When it Rains in Minecraft 1.5, It Snows

[GLo Jones]

Why is it 1.5? Shouldn't it be something more along the lines of 0.5?

 

[Ekit]

Why is it 1.5? Shouldn't it be something more along the lines of 0.5?

My thoughts exactly.

 

[Someone Depressing]

Notch, focus on one thing. Focus on Un-Buggin Multi-Player, or expanding Single-Player.

YOU. HAVE. TO. PICK. ONE!!!

 

[Brainst0rm]

Hopefully snow will re-cover ground that you've dug up to get snowballs. It will make igloos and snow castles and such a lot more viable

Also, lightning should occasionally strike trees and tall towers. That would be EPIC.

 

[Poofs]

well, i am definately excited

 

[Darkgoosey666]

anc[is]

Shhhhhhh.

Spoiler: OH SHI

that is a fucking horrifying picture. thank christ the graphics of minecraft are so bad eh XD

 

[John Funk]

Dwarf Fortress is great, unfortunately it's also extremely hard to get into. Minecraft is a lot more accessible - and our community loves it. We write about what our community is interested in.

That was pretty much my point. The Escapist has an embarrassingly large Minecraft obsession, and the site caters to it. Other games can adds tons of stuff and go unnoticed since they don't have that same following. It's irritating but understandable.

I actually have a question about news updates though; do you have a limit on what you can and can't write articles about? It's not really related to the topic, but I am curious.

In general no; we take a lot of pride in our news team and our judgment - we usually write about videogames, but we can also write about things that we just find cool, because our community will probably find them cool, too. So I can write a post about the one-man Disney movie [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/108705-YouTube-Singer-Performs-Incredible-One-Man-Disney-Movie], because I think it's nifty and there's a safe bet our community will, too.

But we probably shouldn't write about, say, this year's spring fashions, because there's no interest.

So to answer your question, it's not set in stone, but more a matter of judgment calls on the parts of the individual writers.

 

[theultimateend]

Notch, focus on one thing. Focus on Un-Buggin Multi-Player, or expanding Single-Player.

YOU. HAVE. TO. PICK. ONE!!!

Well single player must be his choice because I've been playing since before about 90% of the content was in and haven't noticed any issues for a long long time.

 

[Arcanist]

According to the game's mastermine Notch

I c wut u did thar

In all seriousness, this is pretty baller. Who wants to bet that somebody, be it Notch or a prominent modder, will create a device that will let us control the weather?

 

[Saris Kai]

Notch needs to add armies of monsters that attempt to break into your buildings to kill you. As its stands your safe forever if you have a simple door.

 

[timeadept]

Rain could be fun if it causes random flooding. Like maybe it could cause sources of water to appear randomly, and then disappear a bit after the rain stopped. Or maybe there could be rules for what areas became sources when it started raining, because in the real world flooding happens in the same places consistently.

It would be kinda cool to be exploring a cave, then it starts to rain without you realizing and the cave starts to flood.

One thing i want though is, it'd be cool if sources of water would flow, so that underwater caves would actually flood and fill if you reached the bottom of the ocean. But i still like my infinite waterfalls so there'd need to be some way to maintain them.

 

[xvbones]

Uh, you already can make snowballs from snow.

Edit: Also, weather used to exist, and was removed. This is a re-add of an old feature.

Used to exist, was buggy as shit, now hopefully works properly.

Okay, this is fine news and all that and I now have six wolves following me around (their names are Winkum Blinkum Yoshi Poobah Berkshire and Hamentashen) who may or may not occasionally idiotically hurl themselves after me to their deaths should i ever scale a tree in the process of cutting it down but HEY SLUICE GATE PLEASE SLUICE GATE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE IT IS MY BIRTHDAY AND I WOULD BE EVER SO GRATEFUL IF YOU WOULD PLEASE IMPLEMENT A SLUICE GATE

seriously, weather is nice, i love weather, and yes okay i can understand why some people (miserable fucking twats that they are) might get pissy over how snow does not respawn but HEY PLEASE LESS WITH THE COSMETIC CHANGES AND LET'S HAVE US THAT SLUICE GATE WE'VE BEEN BEGGING FOR.

See, for the children, a 'sluice gate' is a gate that opens and closes to permit or prevent the passage of fluids. Such as water. Or lava.
Currently, Minecraft has no such device. Water and lava will not pass through simple doors at all - it'll just pile up at the open doorway and attempt to flow around it.
To wit: sluice gates.
We would like some.
Pretty please.
With sugar and other such confectioneries on top of it.

By the way, Snowballs only stack to 16 and deal no damage. They can be used to knock monsters off cliffs if you have good aim and they don't see you, or to shear sheep at range without hurting them.
Filling 4x4 spaces in a crafting window with snowballs produces a Snow Block, a building block that is slightly less sturdy than leaves.

Notch needs to add armies of monsters that attempt to break into your buildings to kill you. As its stands your safe forever if you have a simple door.

http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Zombie_Siege

Also, you're only safe forever if you sit inside your little room behind your little door forever and ever and ever and never bother to try to get out and see the world.

Any amount of digging can break into subterranean caverns and I have seen cavern systems so vast and complex hours and hours later I still had not explored half of them - but I was horrendously lost and needed to dig almost straight up to the surface to get back home.

Any amount of so much as existing outdoors leaves you wide open to Creepers, who are well noted to be able to smell the creative impulse.

 

[Plurralbles]

oh so now my weak computer 100% cannot play it...

 

[Lancer873]

Snow will probably... you know... put snow on the ground, and freeze water... Yeah I'm just going to assume that was a joke in the article. Unless it only snows over frozen regions... then it'd be weird. Anyways, sounds pretty cool.

 

[Fensfield]

Finally. Just wasn't the same in snow biomes anymore.

