It's been a long road, but Minecraft has finally entered beta. The transition comes with an update and a rise in price, marking the beginning of the next era of Minecraft's development. Read on for a list of the new updates.
As part of the beta update, Notch posted on his blog , listing the following changes:
- Working server-side inventory! Finally! (And as a result of that, a whole pile of bugs and issues got fixed)
- Made SMP servers save chunks way less often in most cases. Chunks don't resave if they got saved in the last 30 seconds
- Moving too far away from a container, or having it blow up, closes the inventory screen
- Fixed /kill
- Introduced leaf decay again. It acts differently from before
- You can now throw eggs
- On a whim, added super exclusive clan cloaks for Mojang Employees
- ... and something else, which is even more rare
Players have been experiencing some connection and lag problems which the team is currently working on fixing. Notch posted his diagnosis of the problem on Twitter , saying "I have a scary feeling the lag some people get might be leaf decay," adding, "Grraaaaahhh!!"
Leaf decay was removed from the game before for causing infinite loop problems with the new biome terrain generation technology. Players who are sick of the sight of floating clouds of treeless leaves might have to wait a little longer before the problem's sorted.
The move to beta has also seen the price of Minecraft rise from 10 Euro to 14.75. Unlike players who bought the game in alpha, beta purchasers won't necessarily receive every future Minecraft update, though all updates and bugfixes leading up to the game's full release are included in the price.
Looking ahead, Notch has announced plans to add a layer of narrative to the game. In the short term, he says the team's "hoping to be able to squeeze in some fun for xmas.. Perhaps a new mob?"
We're still trying to figure out what the rare "something else" could be, any ideas?
