We recently got an update on the next Minecraft film, A Minecraft Movie Squared, during Minecraft Live over the weekend, and in it we saw some familiar faces, a couple of teases, and heard about the upcoming build competition.

"We're so excited to be back in beautiful New Zealand shooting the sequel to A Minecraft Movie," Jack Black told fans during the showcase. "There is a lot of new in this movie and a massive team hard at work taking this production to the next level." He then went on to introduce the "newest addition to our Minecraft family," Matt Berry.

Now, Berry was in the first movie, cast as the villager Nitwit, and Jennifer Coolidge's love interest. But I doubt he'll be reprising that role: Instead it seems he could be taking on a much bigger part, possibly the mysterious and sinister Minecraft urban legend, Herobrine. This only comes to mind as Berry is handed a jumper during the Minecraft Live event similar to the one Jack Black wore while playing Steve, but he could also just play another Steve.

Later on in the event, actress Danielle Brooke, who played Dawn in A Minecraft Movie, announces that “we are taking you so much deeper into the Minecraft world. New biomes, new characters and new mobs along with some of my favourites." We also got to see some concept art such as cute cubed polar bears.

But the biggest news for fans during this section of Minecraft Live was the announcement of a new contest, which is tied into A Minecraft Movie Squared—and a chance to have their work appear in it.

"We are planning an epic build challenge with amazing prizes," Jens Bergensten, chief creative officer at Mojang, said. "The winning build will actually appear in the movie or the end credits of the movie. We'll also set up private screenings for the finalists. All you need to do is create something awesome in a custom map; we've picked four biomes that are relevant to the movie which should help inspire your builds. We'll select the finalists, then we'll go back to the community for the final vote, and yes, there will be a cape up for grabs."

Minecraft has shared the first features of its third game drop of 2026 at TwitchCon, and while we still have a lot to learn, we do know it'll feature an entirely new forest biome: the dappled forest. After the Chaos Cubed update focused on bringing a new and exciting biome to the underground, I for one am excited to have somewhere new to explore in the overworld, especially given the autumnal aesthetic the biome will take on.

As shown in the reveal during Minecraft Live at TwitchCon, the dappled forest will consist of poplar trees with orange, yellow, and red leaves, as well as dirt blocks covered with leaf litter, new red shrubs, and brown mushrooms. You know, all those classic, cosy, fall features. The addition of poplar trees also brings a new wood set, which is a warm grey colour when broken down into planks and slabs.

However, between the trees you'll also find abandoned camps, which are an exciting new structure. It looks like these camps will consist of a tent-like building made from wool stairs, another entirely new block Minecraft is adding, as well a few chests or barrels to loot. If anything though, they might just be a nice place to rest your head if you're out at night and don't want to dig a 3x2 hole in the ground to hide in while you wait for sunrise.

It's just nice to have a brand new forest biome which doesn't contain a threatening mob to explore. I did love the addition of the pale garden and the Creaking in 2024, but sometimes you just want a cosier adventure in Minecraft, and it looks like dappled forest aims to add just that. You never know though, a horrid monster could be added before the drop is officially released and make me eat my words, but at least for now it feels a little more laid back.

The bad news is that the dappled forest is still in very early stages of development, so it's not available to test just yet. With that said, this biome will come to testing "in summer", which hopefully means we'll get some more information on the other features sooner than we think too. If you need any ideas though, Minecraft, a raccoon would be a really cool and suitable addition for this biome. Just saying.

A Minecraft Movie released in Spring 2025 and was an enormous success: even the iffy reviews couldn't stop it from chicken jockeying its way to almost $1 billion over its theatrical run. That kind of number made a sequel inevitable, and the production has started filming in New Zealand.

Returning star Jack Black, who plays Minecraft's Steve avatar, has marked the occasion by posting a rather lovely painting of himself to Instagram (thanks, GR+). It depicts the actor as Steve, perched atop a comfy leather chair and holding a blocky flame in his hand, with the caption "and so it begins." There's also a skull on the floor, which is a nod to some of the in-game paintings that can be found in Minecraft.

