The Minecraft 1.8 update was supposed to add more of a sense of adventure to one of the world's most popular computer games. It's adding more than that.


It's adding so much more, in fact, that it's probably going to split into two updates, 1.8 and 1.9.

I got a demo of the new content at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle from the man behind Minecraft, the ever-friendly Markus "Notch" Persson, who powered up his Notchbook Air and gave me a tour. We were only interrupted by Notch fans three times!


Among the new features he showed (all of which are in the video here) are:

A revised health system that makes health regenerate so long as your character has food.

A new bow-and-arrow.

Slightly more complex combat

Improved user control over lighting

An expanded world-creator mode

Many people think of Minecraft as a world-building game, a wonderful se of virtual building bocks that people use to construct extraordinary interactive landscapes. The 1.8 "adventure" update, however, is supposed to give players more of a reason to keep playing. Notch has said that people get hooked by the immediate goal of surviving their first night in the hostile Minecraft world he has created, but he wants there to be more goals beyond that. As he explains in the video, he won't be adding a complicated story to the game, but there will be some basic quest goals, similar, he says, to what you might get in a Rogue-like.

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Take a look at the video for the full run-through. While Notch admits this update has gotten too big to go live all at once, he hopes to have both halves of it updated shortly after he gets home from PAX—and only once he can also get to a mysterious top-secret project. (Note: the "Carl" he refers to in the video is his colleague at his studio, Mojang.)

Enjoy the video, folks.

You can contact Stephen Totilo, the author of this post, at stephentotilo@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.