Earlier this year, we supported charity: water, an incredible organisation that’s on a mission to bring clean water to every person on the planet. You can read about the $10,000 donation we made here. But that’s enough.
Wait a minute, no it isn’t! 663 million people currently lack access to clean water (that’s almost 1 in 10 people), which makes the great work of charity: water absolutely essential. They want to bring clean water to as many people as possible, and we want to help them more.
So we teamed up with the excellent content creators Jigarbov Productions. They’ve crafted together a fantastic new map and skin pack, The Travelling Trader. Go to the Minecraft Marketplace on Xbox One, Windows 10 Edition, iOS, Android and Nintendo Switch and you can download it for free! Shall we watch a trailer of this terrific new Minecraft adventure? Let’s!
“But hang on,” I hear you cry. “Does this mean I get a free llama skin? Also, what does this have to do with charity: water?” Well, to answer both your questions, you actually get two llama skins, and as soon as The Travelling Trader has been downloaded from the Minecraft Marketplace 100,000 times, we’ll make a new donation to charity: water of $90,000. That’ll bring us to $100,000 donated, which means ten water projects supported by Minecraft!
Charity: water estimates that the number of people impacted by a $100,000 donation is over 3,300. So all you have to do is download a great map and skin pack, and you’ll help us help a fantastic cause! Every time we call on you to do something like this, you always smash the target in an incredibly short amount of time, and once you’ve downloaded the map 100,000 times, we’ll share the great news on Twitter!
Head to the Minecraft Marketplace now and thank you for helping us help charity: water!
I didn’t think one of the biggest stories of the year for TweakTown would be something covering Minecraft with ‘ray tracing’ style effects with the SEUS Renewed mod that uses path tracing that provides ray tracing-like effects. First we had screenshots and small videos, but now there’s a detailed video of Minecraft with the ray tracing-style effects and it looks awesome. The shader pack provides beautifully realistic lighting, shadow and reflection effects to shiny surfaces, light shafts, and more. The demo video from Digital Foundry was run on an Intel Core i9-7900X, 32GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Even with this horsepower running Minecraft with the path tracing effects at 1080p was still struggling to hit 60FPS. The team at Digital Foundry do an amazing job at showing off the different effects that path tracing brings to Minecraft, with one of the best uses seeing light hitting a wall, and then shining light again behind it causing different shadows to be cast. This can’t be done with pre-baked lighting, and is only achievable with path tracing or real-time ray tracing effects. It makes for a beautiful experience in something like Minecraft, which has otherwise basic graphics. This makes Minecraft the perfect playground for developers to play around with path tracing to see what real-time ray tracing would be like in a world where you can literally build it from building blocks right in front of you with real-time adjustments to the lighting. If you want to check more out on SEUS Remastered for Minecraft, download the mod, or support the developer – check out the Patreon page.
TechSpot regulars may recall that earlier this month, Minecraft — one of the most popular games of the modern generation — got its very own version of ray tracing in the form of a third-party shader pack. The pack adds “path tracing” rendering to the game, which creates effects that are remarkably similar to what we’ve seen in Nvidia RTX-powered titles like Metro Exodus and Battlefield V.
The shader pack adds reflections to shiny surfaces, light shafts, and more. To give us a deeper glimpse of the pack in action, Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia and John Linneman have decided to take viewers on a 30-minute in-game ray tracing tour.
Prior to publishing the video, Battaglia constructed a number of rooms, each of which were designed to show off the power of path tracing in a different way. We see specular bounce lighting as light pours into rooms and hits various blocks, and one room even shows the differing levels of reflectivity for various block types – light bounces of metallic blocks more easily than wool blocks, for example.
As Linneman says, this approach to creating ray tracing-like effects is more software-driven than hardware-driven, but it still takes a pretty big bite out of performance. Despite the beefy specs of Linneman’s rig — it was powered by an Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti, 32GB of RAM, and an Intel Core i9 7900X — he still struggled to achieve a smooth 60 FPS at 1080p.