 

[Hashime]

So I will have to shovel my walk ways in minecraft too. Damn it!

 

[xvbones]

Snow will probably... you know... put snow on the ground, and freeze water... Yeah I'm just going to assume that was a joke in the article. Unless it only snows over frozen regions... then it'd be weird. Anyways, sounds pretty cool.

aaaactually, it would make sense for it to only snow over frozen regions, that's part of Notch's whole thing with Biomes he's trying to do, cold regions remaining cold and hot regions remaining hot. Like, it really should not snow in the desert. That should not happen.

What it is is that currently, harvested snow does not respawn, which can give your glorious snow-draped view a decidedly splotchy appearance if you put a lot of torches down or do any work that rips up the ground. Same with ice, if you break a block of ice, that iceblock remains broken forever.

Grass respawns, you see, any block of dirt that is directly adjacent to any other block of dirt that has grass on it will eventually also have grass on it. That's how creeper-ravaged or strip-mined areas stop looking creeper-ravaged or strip-mined, cover it with dirt, make sure that dirt touches a grassy block and poof, in the space of a day, it'll look fine.

Currently, that is not so with snow and ice. Laugh at this if you want - lord knows I do - but to some people, this is a big deal, views can become ruined by time and circumstance and your snowy field can quickly look like a white-green-brown-grey-splotchy mess.

That's honestly what this update is, it's cosmetic and it opens the door for weather-triggered events - like, for example, flowers might spawn more after a rainfall, letting you anticipate flowerspawns and thus have a little better time farming dyes.

See, that would be cool.

 

[emeraldrafael]

Why do I get the feeling these are going to be annoying as hell because of trying to see through it, and will disrupt what you do.

 

[kebab4you]

Not to be the party pooper, but it must be a slow news day if the Escapist is doing a story on a proposed feature for one of the many updates to a game in beta. I wish you guys would do stories on features I plan on adding to games I make.

The Escapist has a Minecraft obsession. Every little thing added to the game must be covered by the news even before it's released. So Toady can add all of this to Dwarf Fortress;

Spoiler

Toady One This is the first release of what we once called the Caravan Arc, where we'll be changing how trade and the economy work. The entire release schedule is up at the development page. This particular release doesn't have visible changes to trade -- just a lot of world generation infrastructure. People eat and starve in world gen now, though it doesn't matter afterward. Subsequent releases coming up will be making use of these changes during play, but don't expect too much there this time. There have been many other changes. Seeing most of them will require generating a new world.

There are lots of new domestic animals. We also added giraffes, rhinos, honey bees and bumblebees. Bees were the winner of the animal sponsorship drive and they had many associated jobs, so we didn't try to get into the other sponsored beasts, but we'll be adding those in with every release.

Animals can be placed in pen/pasture zones, and grazing animals will need to graze on grass (they can also eat underground fungus found in many open cave layers). Pastures should be made large enough to provide ample grass and to prevent animals from being stacked on top of each other. Animals crammed into one place for too long can become grumpy and violent, but the animals will stay in the pastures without much tending (a dwarf may occasionally run over to an animal if it wanders off the pasture border to walk around something). There is no way to trade for hay or animal feed at this time, so don't expect grazing animals in new forts to survive on glaciers or the deepest deserts. Many deserts have patches of grass (or succulents) now.

Sheep, llamas and alpacas (and trolls for goblins) can be sheared and the wool can be spun into yarn. Chickens and other birds will lay eggs in nest boxes if you place the boxes in accessible areas. You can mill rocknuts into paste and press the paste for oil (which goes into jugs). Pressing occurs at the new screw press building.

You can make many of the more clayish soil types into earthenware ceramics now (and you can make fire clay into stoneware and kaolinite into porcelain). If a fort embark location has clay above the aquifer (or any clay if there is no aquifer), it'll be displayed in the embark readout. I didn't get very far into glazing, but you can ash glaze and tin glaze (with cassiterite). Earthenware jugs need to be glazed to hold liquids. Stoneware and porcelain jugs don't require glaze but can be glazed. You can also make large pots out of various materials, and these act like barrels (they are associated to stockpiles in the same way, etc.).

Honey bees can be collected and kept in artificial hives (which you can make out of various materials). You'll need one natural hive on your embark location to get started, but after that you can split the colony into new artificial hives. The process is fairly automated. You just need to place the hive buildings and a beekeeper will do the rest. You can adjust a few settings on each hive to control which hives are held for splitting and which are collected. You'll need to have jugs around to collect honeycombs (the royal jelly holds up the process otherwise), and you'll need another jug to collect the honey. Wax cakes can only be made into crafts by a wax worker at this time.

The site finder records the best hit in each square now, and you can stop the finder at any time and browse the results. The categories and readout have been changed up a bit. Minerals have been redistributed on the world map, though this might not be satisfying as I was expecting to get a bit farther with dwarf mode trade. Adjustments might have to be made there until trade is updated. We'll see.

Animals and plants occur with more or less contiguous ranges now, respecting biome. There are specific grasses. The evil grasses are probably a little extreme and seizure-inducing. I might throttle that back.

I'm starting the first one to two week bug fix cycle now, so there weren't a lot of bug fixes for this release, but creatures, items and vegetation don't pick up as many contaminants now.

There are new options in the graphical map export from legends mode, and I fixed a bug there with village maps getting cut off.

And never get a single mention, but the second Minecraft adds something trivial like beds it gets showered with attention.

Still, I'm surprised there was no mention of the pistons mod in this article. It may only be a user mod at the moment but it's pretty much confirmed to be coming soon since it adds so much potential to the game.

Sweet I can make efficient farming machines then. Also about damn time we get snow again, haven't seen it for ages ,_,