Like many of you, I have sunk hundreds of hours into Minecraft over the past eighteen months, and have grown pretty accustomed to the regular updates of both little tweaks and epic new features alike. It was just part and parcel of the Minecraft experience and so, before its release, I wasn’t following Mojang’s Beta 1.8 update particularly closely. Cool, a creepy new enemy that you shouldn’t look at and some houses. Sounds interesting, sure, but nothing game-changing, right? So I loaded up a new game, more curious to see what these Endermen were like than anything else and, before I knew it, five hours had passed. Something happened in 1.8 I hadn’t anticipated: I relapsed. I fell back in love with Minecraft.

It isn’t just the numerous new features, but how they all fit together in a way they never did before. Playing Minecraft no longer feels like experimenting with a stack of clunky, disconnected systems but, finally, like playing a singular game. Old and new components alike have been polished and redesigned to fit together in one slick, seamless experience.

The increased polish hits you the moment you load up the game. The brown, earthy, lo-fi title screen that has been around since the earliest alpha days has been replaced with a blurred heli-cam panning across a landscape. Both the multiplayer and single player menus have been overhauled. Previously visited servers are now remembered and listed along with the number of free player slots, and more options are available when commencing a new single player world. Most notably, you have the option of choosing between a creative level (with flying and unlimited blocks) or a traditional survival level.

It is the players of survival mode that will notice the improvements of 1.8 the most. Most significant is the addition of the hunger bar, which has several repercussions. Food no longer restores health but restores hunger, and a full hunger bar means your health will recharge automatically, much as it already did in peaceful mode. Hunger will deteriorate slowly over time, but even faster if you exert yourself too much by jumping, fighting, or sprinting (more on that in a moment). The hunger bar has a double-edged effect. On one hand, you will find yourself planning before an adventure away from home, stocking up on food from your no-longer-useless crops. On the other hand, you will find yourself more willing to take risks in combat. Where before a single skeleton would nearly kill you before you could get close enough, now you can afford to charge a group of them, take a few hits, and recharge your health afterwards.


Other athletic moves have been added, too. You can now sprint, block, and perform critical hits. Bows no longer just launch arrows but instead must actually have the string pulled back while the camera zooms in. An experience points system has been added, too, that Mojang have hinted in future releases will allow these abilities to be upgraded. Further, food no longer disappears from your hand into your stomach but is actually nommed by the character. Together, all these things give a far greater grounding of the character in the world, living and surviving. What this adds to the experience of survival mode can’t be understated.

Aside from how you interact with the world, the world itself has changed dramatically, too. A variety of new biomes and environmental elements give you a whole new reason to go explore beyond known lands. Large gouges in the earth expose deep chasms to the sky; huge mountain ranges rise over treeless plateaus; abandoned mineshafts, infested with spiders, honeycomb between natural caverns; underwater alcoves, just visible from the surface, tempt you towards the ocean floor in your hunt for treasure.

But more impressive still than the new biomes themselves is how all the terrains—old and new—fit together. In past versions, worlds have felt like a clunky patchwork of snow, desert, and grass, but now the world is stitched together seamlessly with gentler gradient shifts from one biome to another and elaborate river systems slithering between them. The lighting has been given an overhaul, too. Torches now flicker and throw softer light while night is no longer black but bathed in hauntingly beautiful moonlight. All this combines so that worlds no longer feel like levels but, truly, like worlds.

All these improvements (and many others I haven’t mentioned) combine in brand new possibilities. My most breathtaking moment so far was finding a giant gorge at the bottom of the ocean. I almost drowned in my repeated attempts to get to it before popping out into a long, deep, slither of a cavern with waterfalls cascading down the ocean walls. I explored for hours, got lost in an abandoned mine, and was dreadfully aware that just ‘digging up’ to the surface was not an option for getting out of here. Many hours later, half dead from hunger and barely surviving off rancid zombie flesh, I found my way back to the cavern. Looking up, I could just see the surface of the ocean and my little boat floating atop it. But closer, in the darkness, were eyes, lots of eyes, blinking and looking at me. I hadn’t been so terrified in a videogame since, well, since the first time I played Minecraft.

More than any update that has come before it, 1.8 lends Minecraft the feeling of a nearly complete game. It’s almost there. You can practically taste the pork chops. “But Minecraft has always felt like a ‘complete’ game!” you might be arguing. Sure, despite its persistently unfinished state, Minecraft never really felt incomplete. It’s always been playable and enjoyable. But 1.8’s cohesiveness has retroactively made all previous versions of the game feel incomplete by comparison. Before I played 1.8, Notch’s ‘release date’ for Minecraft of 11/11/11 seemed like a silly joke. Now it is a date I am actually excited for.

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