Saturday, November 19, 2011

Minecraft! 1.0! (.0!)

Yesterday, 18 November 2011, the full version of Minecraft came out. That means we are no longer in the beta stage. At MineCon Notch flipped the ceremonial lever which hailed the exit from beta and into full release. After two years Minecraft has developed from an independent project to a full scale game written by his company.

I don't usually write much about the latest news and updates; you likely have read about those already. However this is clearly a milestone for Minecraft.

About an hour after I got out of work I updated my 1.7.3 to see what would come out. To my surprise it only went up to 1.8.1, even though there were something like 6 pre-releases of 1.9 and two release candidates. Instead of waiting and worrying about it I began doing some homework, checking in on the QubeTubers stream for entertainment and to see if it's been updated. Once I finished my work and saw people clamoring about the update I tried again and landed in 1.0.0!

One of the things I wanted to try first was the End. I had seen an episode of the Yogscast where Simon and Lewis (the two stars of the show) went to the End with Knight Peculier, one of the supporting characters. They proceeded to spend ten minutes trying to slay the Enderdragon, even switching to Creative mode. It's clearly that difficult.

I pulled the Eye of Ender from the item selection menu and started throwing it around it. It took five or so minutes but eventually I landed at a Stronghold. Being in Creative mode I dug down and encountered the End Portal. I placed more Eyes of Ender where they were needed and the portal came to life. It had a black, starry, void-like look to it. I jumped in and entered the End.

Dark. So dark. I got in there and there was no life until I switched to Easy. Then came the Endermen and the Enderdragon. I spent the next ten minutes trying my hand at long distance archery, shooting at the dragon and the Ender crystals healing it. My aim was pretty bad and although I did inflict pretty decent damage, the battle took longer than I really wanted to. So I gave up on the dragon and started playing with the Endermen! It was rather amusing getting them mad then making them chase me and fall off the small patch of land. I did other things and, via Nether portals, returned to the Overworld.

For right now, I'm not going to do much with 1.0.0. I like mods like SPC, Millenaire, and Wireless Redstone. It will take a few days for those to catch up so I will likely revert to 1.7.3 if I do any major activity. This also puts into question the future of the maps I currently have now. What will the possible block and ID conflicts mean for those mods? Surely I can save most of them but especially for Millenaire and MineColony, both of which having brought so much life into the game, will I have to restart my map again to get them to work?