It looks like a good Minecraft news week all around. First, we got the tweet below from Minecraft: Pocket Edition [$6.99] developer Tommaso Checchi, who pretty much called the Beta season for update 0.12 over. If you haven’t been following MCPE‘s development, every new update usually goes through weeks-long beta testing on the Android side of things before popping up on the App Store once finished. Once the beta testing is over, it usually takes very little time for the update to appear on the App Store, so hopefully we should be getting the 0.12 update on iOS soon. If you don’t know anything about the 0.12 update, MCPE is about to get a huge overhaul as it’s gradually brought to parity with the PC version.
We’ll get the Nether, Nether portals, Nether fortresses, Sprinting, Sneaking, Hunger, revamped touch controls, potions and brewing stands, enchanting, rain and snow, controller support, cross-play with the Windows 10 edition of the game, and much, much more. If you want to see the changelogs from the beta testing, go here.
The other interesting Minecraft news is that Minecraft: Story Mode, Telltale’s take on the Minecraft franchise, will be playable for the first time at this year’s PAX Prime. This will be the first time that Telltale trusts its new baby to public hands, and my hope is that it means the game is coming along nicely and should hit our devices relatively soon. Telltale is known for not spending too much time between announcement and delivery (although they’ve been slipping when it comes to delivering later episodes of their games on time). While many are reserved when it comes to Minecraft: Story Mode, I’m very excited to get my hands on it, and hopefully that won’t be too far into the future.