The Minecraft Better Together update revealed at E3 2017 is the epitome of multiplayer for the Minecraft community. Microsoft is spanning its reach not only across consoles and Windows 10, but bringing them all back together under one economy and collective Bedrock Engine. Which leads to some relevant questions about what happens to the money we’ve already spent on Minecraft.
If you’ve been enjoying Minecraft across platforms, you might want to hold off on making any further purchases until after the summer. With the implementation of the marketplace replacing dollars with new Minecraft coins, buying DLC and digital content for Minecraft is even easier. All of which will also be available cross-play with the Better Together update. But what will happen to those of us that have spent money on Minecraft via different devices?
We reached out to a Microsoft spokesperson for clarification about how the Minecraft Better Together update will affect current and future purchases.
OnMSFT: As we already understand it, the Better Together Update will be making Coins and DLC purchases reach across platforms to each Minecraft on each platform. This brings into question if purchasing Minecraft will be across platform as well. For example, if a gamer buys Minecraft on the Windows 10 Store, will that Minecraft key be available for other consoles or will that player need to purchase Minecraft core game separately for the other console?”
Players will need to purchase Minecraft separately for each device they play on.
OnMSFT: Furthermore, will previous DLC and Coin purchases on the Marketplace be consolidated into extra coins or will previous purchases be ignored? I.E. if I bought the Fallout 4 Mashup Pack for Windows 10 and for Xbox One console version, will one of those be turned/refunded into coins once the games are merged together? Or will the payment towards one of those packs be lost?”
Players will not receive coin credit for packs purchased on multiple devices in the past.
OnMSFT: Is Xbox Play Anywhere for Windows 10/Xbox One in the future?”
Minecraft is not an Xbox Play Anywhere title. With endless, randomly generated worlds, millions of players and an amazing amount of community content, the value that players get from Minecraft is second to none. We feel that there’s an incredible value our players are getting for the cost to buy Minecraft already.
According to Microsoft, Minecraft is a value for its price, so buying it individually on each platform shouldn’t be too much to ask for. The Better Together update will merge the Bedrock Edition for almost all versions of Minecraft (except PlayStation 4 and Java Edition) letting you play together and merge all of your purchased content under one marketplace.
Is the fact that Microsoft won’t refund any duplicated Minecraft DLC purchases before the fact controversial? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
The huge Better Together Minecraft [$6.99] update (or 1.2) is getting closer, and the developers continue teasing upcoming features. One of the new features is ravines, which make map generation much more interesting and create all kinds of possibilities for funny bridge-centered builds. We are also getting parrots, which can be tamed and will perch on your shoulder, turning you into a silly-looking pirate. The update is also adding jukeboxes and music discs, for those lonely, quiet nights of winter. Speaking of winter, temperature will now decrease with height.
The update will also give you the opportunity to play around with fireworks, as you can see in the gif above, and will also offer the possibility of starting new maps with Bonus Chests, which are very helpful. Finally, the crafting UI is redesigned to combine the classic crafting UI with regular recipe book style crafting, which should be great help for players. No word yet on when the update will release, but it shouldn't be too far off.
Local authorities have been “amazed to see that young women from slums could design as architects or urban planners”, according to the co-ordinator of a United Nations initiative using the video game Minecraft to get communities designing their own public spaces.
The Block by Block project is the work of UN-Habitat – the United Nations agency for sustainable urban development – together with the makers of the hugely popular world-building computer game Minecraft, Mojang.
Block by Block is a global UN-run programme in which Minecraft is used as a community participation tool in the design of public spaces, like this one designed for Dandora, Nairobi – the location of the biggest dump site in East Africa
Since 2012, they have used the game to engage communities all over the world — particularly young people, women and slum dwellers – in the design of their local public spaces, and have now reached more than 25 countries. Kenya, Peru, Haiti and Nepal are among the nations to have Block by Block-designed spaces.
