Mojang Live at PAX 2012 - Minecraft 1.4 New Features Announced

During their presentation at PAX 2012 in Seattle, Jeb and the rest of the Minecraft team revealed new features to anticipate in Minecraft 1.4 - The pretty scary update. Features include naturally spawning Wither mob (how to spawn - see video), mod API and new bug tracking system.

Mojang only had a 30 min slot at PAX this year but we learnt a lot in that short period. Even though Notch was absent from the panel, it was good to see Jeb and Dinnerbone showing the same enthusiasm for a game that was created over 3 years ago. It's still incredible how the bukkit team were sourced and hired based on their modding work for the Minecraft community - a great story.

We also got a great insight into future updates and features to expect in Minecraft 1.4.

Minecraft - Future Updates at PAX 2012

You can watch all of the features in the video but here's a summary of what to expect:

Minecraft 1.4 release date will be Halloween - end of October 2012

Yes, it's almost 2 months away but it brings back fond memories of the old Halloween update for Alpha in 2010. That particular update brought us a few surprises including the Nether, Ghasts, Pumpkins, Portals and Biomes.

The Minecraft 1.4 update will be called the 'Pretty Scary Update'

Nathan said that Minecraft 1.4 was going to be a decorative update (flower pots, item frames etc.) but because Halloween is a scary festival, the update would be called 'pretty scary' (intended as a joke in reference to both visually pretty and scary). This name is now official.

Wither mob can spawn when you collect heads dropped by skeletons and perform a sort of ritual

During the Q&A session, Nathan offered to give away his imitation Minecraft sword to anyone who could guess the question to his answer. Of course, it was about the new Wither mob and as everyone knows the mob only appears if you use hacked monster spawners. So how would the Wither spawn? Somehow, some guy guessed right and the Wither mob will not spawn in any particular biome but must be summoned by a kind of ritual.

Nathan explained that when skeletons (or other mobs) are killed they would drop heads. They're probably the same decorative skeleton heads we saw in Jeb's recent screenshot. So, you need to collect 3 heads and perform a kind of ritual (preceise details unconfirmed) to summon the Wither mob.

There's no limit on how many Wither mobs you can spawn

Players can perform the ritual as many times as they like, 1000's of times if wished.

New bug tracking software being rolled out

The new bug tracking system being developed by evil seph will allow the Minecraft community to report bugs and suggest features in a unified way. No need for multiple channels on the mineraft forum, Twitter or Reddit. Initially the bug tracking system will be launched for the Pocket Edition of Minecraft for iPhone and Android devices.

Render and performance improvements to make Minecraft run better on high end machines

Good news, there'll be even more performance improvements to the game. Erik Broes explained that Minecraft was originally written for low end machines so it doesn't run at full capacity on high end machines. This will be improved in future versions.

Minecraft for Xbox

In another interesting discussion, Jeb explained that the Xbox version of Minecraft would never be able to catch up with the PC version. We all knew that anyway, but here's the interesting part. Instead of trying to keep up, the Xbox version will now diverge and offer new features which are completely separate from the PC!

So, you'll now get Xbox only versions of Minecraft and Xbox only features of Minecraft. That's not a bad thing.