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Games Technology

Notch Announces Minecraft 'Adventure Update' 142

Posted by Soulskill from the blocky-indiana-jones-hat-sold-separately dept.
jjp9999 writes "Notch announced that Minecraft 1.7 will include the long-awaited 'Adventure Update.' In an E3 roundup on his blog, Notch wrote, 'The idea with this update is to flesh out the game a bit, making it reward exploration and combat more.' Although he added, 'We're keeping the details secret so people can get surprises,' Notch wrote back on July 7, 2010 that Adventure Mode would be one of the three game modes in Minecraft (the other two being Survival and Creative), and would include a health bar and an inventory, but would remove the player's ability to place or destroy blocks. He said the value of this is that 'people can design "challenge maps" in creative or survival mode, then share them with people so that they can try to beat them in Adventure mode.' Interestingly, Notch also announced the release of the Minecraft source code to a small group of mod developers, in his latest blog post."
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Notch Announces Minecraft 'Adventure Update' More

Notch Announces Minecraft 'Adventure Update'

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  • Terraria (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cgeys ( 2240696 ) on Monday June 13, 2011 @04:40PM (#36429440)
    Personally I've lost interested to Minecraft long time ago. It was fun back then, but meh now. But I tried Terraria with a friend and it's a similar game, but more stuff to do and some point in it. It's worth a look.

    • Not to mention Dwarf Fortress.

    • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by jojoba_oil ( 1071932 )

      Personally I've lost interested to Minecraft long time ago. It was fun back then, but meh now.

      I knew when I decided not to buy it that it would get boring fast. I've watched a few people play it and all I ever see them do is start fresh, start a "home base", get to the point that they can hide in base during the night and explore during the day, and then close it to play a different game.

      And Notch really has no incentive to finish the game anymore. Anyone who was going to buy the game has already bought into the "free updates forever" alpha... Give it a few months and nobody will remember who he is;

      • Give it a few months and nobody will remember who he is; a "1-hit wonder" of video games.

        I hope so. :( Minecraft's sucked down so much of my time already... if he keeps making games like that I'll be in real trouble.

        • I actually created a multi-world online game around minecraft, that allowed you to move items between worlds or sell them in an online market. It's called mineverse.com I ran out of funds though so I currently don't have any servers online :(

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by flitty ( 981864 )
        I see this Adventure Update as a good direction though. I haven't played it in months because I played much like you describe. Create a home-base, maybe a minecart track to get you in and out of your base and main mine, but then get bored. Having the ability to build an adventure and share that would get me firing up the game again.
        • Problem is that the fighting system is just not very robust. It is more like a prototyping tool for a better game. I find the mobs in the game to be nothing more than a nuisance.

          • maybe he`ll working on it for the update

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by KDR_11k ( 778916 )

            I think the fighting itself is fine but enemy numbers and strengths make fighting merely a matter of spotting enemies before they reach you and then it's easy going, just whack them with a sword to conveniently keep them out of range (no, creepers don't require a different approach). Terraria ups the ante there by having many enemy tiers where your basic sword will barely scratch something like a fire imp, enemies may be easy to spot but they'll often overwhelm you, especially if you go into an area you are

      • Re:Terraria (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Daetrin ( 576516 ) on Monday June 13, 2011 @05:21PM (#36429818)

        I knew when I decided not to buy it that it would get boring fast. I've watched a few people play it and all I ever see them do is start fresh, start a "home base", get to the point that they can hide in base during the night and explore during the day, and then close it to play a different game.

        I can only think of two possibilities, either the people you watched are completely uncreative, or they've already got some other area of their life in which they are creative so they don't feel the need for another one.

        Personally i started the game and built a "home base" and did a bit of exploring, but i didn't like the snowy terrain i'd started in. So i started a new world. Then i built a "home base" in that one. Then i built a fountain. Then i built a farm around the fountain. Then i dug down to the bottom of the world so i could mine cool stuff. Then i saw a giant plateau and wanted to get to the top and spent awhile digging my way up there. Then i built a castle on top of the plateau. Then i dug an underground tunnel to connect the castle with my first home base. Then i dug an underground farm. Then i started crafting decorative items. Then i built a large lava pool.

