Witches! Make sure you’re avoiding the splash potions they’re throwing at you! They can make you move slower or even poison you. Spooky stuff!
Armour dying. Tired of the usual look? Why not try the other 10 000 000 colours? Put your pants in the cauldron together with a dye and enjoy the new design!
Item frames. Show off your adventurous loot or put up one of your maps to remember the endless journeys.
Pumpkin and mob head hats. I know it is a bit early for Halloween, but at least now you can prepare properly! :)
And numerous bugs has been squashed, and unfortunately some have probably been sneaking in as well.
Some bugs in the game are more annoying than others. So we decided to take care of some of the bugs that were good candidates for winning a “most popular bugs” contest. We are very sorry for closing tickets with a large fan base. These issues will be missed, but we are relatively sure that their fans will find other interesting bugs to follow.
We are also getting very close to the first 1.9 pre-release. Please make sure you vote on the most severe bugs in the bug tracker if you want to make sure we look at them before releasing 1.9.
Notable changes:
Better riding mechanics for boats, horses, minecarts and saddled pigs
The elytra texture now defaults to the cape texture if no custom texture is uploaded and the player owns a cape
Some sounds are sounding better now
Some sounds are sounding different now
Most sounds are still sounding exactly as before
Most entities in the game should now move much smoother
Villagers are not making fun of players anymore when nobody is around
Cobalt is available to download for Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Steam for Windows. It costs $19.99 / £15:99 / €19.99. Stop reading this and download it right now!
Update: Minecraft snapshot version 16w05b is now available in the launcher.
This weeks snapshot contains only few fixed for bugs reported on the bug tracker. We started looking at the Realms integration to make sure everything is up to date with the changes that were introduced during the lifetime of the 1.8.x versions.
We also started automating more of our internal workflows. It doesn’t make much sense to mention that here, because it’s nothing you can see in the game and it only makes our lives easier as developers, but for the sake of having a slighly longer post this week I decided to keep it in here.
Notable changes:
Fixed some bugs
Tweaked boats a bit more
Hidden a small recipe change
Endermites or now 2.44% more happy than before, especially in boats
Yet another week has passed, lots of bugs have been inspected, turned around and hopefully fixed. We’re inching ever closer to 1.9 and our focus is on stability, performance and the remaining polish.
This week’s snapshot is all about boats! We did another iteration on them so please have a swim with them (watch it, they can sink!).
As always we’d like to thank everyone who is reporting bugs, testing the snapshots and sending us feedback on our changes. While we get closer to 1.9 this will become more and more important. Please continue doing it and thanks to you all!
Baby zombies now have a 15% chance to want to be a jockey. If they want to be a jockey, then upon getting near a player they will look for one of the following to ride before attacking the player (Adult Wolf, Adult Ocelot, Cow, Pig, Sheep, Adult Chicken, Spider or Adult Zombie).
Regular screenshots are now full .png files.
Made Ghast eyes, Blazes and Magma Cubes Cores bright!
News from a slightly different, arguably smarter, place today. We’re announcing Minecraft: Education Edition.
Of course, every Minecraft player learns essential life-skills like tree-punching and good Creeper-defence but, when used in the right way, Minecraft can help people around the world to learn lots more.
Over the past few years, educators around the world have been using Minecraft to explore subjects that might not spring to mind when you think of our block-based game. Since 2011, MinecraftEdu – a version of Minecraft built for the classroom – has been used in over 40 countries. Lots of people have learned loads of things since then.
Microsoft has acquired MinecraftEdu and is building upon its proven success to create a new version of Minecraft that’s dedicated to learning. The new title will be available as a free trial this summer. All existing MinecraftEdu customers will get the first year of Minecraft: Education Edition free of charge.
It’s going to be a collaborative thing. Development of Minecraft: Education Edition will be shaped by a community of educators thanks to education.minecraft.net. The site will host lesson plans and give Minecraft: Education Edition users somewhere to discuss ideas and provide feedback. We know teachers can be a rowdy bunch, so we’re looking into the best ways to moderate the forums as I type. Wish us luck.
For more on Minecraft: Education Edition, check out this post (which comes with bonus quotes), or visit the official page.
: minecraft 
