It’s finally happened the adventure update is out, or at least most of it, there are still features that need to be implemented, but so far i’ve met an enderman as pictured above, shortly before a spider killed me, a strong hold, a swamp, and even stumbled across a randomly generated NPC village not far from my old sandcastle lair. No NPC’s (Non Player Character) there just yet though. This village had a nice tower too.
Obviously i’ve never ventured far from my spawn point on this world. to get the new featured villages and stronghold dungeon type things, you’ll have to generate new chunks. A chunk is a 16 X 16 X 128 area of full sized blocks, as you move towards an area in your far side viewing plane that hasn’t been generated yet, the new code will randomly generate blocks slightly differently than before. The new biomes will also take effect here, creating swamp like areas with vines and trees, huge deserts, vast oceans and rivers grace the landscape now.
There was talk that snow had been left out for some reason, at least it was in the pre release that was attainable from a certain url on the minecraft site, thank @jeb_ for that. This could be why my already generated snow was getting rained on this evening 🙁
Other new in game features include a charge up bow and arrow for greater distance shooting, dealing greater damage to a mob when you attack from above, they now drop experience orbs for you to collect, you can also dash with a double tap of the forward key, this will use up stamina overtime but will also allow you to hit mobs further back. Eating now has an animation, and build stamina back up as well as health. Though i didn’t get to spend much time with the enderman i found, if you look at one directly with the cross hair, it will stare back at you menacingly, then when you look away it will teleport and come for you, scary huh?
So whats missing, possible new snow biomes, experence doesn’t really do anything for you at the momment, though i’m led to believe that this will still count up for when it does, though don’t doe in the mean time, haha. Eventually the ideas were to have NPC’s in the villages, kinda like in WOW (World of Worcraft) in wow they give you missions and reward you, maybe there will be something akin to that. This could be in an update of 1.8.x but more likely in the 1.9 update. But then it’s not long now for the official release date, though that’s not to say anything will change, @notch and @jeb_ will still likely be updating things, though they also have other titles they are working on too.
One last thing, there have been some additions to the lighting in minecraft 1.8, same type blocks can have a slight variation in color, and there are also options for makingthe game look moody or brighter etc, whatever they’ve done it seems to have fixed a weird artifacting especially with snow or clounds on my mac pro when on the osx partition, see the before and after below.
before 1.8 with artifacting (1.7.3).
after 1.8 no artifacting.