Minecraft’s Marketplace was able to hit such huge heights thanks in part to the summer sale, which ran through the first week of July. The Minecraft Team also launched some free content to celebrate that sale. Anyone could get the Summer Beach Party skin pack at no cost.Recommended videosPowered by AnyClipOcasio-Cortez Shares Road Trip Video Of Her Standing In Front Of Giant SequoiasPauseUnmuteDuration 0:37/Current Time 0:04Loaded: 38.81% FullscreenUp Next
But as for premium content, Toy Story was on top for the second month in a row. And I get that. Toy Story 4 was so good, so now waiting for that movie to come out on home video is excruciating. I’ll take Toy Story anything to hold me over, and Minecraft delivers exactly that with the Toy Story Mash-Up pack.
Let’s get to the charts:
Top 10 most downloaded in Minecraft Marketplace July 2019
9. Animals
1. Toy Story Mash-Up by Minecraft
Woody, Buzz, Bo Peep and many of your favorite toys come to life in this oversized mashup based on all the Toy Story movies. To infinity and beyond!
2. Furniture: Modern by Spark Squared
Decorate your home with over 350 furniture options. Mod your living room, bedroom, kitchen, and even your garden! Design your dream house like never before.
3. Lucky Blocks: Classic by Spark Squared
Test your luck with Lucky Blocks: Classic! Open the infamous [?] question mark blocks in this fun world and face exciting or potentially devastating results.
4. Military Base by Vaeron
Your duty begins today, soldier! Drive the troop transport into your base, use the multipurpose vehicle to cover tough ground, and fly the jet through the skies.
5. Party Island by Imagiverse
Take a vacation from the city to Party Island! Choose your own modern mansion and enjoy music at parties all around the island.
6. PureBDCraft by BDcraft
Dive into the exciting life of a marine biologist! Explore several ocean biomes while discovering amazing creatures.
7. Star Wars Classic Skin Pack by Minecraft
The Star Wars Classic Skin Pack features an assortment of over 50 heroes, villains, and rogues from the Galactic Civil War. Whether you pick a Jawa or the mighty Darth Vader, you can play as your favorite Star Wars characters from Episodes IV to VI, Minecraft-style.
8. City Living by Noxcrew
Get the full lifestyle experience with luxury apartments, office buildings, and even drivable vehicles. Pick your perfect home or take in the sights. Customize your world with brand new models, blocks, & textures. Comes with 30 free skins.
9. ANIMALS by Everbloom Studios
Discover tons of newly added animals in a massive custom world! Every animal has its own unique behaviors, animations and sounds.
10. Dinosaurs by Vaeron
Watch out for the dangerous T-rex, dive into the ocean to watch the Sea Rex hunt, and follow the herd of giant Diplodocus.
Top 10 highest grossing Minecraft Marketplace July 2019
8. Advanced Dragons
7. Animals
1. Toy Story Mash-Up by Minecraft
Woody, Buzz, Bo Peep and many of your favorite toys come to life in this oversized mashup based on all the Toy Story movies. To infinity and beyond!
2. Furniture: Modern by Spark Squared
Decorate your home with over 350 furniture options. Mod your living room, bedroom, kitchen, and even your garden! Design your dream house like never before.
3. Lucky Blocks: Classic by Spark Squared
Test your luck with Lucky Blocks: Classic! Open the infamous [?] question mark blocks in this fun world and face exciting or potentially devastating results.
4. Party Island by Imagiverse
Take a vacation from the city to Party Island! Choose your own modern mansion and enjoy music at parties all around the island.
5. Military Base by Vaeron
Your duty begins today, soldier! Drive the troop transport into your base, use the multipurpose vehicle to cover tough ground, and fly the jet through the skies.
6. City Living by Noxcrew
Get the full lifestyle experience with luxury apartments, office buildings, and even drivable vehicles. Pick your perfect home or take in the sights. Customize your world with brand new models, blocks, and textures. Comes with 30 free skins.