Last month, Pontus Westerberg, coordinator of Block by Block, took to the stage at Made In Space, a three-day festival held at Space10 in Copenhagen's meatpacking district, to explain how the initiative uses Minecraft as a community participation tool in urban design for public space projects all over the world – particularly in poor communities within developing countries.
Communities are able to build into virtual landscapes that correspond to the real-life environment, as in this project in Mogadishu, Somalia, where a market hall has been built on a former waste heap
“They're quite stale,” said Westerberg, speaking about typical urban planning meetings in local communities. “Generally, a person will stand in a room in front of people who are listening. All the people in the room are above the age of 45 or 50. There are generally no young people, and not so many women.”
“In Kenya where I live, more than 50 per cent of the population is under 25, so finding ways to get young people involved in community space projects is crucial.”
This rendering shows plans for the second phase of the Market Hall development in Mogadishu, Somalia, where 20 years of civil war has severely limited the development of basic urban services
The Block by Block programme organises workshops with 30-to-50 people that live and work around the planned public spaces. Divided into groups of around three or four people, the local residents are taught how to build in the virtual landscape of Minecraft.
“Older residents who have never used computers before are taught by young guys,” explained Westerberg. “So you get this really nice intergenerational communication going on.”
After building projects in Minecraft, stakeholders from local government, the mayor's office, planners and architects listen to presentations by people who were part of the design process.
Mumbai is one city where Block by Block ran workshops with the people that live and work around the planned public spaces
Speaking about one particular project in Nairobi, Kenya, Westerberg said, “I spoke to the mayor of Nairobi and the head of the urban planning department after the presentations, and they were just amazed to see that young women from slums could actually design as architects or urban planners.”
The ideas from the presentations are put into a final report, which is then given to an architect, who translates the designs and ideas into architectural drawings.
Recent projects include a series of workshops in Hanoi where a group of teenage girls used Minecraft to come up with ideas to improve safety in their local neighbourhood. In Palestine, the organisation worked with 50 teenagers to design a park in East Jerusalem, and in Kosovo an old derelict market space was turned into a public square.
Participants in Mumbai collaborated on this park design in Gautam Nagar – one of 45 resettlement and rehabilitation colonies across the city. The walls surrounding this colony have now been painted with advice about saving water, the environment and waste disposal
Minecraft is the world's second best-selling video game of all time, with more than 121 million copies sold worldwide. In a virtual landscape, players use textured cubes to build constructions. There are no specific goals set for the player to accomplish, so what they do in the world is up to them.
Using the game, players have recreated real and fictional locations from various time periods, including a 1:1 street layout of Lower Manhattan in the 1930s and the continent of Westeros as featured in George RR Martin's Game of Thrones novels.
In Nairobi, Block by Block participants imagined a public space with a skate park. Based on the proposals from the community, a detailed design, including the materials to be used, has been developed for costing and construction
Jose Sanchez, the developer behind another architecture-focused video game, Block'hood, told Dezeen last year that the medium was becoming an increasingly important tool for designing cities.
A group of participants in Nairobi proposed street lighting for their scheme
“As architects, we have been trained to think of local scales: small, medium, large and extra large,” he said. “But today we face global issues and we need new tools to address a new kind of scale: a planetary scale.
“By using games, we can engage a global audience in the problems that architecture is facing.”
In a few weeks, and more precisely up to August 25, players with a Nintendo Switch will be able to try out the first season of Minecraft: Story Mode. But if everything goes well, other titles of Telltale Games should follow up.
Minecraft: Story Mode Season 1 is currently the only game Telltale has announced for Nintendo Switch, but Head of Communications Job Stauffer did not deny the possibility of seeing other titles of the company on the hybrid platform of the house of Kyoto.
It was at GameSpot that Job Stauffer, director of communication, expressed the interest of the developer on the new machine of Nintendo:
“We haven’t quite announced [Minecraft: Story Mode Season 2 for Switch] but we certainly hope to continue things on that platform; we’re big fans.”
