A group of people are working on a Minecraft map that is poised to become to largest Minecraft map project ever.

In its third incarnation, the project named Aerna, will be a massive map that spans many virtual km² populated by towns, castles and virtual terrain that is designed to mirror real-life lkand formation project contributors have seen in their real-life day-to-day. Aerna will be created with lore, quests and even a town-building function.

The map’s size will be 102400 x 51200 blocks, and will take up an estimated memory size of about 84GB when finished. The map is due to be finished within a couple of years, but the people behind the projects have put together a devblog that they’ll be updating so you can stay up-to-date on how the build is going if you’re interested.

Aerna devblog: [x]

Today, for those of you who are not aware, happens to be the birthday of Mr. Dinnerbone, of Mojang and Minecraft-making fame. And that means that we lucky Minecraft PC players get a new snapshot. Because “how birthdays work inside Minecraft” apparently.

The new snapshot is once again another mainly optimisation-based snapshot aimed at squeezing every last FPS out of your computer and the game of Minecraft. “Major optimizations to client rendering. It’s magical!” but also adds a few small things to the game to boot.

The two big game-based changes are the addition of Banners (even if Mojang aren’t going to tell us how they work, we’ll figure it out) and that Creeper, Skeleton and Zombie heads are now available in Survival. Lighting bugs have also been ironed out (which might mean the end to those random dark patches you need to punch to get the lighting to work right) and the final line reads “Crafting cuddles now requires one extra hug in the recipe.”

Pretty sure that last one is a joke. Maybe.

Snapshot post is here: [x]

The news has just been announced that Battleline Hardline, the latest installment in the Battlefield series in which you take the action from the battlefield of martial combat as a soldier to that of the city streets as a police officer or criminal, has had its release date pushed back to some time in 2015.

While originally scheduled to be released in a matter of months, DICE and Visceral said they have pushed back the release to work on a number of things the feedback they got from the Beta brought up. This includes multiplayer “innovation”, single-player story depth and stability, the last one being of gigantic importance after the problems that the last installment Battlefield 4 had even months after its launch and the reputation it gained as a result.

“This has been a focus for our team since day one and we’re going to be using the extra time to continue to optimize the game for a stable launch,” said DICE VP Troedsson, saying that the team learned a lot from Battlefield 4, more from the Hardline Beta and that the extra time would give them a chance to find and squash those issues before the game’s actual launch.

As of about an hour ago, Hearthstone’s single player adventure expansion, Curse of Naxxramas has launched to all players of the game.

The expansion will be downloaded upon opening the game launcher, and during the launch event which will last through to sometime in Early September (although a concrete end date hasn’t been announced) the first wing of the expansion, The Arachnid Quarter, will be available free to all players who have already unlocked all 9 of the playable Hero classes in the game.

The expansion has a further 4 wings to play, which can be purchased with in-game gold (700 per wing) or with real money (5.99 EUR/ 4.99 GBP per wing). Blizzard is also offering package deals to buy more than one chapter at a time for a slightly reduced price.

If you want to go fight the bosses and undead hoardes though, wait a little while. Currently both the North American and the European servers have been experiencing problems that are causing them to crash as the servers are being taxed with the player surge. We will update when both servers are back to normal.

Today another bunch more of the new Naxxramas cards were revealed to us on the Hearthstone Facebook. Again they’re all very ‘death’ related, but there’s a bit more variety now in the effects they have:

Zombie Chow
Minion, 1 mana cost, 2 attack and 3 health. Deathrattle: Restore 5 Health to the enemy hero.

Wailing Soul
Minion, 4 mana cost, 3 attack and 5 health. Silences all your other minions upon summoning.

Unstable Ghoul
Minion, 2 mana cost, 1 attack and 3 health. Taunt, Deathrattle: Deal 1 damage to all minions.

Stoneskin Gargoyle
Minion, 3 mana cost, 1 attack and 4 health. Restored to full health at the start of your turn.

Spectral Knight
Minion, 5 mana cost, 4 attack and 6 health. Can’t be directly targeted by spells or Hero powers.

Sludge Belcher
Minion, 5 mana cost, 3 attack and 5 health. Taunt, Deathrattle: Summons a 1/2 Slime with Taunt.

Nerub’ar Weblord
Minion, 2 mana cost, 1 attack and 4 health. Battlecry minions cost (2) more.

Maexxna
Legendary Minion, 6 mana cost, 2 attack and 8 health. Destroys any minion it damages.

Mad Scientist
Minion, 2 mana cost, 2 attack and 2 health. Deathrattle: Put a Secret from your deck into the battlefield.

Kel’Thuzad
Legendary Minion, 8 mana cost, 6 attack and 8 health. Summons all friendly minions that died that turn at the end of the turn.

Haunted Creeper
Minion, 2 mana cost, 1 attack and 2 health. Deathrattle: Summons two 1/1 Spectral Spiders.

Echoing Ooze
Minion, 2 mana cost, 1 attack and 2 health. Summons exact copy of itself at the end of the turn it is played.

Deathlord
Minion, 3 mana cost, 2 attack and 8 health. Taunt, Deathrattle: Opponent gets to put a minion from their deck onto the battlefield.

Feugen
Legendary Minion, 5 mana cost, 4 attack and 7 health. Deathrattle: Summons Thaddius if Stalagg has also died this game.

Stalagg
Legendary Minion, 5 mana cost, 7 attack and 4 health. Deathrattle: Summons Thaddius if Feugen has also died this game.

Thaddius
Legendary Minion, 10 mana cost, 11 attack and 11 health.

Also, two new card backs have made their way online – one as a prize for beating Naxxramas and the other next month’s Season cardback:

Curse of Naxxramas will launch on July 23rd. Have any of these cards excited you? Tell us in the comments below!