The Adventure Update is upon us, and it’s awesome and huge. So huge, you might need someone to help you find out what you need to know about it.
Find out about all the new features 1.8 brought, learn some useful tips, and just see pretty pictures. Please note that most of you hardcore Minecraft fans out there know this already. However, this article is for miners that don’t want to have to search various sites or wikis to find all the information, but it’s all here in a central location that goes into more detail than the changelog. Let’s begin.
New Biome Generation
To make exploration more rewarding, and to make it easier to implement more new terrain features, Mojang has changed the way biomes are generated in the world. This means we now have much bigger, more unique biomes, but this also means some old ones aren’t here anymore, like all the snow biomes. These will be added in 1.9.
Oceans were also added as a new biome, and they are giant. They do however have lots of different little islands in them, so there isn’t a vast empty ocean like some expected. Swamps were also added, they are flatlands with more water and vines growing on the trees. They also seem to generate an abundant supply of mushrooms.
Ravines have been implemented, which spawn randomly and cut through terrain. They usually look really epic, but they can also be small, so don’t expect each and every one to be huge. World generation also has buildings now, and those buildings are strongholds, villages and abandoned mine shafts. Strongholds are giant versions of dungeons. They are made of stone and mossy bricks (new blocks) and contain iron bars (also new block), and contain different rooms (libraries, jails, hallways) that can have a spawner and/or a chest inside. These are extremely rare, and only 3 exist on each map. Abandoned Mine Shafts are generated as a part of the cave system, except they contain rails, cobwebs and wooden pillars. They also have a new mob, the poisonous spider, in them which can only spawn there. It can poison you on hit, which makes you lose health over time for a short period.
Finally we have villages, which don’t have villagers in them yet, but will in 1.9. Villages are generated randomly in flat areas, and have a few houses, farms, a well, a blacksmith and a guard tower (not all villages have all buildings, though).
Future biomes include the return of snow biomes, giant mushroom biomes and possibly volcanoes. You can however grow giant mushrooms by using bonemeal on regular mushrooms. Giant mushrooms are not flamable.
Tip: Not all village buildings are lit. Most of them aren’t lit at all, so if you live near one, you should go and light it up so monsters don’t spawn in there.
Endermen
The Endermen are a new hostile mob added to the game. You’ve probably heard about them. They are tall, black humanoid mobs that spawn during the night and burn during the day, much like skeletons and zombies. They are passive until you look at them (as in place the crosshair over them.) When you do, they freeze, and they attack you as soon as you remove the crosshair from them. They can teleport so they are a bit hard to hit.
Their major weakness is water. When they are in water, damage is dealt to them as if they were in lava, and they also die in the rain. One of their powers is also picking blocks up and moving them around, and they can do this with almost all blocks (including bedrock, yes scary). They drop an ender pearl, a new item.
Experience
Experience and leveling has been partially implemented. You can get experience orbs and level up by killing mobs, but you can’t spend it on anything yet, this, like villagers for villages, is coming in 1.9.
The amount of experience needed to level up doesn’t seem to rise with level, but since experience and leveling is being tweaked and finished for 1.9; this may be changed. You drop your experience on death, like items.
Unfortunately, building and mining does not give any experience yet.
New Lighting
Notch has coded a new lighting system for 1.8 which now uses textures instead of chunk updates to render light. This is huge news for netbook owners, as Minecraft is now much less laggy at sunsets and sunrises, not to mention how much more beautiful they look. This also means light is colored now instead of just being white, so torches give out a slightly yellow light while the night is more dark blue than pure black. On a related note, clouds are now above building level, so the times of clouds going trough your buildings are over.
Combat and Food Improvements
A major part of The Adventure Update are combat tweaks. And there a lot of them. Critical hits have been added, they deal 50% more damage, and happen when you hit a mob while falling. You can now block with swords which reduces the damage inflicted by 50%.
The bow has been tweaked, and now has a charging animation. The more you charge it the further it shoots and the more damage it deals. The ability to sprint is also new, and it is activated by double tapping forward and keeping it held down. When sprinting you move 50% faster, your FOV (Field of View) is bigger and your hunger bar drains more quickly (more on that in a while). When you hit an enemy while sprinting it throws them back more than a regular hit. While sprinting and jumping you can jump 4 blocks in length.
Tip: Bunny hopping is a new way of moving. While sprinting, hold down space to continue jumping. You will move much faster. It’s also really fun (at least for the little kid in every one of us).
The way you eat food has also been changed forever. Well at least in Minecraft. Food now no longer fills your health, however a new part of the HUD, the hunger bar, is filled every time you eat. When it is full you regain health slowly, however when it empties, you start losing health according to your difficulty level (Down to 5 hearts on easy, 1 heart on normal and killing you on hard.) Eating food now also takes time and is accompanied with a nice new animation. Food is also stackable (except for mushroom stew, for some reason), to balance things out.
Creative Mode
Remember Minecraft Classic? Well now you have something like it in Minecraft Beta. When making a world, you get to pick whether you want it to be Survival or Creative (no way to change this yet except with external tools). In creative mode, you have infinite blocks and instead of your inventory you get a HUD in which you pick items to place into your hotbar so you can place infinite amounts of that item/block. Flying is enabled (though without a cloud effect that was in the initial image Notch posted) by double tapping space. Server admins can switch between game modes with a command (“/gametype playername 0/1″ 0 being survival and 1 creative).
More Changes
But that’s not all. The Adventure Update also adds a lot of other cool stuff. The Main Menu has been updated with a dynamic background and a better logo, you now have a server list in the Multiplayer menu, there are some better key binding options (for mouse commands), a FOV option slider, a brightness slider (even though the game is brighter now than it was before even on the lowest setting). Explosions have a new particle effect, and so do some other particles. Bedrock level now makes your field of view shorter regardless of light level, and the void has been replaced with a particle effect. A new mob, Silverfish has been added, but it’s extremely rare. They generate from blocks found in strongholds. Silverfish are hostile and can call upon other nearby Silverfish nearby. Melons were added and are farmable, and so are pumpkins. Animals have an AI change so they now run away when you first hit them. Fence gates have finally been added, and are extremely useful. Pigs have a new improved model, which is just a fancy way to say they have snouts.
As you can see, The Adventure Update is huge and awesome, and we will be playing it for a long, long time. It’s available right now, and is surprisingly not buggy, probably due to the huge amount of bug reports filed by pre-release players.
