Minecraft Beta 1.3 - New Features - Beds, Half Blocks and Smaller Save Files

The latest major update of the Minecraft game brings us up to version Beta 1.3. New features include building beds, optional lighting engine, more save slots and even some half size blocks to build with. We look at each of the new Minecraft features in detail.

Yes, we're still in Beta but Minecraft is racing along nicely. Each of these major versions always brings something new to Minecraft. Beta 1.3 is no different..

Minecraft Beds

These beds actually do more than provide a resting place for your tired legs after a hard days crafting and exploring. Basically, if all players on the map use a bed to go to sleep, the game jumps to the following morning immediately.

A nice feature than could save hours of sitting in the dark each night!!

In case you are feeling particularly lazy, you can't use the Minecraft beds during the day!

How to make a bed in Minecraft?

It's pretty easy really, just follow the usual Minecraft crafting technique and use:

4 blocks of wooden planks + 4 blocks of wool (any colour)

Half sized blocks

A big change to the Minecraft fundamentals here.

As the name suggests, these blocks are only half the size of the normal Minecraft blocks. Half sized blocks increase your construction options in Minecraft by giving you the chance to build in those tight corners or barely inaccessible places.

There are just times when a half sized block fits better!

Whitelist on Minecraft servers

Keep track of whitelist players on your Minecraft server using the whitelist command:

enter "whitelist <cmd>" where cmd is "on", "off", "add <player>", "remove <player>", "list" or "reload"

Easily add, remove or view the list of Whitelist players.

New save format

Save files are now much smaller in size. Rather than the usually 200MB sized files, we're only talking about 30MB or so. A massive difference to keep your hard drive cleaner.

Old maps might need to be converted to be saved in the new Minecraft format.