14 DAY TRIAL // Minecraft, a sandbox-building video game written in Java by Swedish creator Markus Persson (now owned by his company, Mojang), has received a major update with numerous new additions and tweaks.
As the developers themselves put it, “Minecraft is a game about placing blocks to build anything you can imagine. At night monsters come out, make sure to build a shelter before that happens,” reads the description.
Fans of the sandbox-building game will rejoice at the sound of new additions in version 1.2, such as a new jungle biome, added ocelots, cats and iron golems, new AI for mobs, added rare drops for mobs, new items and blocks, and a new map height limit (now at 256).
Tame wolves can now have puppies, and villagers will have children if there is room in their village. Even the doors have been updated so that double-doors work better with redstone. Many other minor tweaks and fixes have been implemented as well, including the removal of Herobrine.
The gameplay in Minecraft is heavily inspired by Infiniminer by Zachtronics Industries and Dwarf Fortress, by Bay 12 Games.
A player has a lot of freedom to choose how to act, but the primary goals are surviving attacks by monsters (known in-game as "hostile mobs") and building shelters.
The core gameplay revolves around construction. Everything is essentially made of cubes arranged in a fixed grid pattern. Players use different materials, such as dirt, stone, tree trunks, even water, and various ores.
Objects and items can only be placed at fixed locations relative to the grid, but the player can travel anywhere he / she desires.
Minecraft is a Universal Binary that works on both Intel and PowerPC processors.