        And then i got distracted watching the Yogscast Minecraft videos on YouTube, and then i decided to try out the Survival Island challenge myself. Then that inspired me to start a new world and build a new type of home base. Then i built a portal to the Netherworld and started collecting stuff there.

        Then i got distracted by Gemcraft Labyrinth for awhile, and then got distracted from that by Terraria. However i fully plan to go back to Minecraft and build more cool stuff, especially when the next updates happen. (I haven't even played around with minecarts or redstone at all yet!)

        And i am by far not the most creative person out there. You can go on YouTube and find thousands of videos from people a million times more creative than me.

        So Minecraft only gets boring fast if you have no interest in building stuff. Perhaps you meant to say "I have no interest in being creative in a building game so i knew it would get boring for me fast"? Because as originally stated your blanket statement is manifestly untrue.

        • You haven't played with redstone or minecarts? That's the thing that has kept me playing.

          I have a minecart track with 5 stations that are all linked via serial communication via redstone. The current implementation can support up to 8 stations (3 bit station ids). I can go to one station, set in another station id using levers and press the send button. After about 2 seconds, a little piano note sounds and it's time to jump into the minecart and be automatically transported to the station I dialled in.

          I'm w

          • Oooh, havent done serial communication yet... Any chance you have schematics? ^.^

            • While I've not actually implemented this, it should be fairly easy to do by building two delay-line memories, and transmitting by copying from one to the other (i.e. replacing the feedback loop in the destination memory with the output of the source register). Sounds like time for me to sit down and build some of this stuff.
          • I found that redstone logic gates were pretty useless in multiplayer, is that fixed yet? I'd get spotty functionality at best, which made my minecart delivery system only work sometimes..

            • Yeah, it's not entirely reliable on multiplayer, it fails about 10% of the time at a guess. If no receiver recognises a station id, the minecart goes into an infinite loop. I have tried making a video of it to put on youtube but the extra drain on this system makes the receiver fail fairly consistently.

              I'm working on a completely bullet proof system, but it's turning out to be a lot more expensive in redstone and also a lot slower than the current one because I'm using data flip flops to store messages.

              • Still, armed with the logic gate chart for redstone, I spent way too much time recreating myst-like puzzle worlds in the depths of caves, which was too awesome. Oh man this conversation is making me itch for more minecraft.. arrrrhhggg i thought i quit I was over 30 days sober guys!

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by k8to ( 9046 )

          I think you just proved the point.

          Minecraft isn't interesting. The people who play minecraft are interesting.

        • I want to say that being creative in Minecraft is difficult because of the materials and functions are so limited, but I know that should push me to do more with less. I do find making intricate things to be very difficult. For example, anything that involving curves is very tedious. Also, without using some cheats, collecting materials can be extremely tedious. I resorted to giving myself infinite TNT because I couldn't stand hackign away at stone ad nauseum. And I turn off mobs because they're just a nuis

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by KDR_11k ( 778916 )

          Many people aren't looking for user generated content, we want the game to present us a challenge, not roll over and tell us to make our own fun.

      • Did you miss the part where he's adding another game mode, called "Adventure Mode"?

        • Did you miss the part where "Adventure Mode" is just survival mode with the ability-to-destroy-blocks disabled? You can't destroy blocks, so you can't pick blocks up, so you can't place blocks. Maybe there will be a better interface for sharing your world, but that's already (easily) possible according to a few of my friends that do play minecraft.