The painting is oil on panel and was created by Swedish artist Kristoffer Zetterstrand, who is also behind 40 paintings that can be found in Minecraft. Zetterstrand also posted some more detailed shots of the painting, and the final image of his post shows the artist in his studio with multiple other Minecraft paintings on the wall, which may just be works-in-progress but could also be a tease for their appearance in A Minecraft Movie 2.

The New Zealand Herald has been breathlessly reporting on the presence of various Hollywood talent in Auckland. Obviously Black is returning, as is co-star Jason Momoa and director Jared Hess, and Jennifer Coolidge has apparently been spotted on-set. The only new star confirmed thus far is MJ herself, Kirsten Dunst, who will play the character Alex and very honestly said she jumped at the chance to be in a film "where I don’t lose money."

I doubt anything can stop A Minecraft Movie 2 being a commercial juggernaut, though it may struggle to replicate the real-world virality of the first movie's chicken jockey moment, which had cinemagoers chucking popcorn in the aisles and even, in one case, taking a live chicken to a screening. Even Mojang itself eventually threw up its hands and added the chicken jockey to Minecraft.

Another lightning-in-a-bottle moment was Black's ditty 'Steve's Lava Chicken,' which at 34 seconds became the shortest song ever to crack the Billboard Hot 100, with my young son contributing to its success by playing it approximately three billion times. A Minecraft Movie 2 is due to release on July 23, 2027.

I'm pretty sure everyone has a group of friends they actively avoid playing Minecraft with, solely because you know the second you leave your chests or base unattended it will be wrecked and ruined. Don't get me wrong, I love a little giggle with my pals as much as the next person, but the number of times I've lost an inventory full of valuables because of a prank my friends have pulled have been enough to stop me from playing for a while in the past.

From elaborate piston traps to good old-fashioned TNT, the creative bounds of messing with your friends have no limits in Minecraft, and the upcoming Chaos Cubed update will inherently make this worse through adding the ability to craft geysers. With a magma block, a potent sulphur block, and a little pool of water, you can now create a blast of water that will send an unsuspecting player hurtling into the air.

This could be incredibly useful if you want to build some sort of launch point so you can take flight with the Elytra equipped, or if you need to send mobs away from your base in a flash. But I just know I'll step out from my home after spending hours preparing for an expedition only to be sent flying into the air before hearing my friends cackle down their mics. It's inevitable at this point, and I've already come to accept it before the update releases.

Outside of launch pads and pranks, I'm sure there are plenty of ways you can make use of geysers too, and frankly I'm excited to see how they're used by players once they roll out officially. There's bound to be plenty of elaborate machines I'll desperately try to recreate before failing miserably and no doubt losing all my XP in the process. That's part of the fun of new features like this though.

You don't even have to wait to see what the geysers are capable of if you don't want to. All of the features previously shared from the Chaos Cubed update, alongside the geysers, are available for testing in both Bedrock and Java editions, so if you want to start playing around and see what you can create, you're free to. Maybe I need to start mastering the geyser before my friends have a chance to, that might stop me from meeting my demise time and time again.

Valve risks fines of up to AU$825,000 a day if it fails to respond to a transparency notice issued to it by the Australian government's eSafety Commissioner. According to a statement released by the regulator, Steam is "reportedly a hub for a number of extreme-right communities", and must explain to Australia how it is "identifying, preventing and responding to these harms".

Valve isn't the only gaming organisation under fire: Roblox, Microsoft (for Minecraft), and Epic Games (for Fortnite) have all been served transparency notices as well.

"We’ve seen numerous media reports about grooming taking place on all four of these platforms as well as terrorist and violent extremist-themed gameplay," eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said. "This includes Islamic State-inspired games and recreations of mass shootings on Roblox, as well as far right groups recreating fascist imagery in Minecraft.

"Media reports have also pointed to games in Fortnite gamifying the horrific events of the WWII Jasenovac concentration camp and the January 6th US Capitol Building riots, while Steam is reportedly a hub for a number of extreme-right communities."

I've reached out to Valve for comment and will update if I hear back.

Concerning Fortnite, Epic Games said in a statement that its rules "prohibit extremism, child endangerment, dangerous or illegal activities and threats of real world violence. The islands mentioned in the story violated our rules and we took action against them in 2024."

