Hi! It’s Monday, and we’ve got the day off for some reason. (Something about Easter) Me and ez took a short walk, and the weather was wonderful. :-D

But that’s not what this blog post is about. It’s about dumping a bunch of random information on you!

First of all, Jens got temporarily moved to a new project, so I’m on my own on Minecraft for a while (not sure how long..). It feels scary, but he’s right across the desk from me. Thank you for your work so far, Jens, I know both the community and I really appreciate all your hard work. :-D

Jens was working on integrating/tweaking the Piston mod, which will probably get delayed as a result of this. We don’t want to just add it as-is because it doesn’t quite feel “fantasy” enough, and there’s a lot of corner cases we need to solve.

Last week, I started playing around with minimaps, and Vraket from Oxeye games took some interest in it. We played around with it for a while, and it kinda got more and more ambitious as we went. Now it’s a proper mapping tool! You make a map, and it starts out empty. As you move around, you fill in parts of the map automatically (as long as the map is being held). You can give the map to other people and they will see what you’ve explored on there, and it’s quite possible you will even be able to magically “link” two maps so they’re the same map. That means you will be able to see where other people who carry the same map are.

Vraket is a game design genius, btw.

One slightly bad news item is that I’m starting to get second thoughts about the modding API. People are already doing great mods, and there’s no way we’d be able to make an API good and dynamic enough to support all of the awesome things people are making. I still very much want modding to be a part of Minecraft, but I’m not convinced spending months writing an API that won’t satisfy people is the correct way to do so. There probably are better ways to do it.

The main problems we need to solve are preventing people from making money off our work (unless they have a license deal with us), and making sure mods don’t break with each game update. People obviously already CAN make mods, so the ability to make them isn’t the biggest priority.

Hmm.

Oh, oh, oh, and we also passed two million sales! That’s HUUGE, and as usual I’m not quite sure how to deal with it! We’ve got a company dinner planned for Thursday night, and I plan on getting Jakob drunk. That would be fun.

And [at some point in the near future], we’ve got our office house warming party! It’s a bit late since we moved in like half a year ago, but the renovations and new decorations should finally be done by then. The guest list is pretty long, but Carl assures us there’s room for everyone.

There’s one final piece of information that I’d love to share, but I’m not allowed to. I’ll just say I’m very excited about it :D