Minecraft 1.6 hands on: when hatches go bad

The Minecraft 1.6 patch landed earlier today. We dived right in, eager to start playing with the new hatches and maps added by the patch. Spiders died, cows exploded and lava spills threatened to destroy everything. Read on for an account of our first hour in Minecraft 1.6, and a video showing how you craft the new maps.

I place a pressure sensitive pad next to a hatch and jump onto it. The hatch opens up invitingly in front of me with a satisfying clack . Bingo. Time to dig a hole so deep intruding creatures stumbling into it would never be heard from again.

But then I realise I'm too lazy to dig such a hole, and resort to plan B: lava. Five minutes of hasty digging later and my masterpiece is complete. My house is only slightly bigger than a cardboard box, but it's a cardboard box protected by a moat of lava, protected by spring loaded trapdoors.

I lie in wait. The sun sets. There's an unmistakable hissing sound. A spider's about. I hear it before I see it, hopping towards me, straight towards my brand new lava moat. Then, at the last moment, I realise I've made a terrible miscalculation.

Spiders are wider than I thought. Fail. I stab the arachnid to death and go to bed. The next morning I head out into the sunshine to craft a map, another addition made by this morning's 1.6 patch. The video below shows you how to craft them, what they do, and features the abortive lava moat in action. We're certain you can do much, much better. Animals were harmed in the making of this film.

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.