Jeb puts out the pre-release for Minecraft 1.8 for “Expert Users”

Jeb of Mojang has done the unthinkable and released a version of Minecraft 1.8 early, it’s still buggy, but it works. I’ll have the install instructions at the end of this post. This isn’t malware, it’s a legit release by Mojang and Jeb himself has commented on the Reddit thread. He says little more than a smirk.

When he says “Expert Users”, he is talking about people who know how to work a .jar file and also update Minecraft manually. The version has a few game-crashing bugs, but it gives players a chance to root out bugs in 1.8 and beat the life out of some Endermen.

Jeb uploaded an update file to the official Minecraft website for people to find and download provided they had the savvy of navigating a site directory blindly. The changes in the game are absolutely huge. Firstly, the features of the world which was quite limited has been greatly expanded, rivers and ravines are now commonplace, and an unknown plantable item called Ender Pearls has been added. Abandoned mineshafts can also be found if you dig around enough, and NPC villages are also around if you look hard enough.

A smidge of info on the Endermen: just looking at one is a death sentence because of their high attack power of 2.5 hearts and are nearly impossible to escape from. Endermen are vulnerable to water, and the copious amounts of water and deep oceans means that Endermen can be easily eluded by keeping an eye on them and moving backwards to the nearest body of water. Or you can just dump a bucket on them! While on the subject of mobs, passive mobs like sheep and pigs now run away when you attack them, making them significantly harder to kill without the aid of a ranged weapon or patience.

The lighting system appears to have received an upgrade, being far smoother and more subtle in the transitions between the different light levels. The aesthetics of Minecraft in both generation and looks have been upgraded substantially, making this one of the biggest content updates in the history of the game.
There are several things that will crash the game. For example, furnaces no longer work properly and are prone to crashing, and fires going from log to log can also be a bit of a disaster.

Installing this is simple enough, first you have to have Minecraft installed, it’s only around $20 and worth the money. Second, if you have not done so with Minecraft, run the game once, and close it, this will create the Roaming and appdata folders.

Now, navigate to C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\bin, in here you’ll find the file Minecraft.jar. Now for the last step.

Download the .jar file from Minecraft’s website, and place it into the \bin folder, and overwrite it. When you start up Minecraft, you’ll be playing the pre-release 1.8 in singleplayer mode.

If you use a Mac, go to /Library/Application Support/minecraft, if you use Linux, it’ll be in /.minecraft/bin, that’s the magic of Java, it’s cross-compatible and works on all operating systems.

That’s all it takes! It has performance issues but these will likely be ironed out in time, along with all of the bugs and glitches that come with the nature of pre-release testings. Great, there goes the rest of my weekend. Again.