After his attendance at E3 and meeting a lot of fans, Notch, the creator of Minecraft returned to Sweden. On his blog, he announced that he was working on Minecraft Beta 1.7, which he is calling the Adventure Update.
He is keeping all of the details under wraps, which isn’t too unusual for him since he likes to keep a few surprises in store for players. He says that this update is designed to further flesh out and tweak the game, as well as reward combat and exploration more.
What this means is very speculative, he could be adding experience systems, skill systems, or other errata commonly found in games. For those not in the know, you have 20 HP in Minecraft and a max of 20 points of armor, which isn’t an awful lot. It’s not hard to recover HP but a few monsters can easily kill you.
One detail he did release on his twitter account however is that chunk updates at sunrise and sunset have been elimminated. To explain that, a chunk update is the readout of any block that has changed in the last second. Basically, he has optimized sunrise and sunset.
It’s very rare that he will be keeping an entire update secret, but it should be one of the most major ones since the addition of Redstone.