It continues: "Epic’s text chat filters remove mature language including hate speech, and our systems automatically report potentially high-harm interactions in text chat with players under 18 so we can take action. Fortnite has built-in protections for younger players including high-privacy default settings for players under 18 and voice and text chat are off for players under 16 until a parent consents. Using Epic’s Parental Controls, parents can customise their family’s experience including choosing who their child can communicate with."

The notice has been served by the same Australian government organisation responsible for forming new Age-Restricted Material Codes which, in theory, require age verification measures to be implemented to prevent under-18s accessing adult material. While that rule has been in force since March not everyone has implemented it, despite the threat of penalties "up to AU$49.5 million". Steam hasn't implemented any such measures. Nor has Rockstar, according to AFR, though Sony is in the process of rolling them out.

Sony is using Yoti for its age verification checks; other platforms, like Roblox but also Substack, use Persona, which was backed by Founders Fund, an investment firm co-founded by Palantir's Peter Thiel. As I've written before, keeping children from accessing adult material is important, but surrendering personal information—including photo ID—to third-party companies is a legitimate privacy concern.

Still, the eSafety Commissioner isn't interested in how these things are done, only that they're done.

It's certainly not the first time Valve has faced criticism for allegedly allowing extremist material on Steam. A US senator took Gabe Newell to task for it in 2022, and yet another US senator did the same in 2024, deeming Steam an "unsafe place for teens and young adults".

It takes a lot for a Minecraft mod to impress me these days, such is the abundance of third-party addons and expansions for Mojang's digital LEGO set. So it says a lot that the trailer for the recently released Create Aeronautics mod made me catch my breath a little bit. This huge addon lets players build and pilot fully functional vehicles across the game's angular landscapes, allowing you to construct anything from offroad vehicles to enormous airships.

An addon for Minecraft's already substantial Create mod, Create Aeronautics has three key strands that facilitate its vehicular construction. The first is what the modders refer to as "Simulated", the fundamentals of the mod that facilitate vehicular construction. These include new block types, redstone components and other necessary tools, like the ability to use slime to stick different components together. It basically gives Minecraft the kind of contraption-building tools you'd see in a game like Besiege.

The second element is the eponymous aeronautics section, which introduces the key components necessary for creating flying machines. These include propellor bearings that let you create prop planes and helicopters, burners for building hot air balloons, and special floating blocks designed to create lift. Alongside aerial vehicles, tools like propellers will also let you build powered boats and ships, meaning you're no longer restricted to using that implausibly fast wooden rowboat.

Finally, there's the "Offroad" section dedicated to creating terrestrial vehicles. This allows you to build engines, suspensions, and that rarest of phenomena in Minecraft's world, round(ish) wheels. As the name suggests, the main purpose of these tools is for creating all-terrain vehicles, but as shown in the trailer, you could also use them to build combine harvesters to mechanise your crop farming.

Create Aeronautics is available to download now. As the title suggests, you'll need the broader Create mod installed to play it, as well as Sable, a mod that adds a physics pipeline to Minecraft and allows groups of blocks to interact with one another.

Minecraft gets bigger every year and keeping track of all its updates can feel like you've got an unsorted chest in your head. Keep up with what's coming to base game Minecraft next with our guide to the upcoming Minecraft game drops right below. Further down you can peruse all our Minecraft favorites, from the best mods to texture packs and seeds. If you're just joining the world of crafting, walking a kiddo through setup, or returning yourself after years away, scroll further down for our setup guides and basic how-to guides on Minecrafting.

Next Minecraft update

Chaos Cubed is the next Minecraft update

The best of everything in Minecraft

Minecraft getting started guides

How to get started with Minecraft

How to find rare resources

How to tame Minecraft creatures

How to ride Minecraft mounts

How to tame more Minecraft mobs

The Minecraft umbrella holds a whole host of games and a movie starring Jack Black at this point, but few of Mojang's experiments in other genres were quite as good as Minecraft Dungeons. It might have been 'baby's first Diablo,' but it seemed to garner more fans than its so-so action-RTS cousin—and if you're among those fans, it's a good day for you: A sequel is coming very soon.