“It wouldn’t be unheard if more of our series also made it to Switch; we love the platform. It’s kind of perfect for what we do. All of our games are the same on mobile as they are on consoles. And for a mobile console [like the Switch] it’s pretty awesome.”
The release date for Minecraft: Story Mode Season 1 on Nintendo Switch has not yet been communicated.
In recent weeks Stauffer also stated that Telltale is discussing a new intellectual property, however, there are no announcements about it. “An original, new IP is definitely still in our future,” Stauffer told Gamespot. “It may not be as immediate as the next few things we have coming up. We haven’t been able to say a lot about it in the last few years.”
What series of Telltale Games do you want to see happen on Nintendo Switch: The Wolf Among Us, Batman, The Walking Dead, or Guardians of the Galaxy? Let us know about it in the comments below.
We remind you that the first episode of Minecraft Story Mode’s second season will arrive on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and mobile devices running on iOS and Android in a few days, on July 11th.
Microsoft has been slipping fun Easter Eggs into Windows 10’s Insider builds, with the ninja cat meme being only the most obvious manifestation of this trend.
Another Reddit user yesterday spotted and posted a new easter egg where Windows error window read “Windows is opening a portal to another dimension”. This is potentially a reference to Minecraft, which Microsoft now owns and has been pushing for mixed reality and education purposes.
While Easter eggs are popular with fans and some customers, not everyone is enamoured by the thought of Easter Eggs.
In a 2007 post detailing the amount of due diligence done when adding an Easter Egg, Microsoft’s Larry Osterman branded the practice as irresponsible.
But it didn’t matter – we still shouldn’t have done it. Why? Because it was utterly irresponsible. We didn’t tell the customers about it, and that was unforgivable, ESPECIALLY in a network server. What would have happened if there had been a buffer overflow or other security bug in the Easter Egg code? How could we POSSIBLY explain to our customers that the reason we allowed a worm to propagate on the internet was because of the vanity of our deveopers? Why on EARTH would they trust us in the future?
That being said, Easter Eggs are still fun for both developers and users alike, and this particular one has only appeared on an insider beta build so far.
Spotted any other Easter Eggs in Windows 10? Let us know in the comments below.
It's no secret that Apple is betting that AR, and specifically its ARKit, will be a game-changer for the iOS ecosystem, and after seeing some recent examples, I can see why the company is so confident. In the first video, developer Matthew Hallberg shows off his Minecraft [$6.99] AR app that lets players place Minecraft blocks in the real world and then proceed to break them just like they would do when playing the actual game. The video shows how easy it is to create whole Minecraft worlds using ARKit in a way that makes them believable and immersive. Pay attention to how the lights he places interact with the blocks; it's pretty cool. I can see for instance people making Minecraft mazes for a kid's birthday party.
In addition to making gaming applications, developers are also using ARKit to create applications that offer all kinds of extremely useful every-day tools. For instance, the video below shows off an extremely accurate AR measuring tape that you can use to measure objects and spaces in your environment. While this measuring tape might look like a simple little thing, think about all the tools that can easily be replaced through accurate AR, and also think of how many times you had to look for that silly measuring tape just to quickly see if what you're buying from Amazon will actually fit in your house. And keep in mind that the ARKit is still in beta and has been out for barely a few weeks.
And there's an even cooler application of the accuracy of ARKit when combined with Minecraft; designing real buildings for public spaces. You might not remember this story, but last year the United Nations announced that it's utilizing Minecraft to allow communities to design new public spaces in places like East Jerusalem and Africa. With ARKit, projects like those can be done on the actual spaces they will end up occupying, further engaging communities and blurring the digital and the real world. I'm very excited to see what else developers can come up with once ARKit is out in the wild and once the iPhone 8—with its purported AR focus—releases. Any ideas for any great applications?
