PAX 1.8 Preview-Review Part 3: Mechanics and Other Stuff



Filed under: September 6, 2011, 7:11 pmFiled under: Uncategorized

Last in my series about the 1.8 update shown at PAX.

Background: I’m a giant Minecraft fan, and I was picked as one of 12 to volunteer at the Mojang booth at PAX. All day Saturday I was watching people play, and I got a few chances to talk to the devs and ask questions. (And have lunch with Notch, where I had to restrain myself from freaking out)

Disclaimer: I can only comment on things I saw and answers I got straight from the developers. I have kept away from most other media on the situation, so I don’t taint my facts and opinions.

Mechanics

Experience/Stats

Probably the biggest difference (game mechanic wise) between 1.7 and 1.8 is an experience meter. This single change turns Minecraft from a sandbox world builder into an actual game. I say this because there is now a goal (level up) rather than no real objective, other than just don’t die.

When you kill things, experience orbs drop out! Collected orbs fill your experience bar. Once the bar fills, you gain 3 sill points and the meter resets. At PAX, you couldn’t do anything yet with the skill points, but from what I heard from Notch, the prospects are exciting.

While at lunch, as people walked up to talk to Notch, the most frequently asked thing was “What will be be able to do with skill points?” Every time he answered “Well, what do you want them to do?” After talking with him and hearing him talk with others, I think I have a good idea of where skill points are going.

Skill points will most likely be used on a very small set of core abilities, around 6-8 of them. Notch said that a branching skill tree wouldn’t feel right in Minecraft, and I agree. Some possible examples are things like Mine Speed, Run Speed, Jump Height (!!!) and Max Health. All I can say is “Yes.”

The last thing you need to know about skill points is that you lose them ALL when you die! This means everything you upgraded too. Notch says he wants it to take about 2 hours for you to get to max “level” after death. This also finally adds a real death penalty.

(Not out until 1.9)

Food Meter

The food meter is the thing I’m least excited about, just because it will impact the way I play the most. That doesn’t mean its a bad addition, just different.

In 1.8, the food meter is used to show how hungry you are, or how much energy you have left to do things. When you dash or run, your food meter goes down. I think other movements make it go down as well, but I wasn’t able to really tell, since it moved so slow. Eating food refills the meter. Jens confirmed via twitter the behavior of the food meter when it is empty: “If the the food bar is empty in MC 1.8, it will slowly drop your health to 5 hearts on easy, to 0.5 hearts on normal, and kill you on hard.” I bet that on Peaceful, it just doesn’t do damage to you.

Farm Animal Breeding

This feature was talked about, but not shown at PAX. The devs were saying that when you kill things, they won’t just respawn, and that they would add the abiliy to breed farm animals. MinecraftChick said she would be sad to eat all the babies. Not sure if this feature will even be in 1.8, or how soon it will be added. Not sure of my opinion on it yet.

UI Changes

Main Menu

The new main menu has an awesome background now. Just wait and see!

Ingame Options

Brightness Slider: Freaking finally! On the monitors we were using, all the way dark made it impossible to see at night, and all the way bright made it look pretty much like day time at night. This will be great for when I play on my TV, so I don’t have to manually change the brightness.

FOV Slider: Field of View Slider! It goes from “Normal” all the way up to “Quake Pro.” This slider controls the angle of your field of view. This might help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_view

World Gen

When you create a world, you have some new options.

Creative/Survival: Pick the mode you want to start in.

Under more options, you have more options:

Generate Structures: Turn NPC villages (and other things?) on or off for that word. This is great for all the people who think NPC villages ruin the feel of Minecraft.

World Type: This option was greyed out, no idea what it will be! Maybe something like single biome worlds

Creative Mode

Creative mode has gotten an awesome overhaul. Rather than a really old world gen and access to all the block types, you get everything! The world is generated the same as in Survival mode, there are monsters, dungeons, you have access to all the blocks and all the items, and you can fly at will. Basically, there is no health and your inventory screen has been replaced with a Too Many Items type menu. You can double tap space to engage flying mode, then use space to go up and shift to go down. Double tab space again to turn off flying mode. You can fly as high up as you want because the height limit doesn’t stop you, and you accelerate a bit as you fly, so you can go really fast.Of course, you also have instant mining.

Notch says he didn’t implement a way to change a map from Creative to Survival, but said that it would be easy enough to change the config file if you really wanted to.

Bugs: I forget which, but at least one of the craft-able items was missing. Jens was watching and chuckled that it was missing. I wish I could remember which. Possibly flint and steel.

The other bug was with picking up items. Even though all items are infinite, you can still stack things if you drop something. This really doesn’t change anything, it just looks weird and bothered me at the demo.

END

Thats it for 1.8 update stuff. It might be out Thursday, but I think we have a better chance for it coming next week. Hope you have enjoyed my preview-review. Stay tuned for more Minecraft stuff, got some stuff in the works. Follow me on Twitter (@Protato_) for the link as soon as the next post it out.