7. ANIMALS by Everbloom Studios
Discover tons of newly added animals in a massive custom world! Every animal has its own unique behaviors, animations and sounds.
8. Advanced Dragons by Pixelbiester
Take one of six dragons to the skies and become a legendary dragon rider! Surprise your enemies with custom attacks. Shoot fireballs and drop TNT. Explore three huge castles and the beautiful custom landscape.
9. PureBDCraft by BDcraft
Dive into the exciting life of a marine biologist! Explore several ocean biomes while discovering amazing creatures.
10. Dinosaurs by Vaeron
Watch out for the dangerous T-rex, dive into the ocean to watch the Sea Rex hunt, and follow the herd of giant Diplodocus.
The most advanced AIs today can perform select tasks with superhuman-like efficiency, beating the best humans have to offer at intricate games like Starcraft II and Go. But ask those same AIs to perform something outside of their area of expertise, and they’ll struggle. Creating an AI that’s a generalist is one of the next major challenges of AI research. And it’s something a team of researchers at Facebook is attempting to do by teaching an AI how to play a game.
This time around, however, the game of choice is Minecraft. According to Facebook, the simplicity and sandbox nature of Microsoft’s popular title make it the perfect training ground for a generalist assistant AI. In Minecraft‘s ‘Creative’ mode, players have been able to recreate complex structures like Star Trek’s Enterprise D with just a few simple building blocks. It’s that potential for almost infinite creativity with a small set of easy-to-understand tools, in conjunction with the difficulty of teaching an AI to understand natural language, that has Facebook spending countless hours on a private Minecraft server. The hope is to eventually create an AI assistant that can help people with their day-to-day tasks, which is something Facebook has been trying to do for a couple of years now.
In 2015, Facebook launched M, an AI-powered personal assistant within the company’s Messenger app, only to shut down the platform after two-and-a-half years. One of the limitations of M was that it frequently required human oversight to complete tasks. Its other issue was that, outside of a small handful of tasks, Messenger users didn’t use M a lot, limiting the AI’s ability to learn. With enough time and some tweaks, the company’s Minecraft AI could form the basis of a future version of M. In the meantime, if you’d like to check out Facebook’s Minecraft AI, it’s available to download.
Nvidia has revealed Minecraft awash in a coat of new pretty paint, with a new trailer on Monday that shows the before and after effects of Nvidia’s raytracing capabilities, with thoughts on the update by Minecraft’s development team.
Watch the trailer above to see all sorts of locales get the RTX treatment on Windows 10, including vibrant homes, glistening lakes, darkened tunnels full of glowing lava, and expansive caves with light filtering in from cracks above. We went hands-on to experience the improvements with Minecraft using RTX, and felt that it looks like an entirely new game. You can hear more of IGN’s thoughts in the video below.
The raytracing will include enhanced lighting, reflections, and shadows across the world, putting more depth and quality into the classic blocks that retain the same assets, but with better looking textures all around. Nvidia also mentioned that everything will be moddable to benefit players, which is a spot of good news after it was announced that the Super Duper Graphics Pack has been cancelled.
The RTX update from Nvidia doesn’t have an exact release date yet, but when it lands you can expect a free update that’s available to anyone using Nvidia cards in the 2060, 2070, or 2080 range (including the Super and Ti variants).For more on Gamescom, be sure to check out our Gamescom 2019 hub, and check out the whole show’s schedule for a clue as to what else we might be hearing about this week.
The latest update for Minecraft: Java Edition adds what Mojang calls “a large bug” – but don’t worry, it’s just an adorable honey bee. The new mobs are spawning as of the 19W34A snapshot, and they open up a whole bunch of possibilities for collecting honey and building a bee-powered farm.
Bees are neutral mobs that will keep to themselves unless you mess with them or their nests – if you get stung, the bee will lose its stinger and eventually die. Bee nests will naturally spawn in flower forests, plains, and sunflower plains biomes, and bees will seek out flowers, grab some pollen, and add a level of honey to the nest every time they return.