          I don't see how that's as big of an update as people are making it out to be... The whole "fun" part of the game that I've seen is the ability to create your own

          • Did you miss the bit where he is including many other features that he hasnt disclosed? I imagine he would throw in missions, NPCs and other things you couldnt think of off hand - the game has certainly surprised me before
            • I would be surprised if he threw in something as crazy as missions or NPCs. So far additions have been limited to less functional things like weather.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by AAWood ( 918613 )
                Since late October we've had the introduction of the redstone system (with all that that's brought to the game), working monsters and inventory in multiplayer (hell, lets just say working multiplayer and have done with), different "biomes" so the landscape changes, the weather/stat/achievement systems added, beds that let you set a new spawn, the improved file format, dyes for wool, the Nether with all that that entails (new mobs, new blocks, portals, fast transit...) and a new world on the way, tameable pe

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by KDR_11k ( 778916 )

              Mojang isn't Arcen Games, Minecraft patches have been fairly moderate in their changes so far. Don't expect Dwarf Fortress's adventure mode out of this, at least not within the first few months.

        • Actually, based on his latest blog entry, it sounds like the "Adventure Update" isn't going to be about a separate game mode, but rather adding things to Survival Mode that encourage and reward exploration and otherwise flesh it out. Which I personally much prefer. "Challenge maps" are already quite possible and popular -- and if you're into trying one, obeying the creator's rules like "don't destroy blocks" is simple enough to do yourself. No need to create a separate game mode that removes fundamental

      • Personally I've lost interested to Minecraft long time ago. It was fun back then, but meh now.

        "Back then"? Dude it's only been in beta for 6 months, and before that it wasn't what anybody would call a "game". You must have the lifespan of a gnat to refer to that as "back then".

        I knew when I decided not to buy it that it would get boring fast. I've watched a few people play it and all I ever see them do is start fresh, start a "home base", get to the point that they can hide in base during the night and explore during the day, and then close it to play a different game.

        This is how I play it, too. But it's how I play most games. Minecraft, more than most games, feels like getting your Legos out when you were still in grade school. You either tear everything apart and start over, or you go back to the one or two things you built that were really awesome. You play with it for a bit, then

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nmb3000 ( 741169 )

        And Notch really has no incentive to finish the game anymore.

        I wonder about this. According to the Minecraft stats [minecraft.net], there have been 2,507,617 purchases made for the game. Even assuming a 10 euro average price (I'm not sure how the price has increased over time), that's over 25 million euros he's already made -- and it's probably a bit more than that. The guy is rolling in money, and unless developing Minecraft is something he really enjoys, I don't see any real motivation for him to continue much longer.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Hadlock ( 143607 )

          Why on earth would you kill the golden goose? Every point update generates huge amounts of free advertising and probably sells a hundred thousand copies. Notch doesn't seem to do much development on Minecraft anymore, but hiring a full time developer to work on it would easily pay for itself for another year or two.

      • I really don't think so, especially with it coming to the 360. I think it'll be popular on the 360, really. Maybe not the same cult-like reception it gets on the PC, but yeah. Also fuck survival, that's boring- if you're not playing on a "creative" server then you're-doing-it-wrong, and that's why it's getting boring.

        • I really don't think so, especially with it coming to the 360. I think it'll be popular on the 360, really. Maybe not the same cult-like reception it gets on the PC, but yeah.

          Also fuck survival, that's boring- if you're not playing on a "creative" server then you're-doing-it-wrong, and that's why it's getting boring.

          I couldn't disagree more. Creative is extremely boring. Building a great structure with materials you obtained yourself, and while under fire from denizens of the night, is what makes Minecraft fun for me.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by KDR_11k ( 778916 )

        Indies like that need their reputation, if Notch screwed players by stopping development on Minecraft that would kill the sales of all future games he makes.

    • It depends what kind of game you prefer:

      Minecraft concentrates on the creationism/building. There's no end-game goals, there's not much in the way of RPG/adventure elements (yet) - it's basically virtual Lego. I like that and I'm still playing it obsessively (big projects take months or years to build unless you hack, so I can see myself playing it for a while yet).

      Terraria focuses more on the exploration/gear/adventure elements and less on building. It has a far greater array of droppable/craftable/mineabl

  • At first I was oblivious to what Minecraft was. Then I bought it. Then I played it for a while. Then I figured out there was nothing to really DO in the game. Okay, I know it's a giant sandbox and you can build stuff, but after a while, you kind of get bored of building stuff...

