World of ‘Minecraft’ getting taller (and deeper)
MOJANG Studios, the developer behind Minecraft, is restructuring the genesis of Minecraft’s blocky world, changing how the sandbox game scales for its millions of players.
In a long-awaited update, appropriately titled Caves and Cliffs, the game’s engine will begin to form deeper caves, higher mountains for players to explore, and introduce more variations of flora and fauna to encounter. The company said it planned to release the update on November 30.
When someone starts a world in Minecraft, the game uses procedural generation to create the forests, rivers, caves and mountains across the map.
Over the past 12 years, Minecraft has introduced environments like deserts and oceans for players to explore. The developers at Mojang are expanding the upper and lower limits of the world in order to generate peaks and valleys that previously were not
possible in the game.
More than a 100 million people play Minecraft every month. The blocky, low-fi game is a decentralised collection of servers players can join and build from. Students at UC Berkeley once held a virtual graduation ceremony inside a Minecraft server during the Covid-19 pandemic. Players have built and rebuilt the famed Harry Potter castle of Hogwarts, Notre Dame, the Empire State building and even ancient Rome. It’s hard to find a well-known building that doesn’t exist somewhere on some Minecraft server.
“For a whole generation of kids, that’s kind of where they go,” said Kurt Squire, a professor at University of California Irvine who studies how games can be used to help learners learn. “It literally is the playground, the sandbox that they grew up in.”
Minecraft’s booming success is due, in part, to the game’s simplicity. There are no objectives or tasks. (There is a final boss, but it is optional.) You decide what to explore or build. But with every update, there’s a risk that the game becomes too complicated for first-time players to understand.
Agnes Larsson, Minecraft’s game director, said the team at Mojang Studios spent a lot of time thinking about that. The team want to continue to develop Minecraft for “many, many years” but Larsson said they needed to maintain the bedrock principles of the game – to keep it Minecraft-y, so to speak.
“We have something that’s amazing,” Larsson said. “It’s a lovely game but we can, of course, still add more things to it in the right way.”
Larsson is working on a creative direction for the game “to really help us evolve”. “What are new ways we can inspire our players to be creative in their own ways and come up with their own goals?” Larsson said. “How can we inspire more exploration or more storytelling?”
In addition to expanding the world height, the Caves and Cliffs update is redistributing how ore, like iron, copper and gold, will be generated throughout the game. Spelunkers who love to dig into Minecraft’s caves will ind massive, multitiered caverns with aquifers, hanging vines and dripping stalactites, depending on where they are on the map. And, Larsson said certain biomes would combine so a forest or desert could populate on the side of a mountain, for example.
Fans are referring to the update, technically listed as version 1.18 of the game, as Minecraft 2.0.
Larsson said that, with every update, the team at Mojang Studios attempted to provide something new for every type of fan – like, the builder, the explorer or the survivalist.
At the 10th annual Minecraft Live last month, Mojang announced next year’s update, The Wilds, wouldl introduce even more biomes, animals and blocks to the game, including a lost underground city called the “Deep Dark”. |