Minecraft 1.1: The Beginning of Awesome

Notch has been teasing all of his fans since shortly after the release of full fledged Minecraft. He’s promised more things to come and has delivered. Minecraft 1.1 launched Jan. 12, which means that I had to do some…research. Between patch notes, the minecraft wiki (the only wiki I will ever cite) and Notch/Mojang’s own statements, there is plenty to chew on.

The Good

Apples! Yay! Notch finally put apples into trees! Now, every 1:200 breaks (this data can be found on the wiki, and two hours of me punching trees for verification) of oak leaves will drop a red apple. Now, red apples are still basically useless – for all that work you only get two bars of hunger added – but the awesome new golden apple recipe makes all that work worth it.

As soon as the server I use is done with maintenance, I will have to go through and fix my sheep farm. What I normally do is corral them, breed them, sheer the parents, then kill the parents for miniscule experience right in front of the children as a warning of what will happen if they don’t yield enough wool. Once they are sheered, they are useful as nothing more than breeders, and too many sheep will cause de-spawning on SMP(survival multiplayer). I like pretty buildings, so I made my sheep an elaborate rug to walk on.

Now I have to go break my elaborate rug. Sheep will now eat grass to get new wool! Grass will also continue to regrow as it has, so that makes sheep way more useful than they used to be for me. No more senseless slaughter perverting the minds of young sheepies. The little ones will now grow up in a full, fluffy home with their parents.

The sites all list “general bug fixes,” and that bows have been changed. As far as the bug fixes go, the only one I have noticed so far is that my sprint now works a lot better. Bows have a much larger arc on them, and a magical thing called gravity actually affects the arrow in a realistic way. They have also removed the bumper blocks from ladders and gates(that annoying invisible force field at the top and bottom of each that just told you no, you shall not pass), and ladders do still hold back liquids, though I have yet to find real use for that feature.

The last of the major updates come with a pretty bow wrapped around them. Notch and Mojang decided to do as we all asked, and give us some of the things we wanted. There were 56 languages in total added – pirate is now my personal choice – that cover just about anything I can think of, and forcing me to look up several therein.

The Bad

They went and added a new world option, “super flat.” Now, though that sounds like it would be amazing for creative made – and it is, don’t get me wrong – you have no choice but to exist on peaceful mode only. You can choose to use the spawning levels of difficulty, but the amount of slimes is simply ludicrous. They never end, seeing as the spawning algorithms are now thrown off thanks to the whole of the world being flat. At first, I found this to be an entertaining feature, then I really just wanted to put TNT everywhere and destroy them all. Turns out, the world is only five layers thick, four layers being dirt. So my explosion reduced a huge chuck to bedrock, which still had more slimes spawning on it. The only benefit I can see to this is a change to the algorithms that control slime spawning. Hopefully these changes will lead to more common spawns, but I don’t intend to hold my breath on that one.

Spawning eggs were added as well, which I guess is cool? There were 20 eggs added that allow you to throw them just like chicken eggs (in creative mode only). The issue? I know for a fact some people on my server will be throwing creeper spawning eggs at me while I am building as a joke. Though this will be funny the first time, but I foresee another Minecraft Internet meme coming.

The Ugly

You guys all thought I was going to tell you something ugly was put into this, and you were wrong. This update fixed the ugly!

Biomes have been made to actually fade into each other. The smoothness this gives the world is actually rather nice to look at. They updated some of the things inside of the biomes(IE, snow and ice rather than just one or the other in snowy forests{also called ‘tiaga’ biomes}.) The greatest part of the “make Minecraft pretty” campaign can best be described by Blake Shelton: “Some beach, somewhere.” In an effort to make worlds more realistic, natural beaches and shorelines are present intentionally, rather than the spontaneous ones, leading to a better looking and more natural feel.

All in all, this is an awesome update for the Minecraft community. Now I am just hoping that they will dedicate time to some other things we all have requested(*cough cough * puppies and villager AI * cough cough *)


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