With the 2014 Game Developers Conference having come and gone, many likely assumed Mojang would release a Minecraft 1.8 preview build this week, but it seems we will have to settle for a Minecraft 1.7.6 pre-release instead.

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Anyone who was hoping to find a new preview of the Minecraft 1.8 Update waiting for them after school/work is probably going to be disappointed this afternoon, but that doesn't mean we're going to have to wait another seven days for a new Minecraft release of some kind. Instead, the dev team has decided to release an early build of Minecraft 1.7.6, an incremental update that will finally clear the way for name changes via a new unique ID system that I can only assume will replace the current database sometime later this month.


I don't know exactly what stopped Mojang from releasing another preview of the Minecraft 1.8 Update this week, though Minecraft programmer Nathan "Dinnerbone" Adams did say the team wasn't quite ready to show off the content they've been working on recently. Sadly, it seems we'll have to wait a few more days to find out what exactly that means for the community, though Adams' tweet seems to suggest the next snapshot will be more-focused on the game code than new Minecraft content.


In addition to name changes, the latest Minecraft patch will also continue to tweak systems that the team hopes will improve players' performance while making use of the Minecraft Realms service. As with any Minecraft update, 1.7.6 also includes a handful of system optimizations, plus fixes for a handful of bugs that are still causing problems for the Minecraft community.


The good news is, provided your server and/or game client has already been tuned to Minecraft's developmental snapshot branch, installation of the Minecraft 1.7.6 update should take place automatically the next time you launch the game. Servers will update on their next restart, whether that be scheduled or initiated by admin; however, the Minecraft team says failure to restart could mean you'll need to check your black/white lists for nonexistent players and/or other issues.


The bad news is that Minecraft 1.7.6 isn't compatible with Minecraft 1.7.5, meaning servers/clients will have to be running the same version to create a connection, and the snapshot could even break a couple of the mods used by members of the Minecraft community. Fixes for such issues typically arrive pretty quickly, and setting up a profile to run the latest Minecraft snapshot is easy if you haven't already, but consider yourself warned all the same.

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Thanks for reading!

~Decisive