojang logo appears shorter, and silk touch and block picking have been perfected.

Small changes have also been made to the F3 screen, as coordinates are now rounded and ws (walking speed), fs (flying speed) and g (ground, true when touching the ground) have been added.

Knowing they made a first step to a new Minecraft system there are bound to be bugs everywhere, that's what I meant when I said this snapshot is experimental.
For example: enchanting doens't work, the End and the Nether are empty when entering, movement is stuttering, many sounds stopped working or have a delay when playing, Minecraft doesn't shut down local servers when encountering a fatal bug, many visual effects are missing, bonus chests don't work, creative mode has to be re-enabled when opening ANY world...
So be careful when installing this and backup any worlds before entering them.

For a list of ALL the stuff that has been added/changed/bugged you can always check the wiki.

Since there aren't many fatal bugs around there won't be a "b" release of this snapshot.
If anyone wants to try it out: client and server are up for download as always, but beware when installing your client. You get both the client as the server .jars, where minecraft.jar goes into .minecraft/bin (as usual) and minecraf_server.jar goes into a new folder you have to create (.minecraft/server)

I don't know how you like the current Snapshot reporting, I'm trying this out for now. If you want me to post lists again (as before) you can contact me in our forums.

-TheOtherRetard, being quite thrilled with these new developments.

Hi there,

On this blog I'll post any Minecraft news from the moment I have it finished. that same news will be condensed and updated to the Weekly Pickaxe at the end of the week.

That's all for now... I'll post tha latest Minecraft snapshot article to fill the page.

-ThOR