    About a month ago, I found Terraria. The game has been in development for less than half a year, and it has more depth and more things to do, especially in multiplayer, which is just pure fun.

    Any updates to Minecraft are much welcome

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thebra ( 707939 )

      At first I was oblivious to what Minecraft was. Then I bought it. Then I played it for a while. Then I figured out there was nothing to really DO in the game. Okay, I know it's a giant sandbox and you can build stuff, but after a while, you kind of get bored of building stuff...

      About a month ago, I found Terraria. The game has been in development for less than half a year, and it has more depth and more things to do, especially in multiplayer, which is just pure fun.

      Any updates to Minecraft are much welcome, both in SP and MP. Hopefully there will be more crafting stuff and more things to do. Maybe it's just me, but when I play Terraria, I get this weird thought in my head - "this is what Minecraft should have been". Somehow I feel that Notch got a boatload of money and then semi-abandoned the game...

      If he is smart he will build in some sort of in "app" purchases. "Upgrade your sand blocks to golden blocks for .99 cents" or "Purchase the new sword of awesomeness for 250 Minecraft dollars".

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Except that minecraft is 3D, which introduces a whole host of complications. Everything becomes much harder, when programming in a 3D vs. a 2D environment. This is why Dwarf Fortress is so incredible: Toady does almost _no_ work in terms of graphics/animation, and pathfinding, AI, world generation, etc. become much simpler. He is then free to focus on the behavior.

      Also: Terraria's server. Was awful. Minecraft's server took a LOT of work to get right, and that's something that occupied a large chunk of his t

      • I don't know... He's announcing Minecraft for other platforms, which worries me a bit. If he continues working on the game, but really WORKING on the game, in a year it could be awesome. I'm just not convinced that's going to happen :(

        • He (and his main Minecraft programming assistant, Jeb) aren't the ones working on the ports. They're focused on the PC game.

    • Re:Minecraft vs. Terraria (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mark-t ( 151149 ) <marktNO@SPAMnerdflat.com> on Monday June 13, 2011 @05:15PM (#36429768) Journal

      ...but after a while, you kind of get bored of building stuff...

      One word. Lego.

      Building new stuff never gets old for someone who has a passion to create.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )

        I think it gets boring in single player but when you play online and can share your 'inventions' or collections with others, it becomes much better. You can also make it reflect real world if you want to and build mock-ups of your real-world ideas. I'm building my basement to scale (1m per block) for fun right now but I'm planning on converting it into a man-cave so I could use it to mock-up my placement ideas.

      • Which makes sense for the game's sandbox mode. But survival? survival has no meat: it's sandbox with minor annoyances every so often.

        • This is my problem with it--survival is the "main" mode and it has no real gameplay.

          I read in an interview where Notch said that that creative mode was just a test mode while he got the basic engine working--it was never intended to be the pure stress-free building sandbox that everyone makes it out to be. So many people fixated on that mode that people think that's what the game is supposed to be--just virtual Legos.

          The game needs challenge. It needs things to threaten you even once you've built your for

      • always looking for good builders on our server for bunch of nerds gaming: mc.bongaming.com

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by KDR_11k ( 778916 )

        Lego is more versatile (especially once you add the Technic parts for mechanisms) and you can do more than just put it on shelves, if you build a boat you can move it around and pretend it's a boat. In Minecraft your structures are static and can't be moved around.

      • One word. Lego.
          Building new stuff never gets old for someone who has a passion to create.

        I weighed my Lego collection some time ago - I've got a solid 14.3 kg of Lego bricks. I'm in my thirties and I *still* buy new Legos and play with them; have done so for over two decades now. It's not such a great comparison :)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AP31R0N ( 723649 )

        It's a player type. i can't get into god/sandbox games at all. Second Life, Sims, Sim City... *yawn*.

