After seven pre-releases of it, Minecraft 1.8.2 was finally released officially yesterday bringing with it all the changes from the pre-releases as well as a few other minor ones. However, if you opened up your Vanilla client you might notice something odd… it’s already been replaced by 1.8.3 in what must be one of the quickest version updates seen in Minecraft since the days of it’s pre-Alpha.

The reason for the quick and sudden update was a good one though. Mojang say that unfortunately a serious bug managed to ship out with the 1.8.2 server client and it causes crashes of the game upon world load. So really the update had to happen quickly to fix the problem, meaning that 1.8.3 is not so much a new version but a bug patch in disguise.

Speaking of bug patches, 1.8.2 brought a fair share of them too. The main one dealt with the fixing of explosive physics after a July snapshot made them go a little wonky, and another one notable only because it was a little funny was the bug fixes to the textures rendered on Mooshroom udders and mushrooms. There were also general performance tweaks and improvements, but the main point of 1.8.2 was the addition of a feature that had been asked for by players for a long time. Name changes to accounts finally became available on Feb 4th through the page of your Mojang account.

1.9 is still a mystery mostly at this point, although Mojang have revealed that they’re working on it now and that it will include changes to the Ender Dragon to make it behave more like the console version of the beast.

After having talked about implementing it for over a year now, saying that some barriers stood in the way of changes for a while (such as applying another unique identifier to accounts to make sure bans and whitelisting still worked), Mojang finally announced a few weeks ago that you would finally be able to change your displayed username for Minecraft accounts.

Today this update was rolled out halfway through the day, with a little change option being added to the pages of Mojang accounts everywhere. Many people have already managed to change their old usernames that no longer suited them to newer ones that better reflected themselves, so Mojang obviously did the bug testing before they rolled it out which is nice. Not to say that there won’t be at least one, but I do love to see a new feature work as advertised straight from the off.

Now all I have to do is regain access to my first Minecraft account again so I can change the username and use it for mischief… ¬u¬

The pre-release for Minecraft’s 1.8.2 was released in December, just before the Mojang people went off to enjoy their holidays. When they came back they were back to work on it, and have released a few updates to fix bugs that were cropping up.

Today saw the release of the fifth which among other things fixed a few issues with beacons, especially to do with beacons inside the Nether. Most other bugs were to do with wrong data being stored or crashes, but interestingly there’s two to do with Mooshrooms and incorrectly displayed textures/models. One being the model of the mushrooms they have on their backs, the other… their udder texture. How strange.

If you want to grab it, wait a little bit. Some code was slightly broken with this update and Mojang are going to release a patch soon to mend it. Once they have mended it though, I recommend creating a separate profile to try out pre-release and ‘beta’ versions of the game. After all, these are unfinished versions and believe me, incompatibility between game version and saves can get a little nasty and could end with the loss of the save file.

Full bug fix list below:

• Items placed into a beacon are lost upon destroying it or reloading a world
• Beacons work inconsistently in the Nether
• Keyboard input causes mouse look to stutter or jerk (Fixed in LWJGL 2.9.3)
• Tellraw crashes if clickEvent is an URL without “http://”
• Mooshroom udder texture does not display correctly
• Mooshrooms incorrectly display custom mushroom models
• Beacons in Nether need clear path to “sky”
• Beacon stops working at a certain height
• Can’t select any of the previous created worlds in Java 8 (Fixed by installing Java 7) (Windows 8)
• Able to hit a block behind out of range entity.
• villages.dat stores player names instead of UUIDs
• Preexisting vines on east and west sides of blocks are rendered at the wrong face of the block (floating)
• Glass Pane image flipped
• Huge Mushrooms Generate Incorrectly
• Hopper: java.lang.NullPointerException: Updating screen events
• Various particles near world border rendered incorrectly.
• Hoppers grab items from minecarts, that aren’t standing directly above them
• Changing owner of Enderpearl doesn’t work.

Today on their site’s blog Mojang announced that something Minecraft players have been waiting for is soon about to make its way to the game!

… No, it’s not the Mod API. It’s the ability to change your in-game name!

The change is due to be rolled out on February 4th and as long as you already have a Mojang account it’s free to do. The option to change the name will be a little link on the Mojang account page with the ‘change’ option next to your current in-game name.

You can only grab unused names though, and once you change your name you can’t do it again for another 30 days. But no worries if you want to change back, names previously in use are held for 37 days before they become up for grabs so as long as you’re on the ball you won’t lose your username if you regret the change. Mojang are also freeing up old unpaid account names for use, so if you have one now’s the time to go and buy it!

The system gives each account an identifier that’s separate from the display name so if a user’s been banned for a server they’ll stay banned, as well as accounts retaining inventories and other things across name changes. Mojang hope that the system will be simple enough for mod users to encode with for their own mods.

Mojang blog “Announcing Minecraft name changes”: [x]

It was a little overshadowed by their release of Scrolls, but Mojang have managed to put out the first pre-release for 1.8.2 of Minecraft, just before the holidays. It isn’t a large update though, just one that gives us some performance tweaks and bug fixes.

The main bug fixes are to three reported issues. Firstly Spectator Mode players were still getting hostile mobs aggroing on them, following them about and trying to attack them; despite being incorporeal and invisible. That should no longer happen now. The second related to explosion forces being directionally biased, pushing harder in some directions than others. The third fixed some physic issues with explosions too, so certain TNT cannons should no longer be able to shoot ridiculously far.

As well as the update including the normal things, Mojang also says that it includes “cookies, milk and of course lots of hugs” and warns us not to open our gifts before Christmas before wishing us all a happy holidays.

I look forward to seeing how Minecraft develops in the new year, especially after Microsoft took ownership of Mojang. It should be interesting at least.

Mojang blog “Minecraft 1.8.2-pre1 – Christmas Gift Edition”: [x]