Battaglia’s system was considerably weaker, with a GTX 1070, AMD’s Ryzen 1700X, and 16GB of RAM. As you might expect, his performance was even worse – indeed, he had to knock Minecraft’s resolution down to 720p and cap the FPS at 30 to make the game playable.
Apparently, even that level of playability is only possible because of the very nature of Minecraft: the entire world is made up of blocks, which aren’t very complex. They’re either deleted or existing and remaining still. With very few exceptions (such as sand or gravel, which fall straight down), almost every block in Minecraft is completely static.
Due to these unique qualities, if one were to try to implement this tech in another ordinarily non-performance-intensive game, such as Fortnite, there’s a good chance it’d be near-impossible to run on modern rigs without some form of hardware-based optimization.
Still, performance aside, it’s interesting to see Minecraft from such a different perspective. If you have a rig that can take full advantage of this mod (created by Sonic Ether), you can download it from the modder’s Patreon page right here (https://www.patreon.com/sonicether ) .
Undertaken by 13 members of Team Kyo that were part of the Minecraft Partner Program, they managed to recreate the entirety of Hyrule Castle from Breath of the Wild.
Not only did they manage to build the exteriors of the castle to a wonderful level of detail but also did a great deal of work bringing the interiors to life as well.
You will also notice in the video below, that this version of Hyrule Castle is actually pre-Calamity Ganon and is consequently not the ruined wreck you see in the game.
That said, I found traversing Hyrule Castle in the game to be both fascinating and somewhat haunting, not least due to the amazing musical score.
Anyway, this Minecraft rendition of Hyrule Castle is amazing and with any luck, we will see it become available on the Minecraft Marketplace at some point.
Like many a major media property, Minecraft is set to get its own movie. There have been plans for a Minecraft movie since 2014 — in fact, it was originally set to release next month — but now it seems some progress has been made with Mojang partnering with Warner Bros and a director attached to the project. That director is Peter Sollett, who has directed a variety of film and TV shows and is most known for 2008’s Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist.
Aside from the director, it was revealed by Mojang that it will be a live-action film. Not only that, but they revealed a basic — they don’t want to spoil everything, after all — storyline for the film:
We’ll tell you the story of a teenage girl and her unlikely group of adventurers. After the malevolent Ender Dragon sets out on a path of destruction, they must save their beautiful, blocky Overworld.Now, given the infamous track record of video game film adaptations, you might want to avoid buying tickets right away. But who knows, I was personally extremely sceptical about what seemed like the equally nonsensical idea The Lego Movie, and that turned out to be pretty great. Whatever the case is, we should find out on March 4, 2022, and of course, we’ll bring you other details when we know more.
We’ve got the full list of Minecraft achievements – check the list for guides to unlocking them.
It shouldn’t be too much longer until the final Village and Pillage update is out to players. In the meantime, the Microsoft Marketplace is running a Spring Sale today, featuring “up to 75% off” in-game items such as world, skins, textures, and other content.View image on Twitter
Spring is here, and with it – the Minecraft Marketplace Spring sale! Between April 19-21, get up to 75% off worlds, skins, texture packs and more. One of our biggest sales ever has new discounts every day, so spring into action and check it out!
The sales will run this weekend between April 19 and the 21, and each of the three promotional days will see a different set of sales. So, if you (or a friend or child) have been looking to spice up the game with a new texture or map to explore, now is the perfect time to try something new.
At least for now you’ll have something to do while you patiently wait for the rest of the Village & Pillage update—which will add raiding, Illager patrols, and many additional blocks such as the Campfire, Carrel, Smoker, and Stonecutter (which are all available though expirimental gameplay.
If you don’t yet have Minecraft, you can download it using one of the links below. And if you do, you can check out the Minecraft Marketplace from here to see what peaks your interest.
