Minecraft 1.8 snapshot releases this January

Minecraft developer Jens Bergensten, more commonly known as ‘Jeb’ has tweeted that snapshots for Minecraft 1.8 will begin this January.

The change log lists changes to the enchantment system and rebalancing of anvils to conform with the new enchanting system. Enchanting has a separate XP level requirement and gold resource requirement. Levels as a whole are harder to obtain, slowing the rapid progression of other versions. Several new blocks have been added including raw and smooth granite, more stone variants and a bouncy block resembling a slime. I could imagine the bouncy blocks being used for some interesting obstacle maps.

Some of the smaller changes include locking difficulty, which I think is awesome because I’m always tempted as a player to change difficulty to peaceful when I’m in a bad spot playing on hard, but I don’t want to lose my save potentially playing on hardcore, so this is definitely a welcome change. Doors can now be stacked to 64 and the crafting recipe now yields three doors instead of one. The hit boxes in adventure mode are only visible on blocks that can be interacted with, which makes it less intrusive and lets you know how far you can reach certain blocks with a pickaxe for example.

Overall, its not the biggest or most exciting update, but its certainly another step to ironing out some of the tedium with item management and pacing levelling better with the length of the game. The official release of 1.8 is not known at this time.  

Last Updated: January 7, 2014