Hints about a major new addition to the game of Minecraft have been floating about recently, and yesterday Mojang have finally revealed the nature of the addition in a video demonstrating its use. Simply, you’ll be able to generate your own custom worlds with much greater control than ever before.

Coming in update 1.8, the new function allows a player to alter the settings of a newly generated world via 16 sliders, as well as controlling the spawning of villages, dungeons etc. by strictly defining how many spawn or even if they will spawn at all. You can also set a new sea level for the world. Included with this update are a set of premades that Mojang have made to allow players to get certain types of world without having to experiment with the sliders first (this includes a world made of mountains as well as another made mainly of islands and ocean).

All of this means that as soon as the game updates to include this new feature, players will have an even greater control over the worlds they spawn, being somewhere in between the usual world-spawn Minecraft uses and the use of a tool like Voxel Sniper or MCEdit to make a custom world that fits with whatever the player has in mind for that world. And as someone who often wants a certain thing from her Minecraft worlds, yet also enjoys seeing the random way the game creates its landscape, I see this as being a very exciting thing indeed.