In celebration of Sonic the Hedgehog’s 30th birthday, Minecraft gets an all-new DLC, complete with procedurally generated locations, whether it be a standard forest trail or beach route to the iconic Green Hills Zone and Chemical Plant Zone. Just like its SEGA counterpart, there are rings to collect. Sure, they may be the blockiest rings you have ever laid your eyes on, but they get the job done and there are also plenty of obstacles to dash past as well as bosses to defeat. Read more for a video and additional information.
Mojang Studios recently partnered with Play Mechanix to develop Minecraft Dungeons Arcade. This new cabinet offers a four-player co-op experience with a fresh approach to the standard version, with a limited number of machines being distributed across North America for testing, and more being released later this year. This arcade version contains the familiar multiplayer, dungeon-crawling gameplay, and adds a new take on all of these modes. Read more for a video showing what Minecraft Dungeons is all about and additional information.
Soon, Minecraft gamers around the world will get to experience their self-created worlds more brilliantly than ever when the RTX moves to open beta on Windows 10 this week, complete with realistic shadows, lighting as well as vibrant colors. NVIDIA is also offering players six new Minecraft worlds to download for free from the Minecraft Marketplace, allowing them to experience what is possible when real-time ray tracing is turned on. Read more for three videos and additional information.
PippenFTS knows that you can build just about anything in Minecraft, but what about the Earth to scale? It’s possible, thanks to two mods: Terra 1-to-1 to convert data from sources like Google Maps into Minecraft maps and Cubic Chunks, which reformats the game’s map layouts to remove the height limit for blocks for recreating mountains and valleys at their proper heights. Read more for a video and additional information.
Countries around the world are going into lockdown mode to slow down the spread of COVID-19, and that includes Poland. The Polish government wants to help the restless students make good use of their time during the mandatory 14-day quarantine, so the Ministry of Digitization is launching a Minecraft server. It’s a part of their Grarantanna program, which is a series of online activities meant to both entertain and educate students who can’t go to classes during this time. Read more for a video and additional information.
In several authoritarian countries, the government censors news sources and books, while “Minecraft” is not. So, Reporters Without Borders enlisted 24 builders, who used 12.5 million virtual Minecraft blocks, to build The Uncensored Library in the popular online computer game, packing it full of information that people in those countries, and elsewhere around the world, can access. Read more for two videos and additional informatioon.
The YouTube Rewind 2019 video looks back at all the biggest things that happened on the platform this year, and unlike last year, they included fan favorites like PewDiePie and Minecraft. Unfortunately, that hasn’t changed the number of dislikes, as the video already received over 3.3-million at the time of this writing, with just 1.6-million likes. Read more to see what all the controversy is about.
Minecraft has been described as one of the most influential and greatest video games in history, thanks to the ability for players to use a variety of different blocks in a 3D procedurally generated world. NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX ray-tracing technology, which uses real light sources to accurately illuminate the environment, gives this title a modern visual makeover while keeping the same aesthetics as the original. Read more for an extended gameplay video of the ray-tracing on Minecraft.
Microsoft announced today at Minecon 2019 that their augmented-reality mobile game Minecraft Earth is set to be launched in early access during October. Right now, the closed beta is only availability in a few large cities, including Mexico City, London, Seattle, Stockholm and Tokyo. For those who’ve never heard of this title, the AR game is centered around building structures, gathering resources, crafting and exploration. You augmented reality structures in collaboration with other players, gather resources using in the in-game map, and access “Adventures” (puzzles, tasks, virtual locations with entities to defeat). Read more for a video and additional information.
Facebook has teamed up with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant for the world’s most popular video game, Minecraft. This isn’t an AI that will help you automatically build worlds, but rather one capable of multitasking and helping users with everyday tasks outside a gaming environment. Read more for a video and additional information.