The news came during today's Minecraft Live showcase in the form of a brief teaser trailer that shows the game's voxel-based fantasy realm under fire once again. A narrator recaps the story thus far, saying that "with peace restored, all was well until it wasn't." Sounds like justification enough to bash some monsters up for loot.

There's no gameplay footage to go off, and the new Steam page just shows screenshots from the new cinematic, so there's not much to get excited about just yet if you're a Minecraft Dungeons layman. Still, this announcement shows that Mojang hasn't shied away from spinoffs due to Legends' mixed reception, and should please any fans of Minecraft lore itching to dive back into Dungeons' lighthearted fantasy world.

The original didn't take the ARPG world by storm, but it fielded plenty of positive review scores in the 7/10 hemisphere. PC Gamer contributor Rachel Watts said in her review that "it doesn't have anything in particular that makes it stand out, but it's a fun, streamlined take on the dungeon crawl genre."

You might call that damning by faint praise, but it's better than I'd have expected from a spinoff of a creative building game trying to appeal both to children and the sort of sickos that pore over loot tables until their eyes sting.

Minecraft Dungeons 2's release is planned for sometime this year, so it shouldn't be long until we see more of the game and can get an idea of how it'll compare to the original. Maybe it will help fill the void in my heart I've reserved for Hytale's upcoming adventure mode.

Back in my day there were only three channels on TV and one Minecraft update per year. For years, Mojang's schedule revolved around the annual title update crammed with new mobs, new biomes, blocks, and enemies. That mindset changed in 2021, its general manager says, when the Caves & Cliffs update grew so ambitious that it had to be split into two releases and Mojang backed off mega sized yearly updates thereafter.

Speaking at the Game Developer's Conference this week, Minecraft general manager Ryan Cooper shared a panel with King's head of live operations on Candy Crush, Eva Ryott, to talk about the secret sauce of working on two games that have stood the test of time for 15 years each. Among those secrets were listening to player feedback to drive new game updates, a commitment that Cooper says really pushed Mojang's processes to the limit a few years back.

Mojang teased the Minecraft Caves & Cliffs update back in 2020 with a pretty huge feature list including major changes to how Minecraft's worlds are generated. Cooper described work on that update as being highly influenced by Minecraft's players. "We were getting so much feedback from our community that we just decided to take on additional work," Cooper said. He described the drive to incorporate feedback that Mojang got beyond just polish and lean into new features for Caves & Cliffs.

The real explosion of effort was on world generation tech. When that part of the update landed in last 2021, update 1.18 was probably the most excited I'd felt about Minecraft in years, exploring new village placements, giant dripping cave structures, and the circular ring biomes that players have been obsessed with ever since.

Cooper says that Mojang learned in the process of creating all those massive generative changes was that it really should have updated a lot of its own foundational technology first. Instead, Mojang put itself in the position of updating the game and its own development infrastructure at the same time.

"We joke that it's akin to trying to build a skyscraper with hand tools," Cooper said. Which does sound difficult but, amusingly, does also sound like the exact kind of madcap project Minecraft players themselves take on pretty regularly. Why not build a skyscraper by hand, eh? For a company the size of Mojang though, working on a product as complex as Minecraft, getting backed into that kind of massive workflow overhaul just wasn't a mistake it wanted to make again.

"What happened as a result of Caves & Cliffs was we decided that we wanted to move to a more rapid cadence of updates," Cooper said. Mojang did launch a couple more yearly updates after Caves & Cliffs, I imagine as those updates may have already been partially conceived of and in progress.

In 2024, Mojang announced that it would be moving away from major yearly updates to its content "drops" which occur more frequently with smaller, more targeted feature lists.

Minecraft's first drop for 2026 is the upcoming "tiny mob update," now called the Tiny Takeover update. You can also tune in to Minecraft Live 2026 later this month for more on that update and the future of everything else Minecraft.