        Minecraft would appeal to me if there was something competitive going on, or a story to advance. Let me build some cannons and blast the crap out of someone's castle. Give me some quests to complete or a hottie to try to seduce.

        i loved Legos. i'd be up all night building during the summer. i'd cover the floor with bases and spaceships. i could tell you what the colors of their uniforms meant and quit

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by snuf23 ( 182335 )

      I agree that Terraria has more game elements but it's far less compelling as a sandbox to build things. Constructed environments can't be as complex or interesting in two dimensions, and of course this is nothing like redstone circuits in Terraria.

      Also as far as the content in Terraria, it doesn't really have THAT much. There are only 3 bosses, all of which can be soloed without the top gear (better gear makes it easier but you don't need the best in the game to kill them). I got kind of bored with just loo

      • I take the approach of temporary defenses when I'm building at night in survival. Extra walls or pits, excess lighting, dirt scaffolding to keep off the ground and get a good view of what I'm working on.

        What I like about survival is exactly this - with proper defenses you can focus on your work. But every now and then, you still get half a heart attack when something comes at you out of the night. The heightened focus required for my projects enhances the JUMP I get when I hear an ominous rustle nearby, and

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rwa2 ( 4391 ) *

      Yeah, somewhere on the Minecraft website Notch even admits he'd like to add more Terraria-like elements to Minecraft. I haven't played with Terraria yet, but the demo movie makes it look kinda boring, but I also admit I was never into Castlevania.

      I have enough fun with Minecraft, and it's the first thing I've managed to get my wife addicted to since the Sims.

      Anyway, I shall now troll you with obligatory giant golden wang: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2680-Minecraft [escapistmagazine.com]

  • Shouldn't he rename it the LittleBigPlanet update?

  • I love playing Minecraft it's fun and mindless. But after an hour or so (even if I just leave it open and complete other stuff) it'll start eating into my ram (8GB) and start using 50% CPU at idle. I know OS X's Java implementation is a bit to blame, but something this 'simple' could be done in GTK and use almost no CPU.

    • You can leak memory in every programming language.

    • I'm not convinced the JVM is at fault here. I've seen very efficient Java games.

      And very efficient Java servers. Minecraft's server is plain idiotic (uses threads! figure that). Bravo uses a fraction of the resources and it's written in Python.

      That said, Minecraft is indeed awesome.
    • C++ is nice, but I wonder how the game would perform in GLSL? Having spent a big part of my undergraduate CS elective budget on physics simulations and advanced rendering methods with GLSL, the first thing I thought when I got the game was how much faster it would be if all the heavy lifting was done on the GPU.

      I am sure Notch had his reasons for programming the whole thing in Java, I just hope those reasons weren't speed and cross-platform compatibility.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jamu ( 852752 )
      I've noticed it uses more and more memory, until it decides to free it again. You also get occasional lag spikes. I just assumed it was Java's garbage collection. I'm not sure if there's anyway you can get Java to collect garbage regularly. Games that require a steady framerate would benefit from a small amount of resource management each frame, rather than a large amount irregularly.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shados ( 741919 )

        It is. I don't know how java's particular implementation works, but generally managed languages with garbage collection will look at how much free memory there is on the system at any given time, and only bother collecting resources that are long lived (as opposed to local scoped variables, which will get collected very quickly) if there's any kind of memory pressure.

        So basically if you have 40 GB of RAM, it could wait a very, very long time until the memory is collected.

        Fire up Starcraft 2 or Elderscroll w

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by KDR_11k ( 778916 )

          The problem is that garbage collection takes time. Making it collect smaller chunks every second would create a smoother experience than having it do one massive collection every half hour. Arcen Games struggled with that in AI War where they create and destroy lots of things all the time leading to lengthy garbage collections if they don't happen frequently.

    • There is a project called Minetest-c55 [55.lt]. It is not as featureful as Minecraft, but written in C++ (using Irrlicht) and licensed under the GPL2 (or – as I remember – at your option, any later version). You can check it out on Bitbucket [bitbucket.org].

