Minecraft developer Notch, the worst person at keeping secrets ever, just tweeted a peek at something he's adding to the next major version of Minecraft: underground ravines. You can already hit some interesting cavern complexes when digging around, but these huge hallways of rock are a whole new level of "Ooh, look what I just fell into and broke my legs in!"
Exploring is the best bit of Minecraft, and exploring underground is the best bit of that. Call me a procedural dork, but I'd be happy if the rest of Minecraft's development was just adding endless new geographical features to the terrain generation engine.
Notch says he's having a hard time keeping the details of 1.7, the Adventure Update, under wraps. Generally all the juicy details of each Minecraft update trickle out on his Twitter feed in snippets and shots like this one, so we do a lot of "Small feature added!" posts and not many "Megaton preview!" articles on it.
It's the nice thing about the internet: we can tell you stuff we care about even if it's not mega news for everyone. But it's also the reason it hasn't really made sense yet to do a real Minecraft cover in the mag: there are no juicy details to be had that you don't already know.
It'll be interesting if he does manage to keep the rest of the Adventure Update secret, but immediately posting this shot doesn't make it look likely. Here's the full res version in all its dingy glory:
We've contacted Notch to inquire about his breakfast this morning, but there has been no response at time of going to press. And so the secrecy begins.