You can use a bottle on a nest to get honey, or you can construct your own bee hives using honeycombs and wood planks to build a honey farm wherever you want it. You can keep bees calm with smoke by placing a campfire near a nest or hive.BEST PC GAMING HARDWARE DEALS TODAYLogitech G502 HERO High Performance Gaming Mouse
Those bees will look even better with the official addition of ray tracing to Minecraft – not a bad trade for that cancelled graphics pack, all things considered.
In July the first closed beta for Minecraft Earth was released to select residents in London, Seattle, Stockholm, and Tokyo. Today Mojang’s augmented reality version of Minecraft has finally arrived on the Play Store as a pre-registration listing, and it would appear that another beta wave is going to take place next week. While Mojang hasn’t stipulated whether this will be an open or closed beta, a recent tweet from the official Minecraft Earth account points towards a sign-up page, so I’m guessing invites will still be necessary to get in, just like the previous wave.Now here’s the thing. It would appear that today’s pre-reg listing has little to do with today’s announcement of another beta round. So if you’d like to get into the next wave, you’ll want to sign up on Mojang’s official website, and if you’d like to receive a notification whenever the game is officially released on Android, you’ll want to click the pre-reg button in the Play Store widget below this article.
We still don’t know when Minecraft Earth will officially debut, though the numerous beta waves and today’s pre-reg listing should be a sign that we are inching ever-closer to that date, whatever it may be. Currently, the new Play Store listing states that in-app purchases will be included with the release, but since the title isn’t available yet, no prices are offered. Clearly, this leaves many of us with a lot of unanswered questions, so it’s my hope that the next beta brings along a few more clues. Finger’s crossed, maybe this time I’ll get in. If you’d like to try your luck, feel free to sign up for beta access on Mojang’s site.
We’ve been following the evolution of hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing for some time now here at Digital Foundry – and one of the most spectacular demos we’ve seen actually took the form of Sonic Ether’s RT shader mod for Minecraft, which brute-forced full path-tracing into the Java version of the classic Mojang title. It’s brilliant stuff, and although slow, it will work on any modern GPU.
But as good as it is, we had to wonder – what kind of improvement would we see with full hardware acceleration? What if Mojang itself incorporated full path tracing into the engine itself? The developer duly delivered at Gamescom 2019 and my colleagues John Linneman and Alex Battaglia played the early code, handing in the extensive deep dive into the demo found on this page.
Similar to our own work with the mod, the developers put together their own custom maps to showcase the effects of full path tracing within the Minecraft engine. In our video, you’ll get to see both of these creations. One of them showcases how the new technology interacts with the existing, older-style textures – which are typically based on 64×64 textures – but the video kicks off with a look at path tracing combined with higher resolution block art, reaching a maximum of 1024×1024.
Nvidia’s Gamescom trailer reveal for the path traced Minecraft was impressive enough, but in this extended playthrough, DF’s John Linneman and Alex Battaglia guide you through the entire content of the demo, showcasing various effects and explaining how they work.Subscribe to our YouTube channel
In all cases, light interacts accurately with the materials and conditions in place, to the point where the developers accidentally discovered that the classic camera obscura pinhole effect could be replicated in-game. But this is just one of many remarkable phenomena path tracing brings to the table – and in the embedded video below, you’ll see John and Alex run the gamut of the demo, experimenting with its various effects, and even pushing the implementation beyond its current limits.
And hitting those limits is easily possible right now, most because Mojang has only been working on Minecraft’s official path tracing implementation since April (coincidentally (?) when Sonic Ether’s Minecraft mod first appeared), so there’s still a long way to go before the RTX support rolls out generally. However, as a taste of how transformative full path tracing is, this is the most impressive demo we’ve seen – it’s a more total, more complete implementation in a game than anything else out there, even more so than the impressive Quake 2 RTX.
All of which is to say that checking out the video above is highly recommended! The DF Gamescom team sat down to talk with the developers in more depth, and we’ll be bringing you that interview soon, along the more coverage from the show.