      Disclaimer: I maintain a fork called Minetest (Minetest Delta) with some added features (new block types etc.), which can be found on GitHub [github.com]. Look at the screenshots [dieweltistgarnichtso.net].

    • It certainly could be something in OS X's Java implementation. The Java-based PS3 Media Server has the same problem on OS X; it releases very little of its memory. Streaming long bits of HD content becomes a RAM problem quickly. In both cases this could be a case of not releasing asset memory due to programmer error. But I'm not really sure this a Java issue -- look at Firefox 4+ on OS X. It has massive memory leaks: it seems to never let go of HTML images, as well as Flash videos. I have to restart Firefox

    • Read the updates.

      Minecraft sucks up a LOT of cpu and RAM, it's true, but I'm eeking by on OS X with only 2 GB of ram, (256 mb of which is dedicated to the graphics card...)

      The secret graphics setting the "performance: blah" switch (formerly the fps limit switch). Setting it to "max fps" will cause it to go way overboard with the chunk updates. It'll deliberately use all the cpu you've got for something. Your day-night transitions will, of course, be super fast as a result, but my suspicion, bolstered by

  • Personally, I love this game. ive grown tired of todays games and find that this one lets me do whatever i want and build whatever i dream of. I dont play with other people(never liked it in other games too) and dont play with the mobs, just peaceful mode. This game can create some beautiful landscapes and exploring to find them and then build ontop of them is very satisfying to me.

  • Minecraft is sort-of-fun on its own, but the game really blossoms when you do something like run a Bukkit-based server and get a world or two going, get some of the important plugins going, and invite friends into your world. If it weren't for the Bukkit project I would have been done with Minecraft by the time Beta came out.

    My greatest hope is that one day someone will bridge the gap between second-life and Minecraft and will create a game that has the flexibility and user-generated content from second-lif

    • I'd like to see a terrain smoothing algorithm that would allow the block placement but it'd find some way to make certain parts of terrain flow, like dirt sand and gravel, while having separate building materials that would come out square.

      I have played with scripted NPCs in minecraft with npcx a bit on my server at mc.bongaming.com but the plugin was rather sketchy so I currently have it disabled.

  • How about instead of new features, we get bug fixes so the game isn't shitty. Notch's QA process is literally letting people on IRC mess with it for a couple of hours and then he rolls it to live. His code base is also a pile of crap, so we get awesome (wiki adjusted) patch notes like this:

    Bug Fixes:
    Fixed new item duplication bug

    New Bugs:
    The item duplication bug was not actually fixed; items placed in a furnace can still be taken out of a furnace and duplicated infinitely by right-clicking (although it
    appears the newly duplicated item will not function). Also, bug with cloned items being picked up after death wasn't fixed too.
    When using a furnace and placing items into it, as soon as it's activated all items minus 1 are ejected and must be placed back in the furnace in order to use it.
    Lighting is not always updated when digging new holes/tunnels, placing torches or setting blocks on fire (in both nether & normal world).
    Tall grass can grow on dirt with no grass on it.
    Shift-clicking something into a full chest from inventory or from chest into full inventory crashes the client.
    It is now impossible to row a boat in 1 block deep water.
    Sometimes (tested while in a boat on water, and when floating in water) while viewing a map the game will switch to a "saving chunks screen" then end on a black
    screen.
    When quitting game the "Saving Chunks" progress bar does not appear sometimes.
    When loading a world and standing in a cave less than 4 blocks high, the player gets some initial damage (at least the damage sound appears).
    "Out of memory" error. Often appears after the "blocks don't disappear" bug.

    The following bugs only occur in new chunks generated in 1.6.2:
    Some chunks don't get dark at night (and vice versa; some chunks stay dark during the day).
    The textures don't load on some chunks (The blocks are present but with transparent textures).
    Some blocks don't disappear after being broken; it appears as if the block is still there, but can be passed through.

    Every time we get any sort of content update, we quit playing for a week as Notch puts out a few several new minor version updates to get the game to only have slightly more bugs than it had before the update, and then he

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