14 DAY TRIAL // Mojang has announced that the first snapshot of Minecraft 1.8 has arrived, and OS X gamers can immediately download the .jar file and take it for a spin.
According to the developers, Minecraft Snapshot 14w02a has two primary focuses, one being survival gameplay & improvements, the other dealing with some new abilities for adventure maps.
“We’ve done a whole bunch of optimizing for both the client and server (with more to come!) and lots more work towards the Plugin API in the background. As this is the very first snapshot of 1.8, do remember to backup your worlds before trying it!” says Mojang.
Changes regarding survival gameplay include three new stone types, some pretty big Enchanting & Repairing tweaks, mossy stone bricks recipe, updated Villager trading, doors stack, slime blocks, and more.
Adventure Map changes feature a prevention for placing or destroying blocks (something that the team admits can change in the future), Entity Selectors, a /blockdata command, “Lock” (String) NBT tag on most containers, and other cool stuff.
Visit Mojang’s site to download Minecraft 1.8 snapshot #1 (Minecraft Snapshot 14w02a) on your Mac and enjoy!
As usual, players must open their launcher and press the “New Profile” button to get the snapshot. Users must also check the box that says “Enable experimental development snapshots” and hit save.
Switching back to the normal version is done from the drop-down menu at the bottom of the launcher.
Don’t get your hopes up for Minecraft 1.8 Final to arrive anytime soon. History has shown that Mojang is very diligent in developing public builds, so expect a few more betas to be announced before the stable build gets rolled out. Speaking of which, you can always download Minecraft from Softpedia.