The state of Minecraft

There are manly men with powertools in our office, punching floors and walls in an attempt to make things look better. As a result, we haven’t been able to work from the office this week, and worked from home. Jens spent most of the week working on a new mob; the wolf! You can tame it and order it to follow you around, and it’ll work as a pet. They’re fairly rare, but they won’t despawn once you’ve tamed them.

I worked on the achievement and stats system. One design issue was dealing with offline mode and synching the achievements once you get a connection again, but that’s been solved. We’ve got a couple of people in the office who don’t like achievements in games at all, so the goal is to design something that they’re fine with.

Achievements will NOT be chores like “cut down 10000 trees”, but rather challenges like “ride a pig off a cliff”. Stats, however, will be used to keep track of how many trees you have cut down. The long term plan is to show achievements and stats from the profile page on minecraft.net as well, in case you want to brag.

Just keep in mind that because you can design your own levels and run your own servers, people will be able to cheat with achievements and stats!

Oh, and here’s a vid of the wolves: [youtube]www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9Lp9p5yjuo[/youtube]

I’ve been able to focus on development a lot the last couple of weeks, and we’re hoping to get the new update out soon. It will include the wolves, the ability to change your spawn point, and a rather ambitious statistics tracking and achievement system. Once that update is out, we’ll spend some time figuring out exactly what to do with the modding, which should result in a nice modding API.