Minecraft Redstone Update Extends the Tech Tree

Mojang’s latest patch brings Minecraft one step closer to the singularity.

Minecraft players have come a long way from punching trees. Redstone, the resource that generates electricity for the game’s craftable powered items, opened the door for complex logic-driven machines. Enterprising players have built functioning printers, binary calculators, and even recreations of Minecraft within Minecraft. If that wasn’t impressive enough, the game’s 1.5 patch will soon add a slew of new computational toys for your engineering pleasure.

Minecraft 1.5, nicknamed the Redstone Update, includes a handful of new craftable blocks, which players will surely use to blow our minds in new and interesting ways. Long-time fans may be disappointed by the lack of non-electric additions, but those will come in time: the Redstone Update is the first of several patches focused on majorly expanding a single feature of the game. These feature-focused updates are loosely scheduled to occur every two months.

Here’s a full list of the changes:

? Added Redstone Comparator (used in Redstone logic)
? Added Hopper (collects items and moves them to containers)
? Added Dropper (similar to Dispensers, but always drops the item)
? Added Activator Rail (activates TNT Minecarts)
? Added Daylight Sensor
? Added Trapped Chest
? Added Weighed Pressure Plate
? Added Block of Redstone
? Added Nether Brick (item)
? Added Nether Quartz and ore
? Added Block of Quartz, with half blocks and chiseled variants
? New command: /scoreboard
? New command: /effect
? Containers and mobs can have custom names
? Inventory management has been changed, for example you can drag-place items over slots
? Texture packs now have separate images for each block and item, and can have animations
? Nether Quartz Ore now spawns in the Nether
? Smooth lighting now has three settings (none, minimal, maximum)
? More detailed death messages
? Some hostile mobs now are harder in Hard difficulty
? Many, many, bug fixes
? Removed Herobrine

The update is scheduled to be officially released on Wednesday, March 13. For those of you who simply can’t wait to start working on your redstone-powered giant robots, you can grab the pre-release at Mojang’s website.

Source: Mojang