Minecraft 1.4 Update Review

I've decided to do something new with this blog...Minecraft!

I woke up this morning, hours before Hurricane Sandy is going to strike the east coast and I said to myself, "If I'm going to make this blog personal, I'm going to write about something close to my heart and the hearts of 8 million people and counting. Minecraft. Minecraft is an online game that is basically a sandbox world  - meaning you, your friends and anyone else in the world can play it however you see fit. This is like building with virtual Legos. There are rocks and ores and various other resources in this block land with which you can build a fort, a castle, a house, a tower, or anything at all you can imagine. That's the real point of Minecraft: to be transported into a world of your very own making, without global warming and wars and those kinds of things.

On Thursday, the 25th  I was watching a video about the upcoming Minecraft update and was shocked to find out that it was released the day before! I started exploring right away.

Here I present some screenshots of what's new in this update, All you, the viewer, need to do is scroll down and look and have your mind dazzled by this improved world of blocks. The update is impressive.

A lot of things were added into the update so I'll try to keep it short and simple.Bats have been added to the Minecraft universe, and I saw a bunch but they move so fast that I couldn't get any clear screenshots.  It seems they're just there to add to the cave-y creepy underground feel. Like most other creatures, bats spawn in caves and other dark places.

Witches have also been added. They are hostile creatures that will attack a player with various throwable potions of poison and instant damage. A creature to be feared! I did manage to get a picture of the witch. They look a lot like a regular NPC villager: they wear shirts that hide their hands and they have gigantic Squidward-like noses on their ridiculously large heads. I could not stop laughing when I discovered that they have a small wart on that Squidward nose. Here's a screen shot of the witch...

Do you see the wart on the right side of the nose?

Also added into the game were two vegetables, one of which I'm very grateful for (keep reading). Here's a screenshot of the first veg, the carrot. 

You can tell these are carrots by the little bit of orange sticking out of the ground. Carrots can be planted and farmed over and over and over, so if you have one - you have infinity.

Same goes for the next vegetable - infinity. And if you want to know why I like the this vegetable, I'll tell you. My ancestors span quite a few heritages. I'm Polish, Welsh, English, German, Austrian, French, and Irish. The last heritage is why this vegetable is dear to me. Potatoes were added into the game! So even when I'm playing Minecraft I can embrace my inner potato-loving Irishman. Here's a picture of the potatoes in Minecraft:

The list of new stuff in this update just keeps gorwing. Flower pots! If you play Minecraft and like to garden, then just craft yourself a flowerpot and be the Father Lawrence of Minecraft . (Anyone see the Shakespeare reference there?) Here's a picture of the flower pots and all the plants that can be planted in them.

Heads were added into the game as well. Not to say that the Minecraft characters didn't have heads before this update... these heads are decoration blocks that look like the heads of creatures in the game. Here's the screenshot, and don't worry, no Minecraft creatures were hurt in the making of this blog post.

These heads can also be placed on the player as a hat so they can look like any one of these creatures. And a simple solution has been added into the game for fixing a Minecrafter's worst nightmere, the inability to fix broken tools. In the picture below, my golden sword is nearly broken. I honestly want to keep my sword so I'll use the newly added anvil tool to fix it.

The anvil also alllows you to rename items. So I'm renaming this gold sword a "butter sword" because golden tools have lame durability of butter. Also gold ingots look uncannily like sticks of butter.

Now as I add more gold ingots the durability of the butter sword goes up, up and away! Repairs do cost experience points (XP), but it's worth it

As seen in the picture below, it will cost me 4 gold ingots and 13 XP to fully restore my butter sword.

Also in this update you can now dye leather armor any color you want. Here's a picture of my character in a great looking Irish green set of armor.

This is a great picture because it also shows how players can now take any item they want and frame it. That's how I made the insignia in the background Also, he's holding the nether star which is used to craft beacon blocks. I'll tell you about those in a future blog post because I think I just tore a ligament typing this post... just kidding. The basic point of the beacons is to make a beam in the air which creates a zone around it giving the player a boost like jumping higher or being stronger. Now there are a lot of things that I didn't cover in this post. But that's because I want you, the viewer, to got to minecraft.net and buy Minecraft 1.4 to explore the new possibilities. I even hyperlinked it for you... I'm so nice :).