I don't know what it's like anywhere else in the world, but Bluey is everywhere here in Australia. There are Bluey Christmas decorations, Bluey slippers, Bluey rice crackers, Bluey fan art in the windows of unrelated downtown shops, and Bluey cheese sticks. Sometimes adults try to talk to me about Bluey episodes, even though they have no children to watch Bluey with.

If you're sick of the blue-hued dog I wouldn't blame you. But it's incumbent on me to report, by dint of working for PC Gamer, that Bluey is going to make an official appearance in Minecraft soon.

The creatively titled Bluey DLC: Bluey's House is set in Bluey's house. "Players can meet Bluey, Bingo, Mum and Dad while reliving memorable moments from the series," the official Bluey spiel reads. "They will be able to search for hidden keys throughout the home, guided by Bluey and her family, unclocking new rooms and areas as they progress."

The spiel continues that a bunch of "familiar activities and mini-games" from the series will feature in the DLC, including I-Spy, Hide and Seek, and Ragdoll (I'm sure Bluey fanatics don't need me to elaborate on these, and all seem pretty self-explanatory anyway).

There was actually a full Bluey videogame released back in 2023, but my own children—who play Stardew Valley and Minecraft almost exclusively—didn't take to it. Still, it may be something to try while we wait for Bluey's inevitable Fortnite collab. Dare we hope for a Rocket League skin?

The Bluey Minecraft DLC doesn't have a price yet but it's hitting the Minecraft Marketplace on February 5.

Hytale sure looks a lot like Minecraft, doesn't it? Giving a quick glance at some side-by-side screenshots it would be pretty easy to confuse the two, though that's not a huge surprise: Hypixel Studio, maker of Hytale, was founded by Minecraft modders and mappers who decided to create their own voxel game.

Besides looks, Minecraft and Hytale have a ton in common: they both take place in "infinite" procedurally generated worlds with multiple biomes and deformable terrain, they both feature base-building and gear and weapon crafting, cooking, wildlife and fantasy monsters, and other similar systems. They can both be played solo or in co-op, they both have creative modes, and they're both moddable. And there's blocks. So many, many blocks.

So… what's the actual difference between them? Why should you consider trying Hytale if you've already got Minecraft?

1. Hytale is very early access

The biggest difference right now, frankly, is that Minecraft has been around for 15 years and Hytale just entered early access—and it's very early access.

That doesn't mean it's full of jank and bugs—it's actually been very stable and what's there works well. But Hytale is nowhere near feature-complete the way Minecraft has been for over a decade.

In Hytale, for instance, there are fish but no fishing poles (there are traps, however). There are animals but there's no taming system. There are monsters but no boss fights. There's a tab for minigames, but none have been added yet. Hytale is a work in progress—you'll even find physical signs in the world showing the location of features that are planned for the future.

2. Hytale plans to be an RPG as well as a sandbox

Hytale is intended to be an RPG as much as it is a sandbox, though there's very little of that RPG available at the moment. The adventure campaign, for example, is simply not included in the current build of the game. There are no quests at all: Hytale is just a sandbox at the moment, and it may stay that way for a long while.

If you're cool with making your own goals and finding your own fun, you'll be fine. If you're hoping for a real adventure with structure and quests, you won't find it, at least not yet.

3. Hytale's combat has weapon movesets and ults

There are some hints at Hytale's RPG future when it comes to fighting. There are special combat movesets in Hytale besides just swinging your weapons as fast as you can. Pressing and holding the attack button will charge up a lunge attack with a sword, a ground-pound with a hammer, and a double-slashing move if you're dual-wielding daggers.

Combat also slowly fills a meter that grants you an ult, which you can use to unleash a powerful, multi-part attack. You also even bash enemies with your shield, if you have one. It's not a fully developed system yet, but Hytale's combat already feels different enough from Minecraft to be notable.

4. Hytale's crafting is more like Valheim than Minecraft

Crafting is much simpler in Hytale than it is in Minecraft: you don't have to arrange resources in a grid, you just choose the item you want to craft from the menu (either on your person or at a crafting station) and if you've got the resources, you can craft it.

But there is a progression system for your crafting stations in Hytale, like the armorer's bench, the farming bench, and so on. You can upgrade many of your crafting stations to higher tiers using resources, which will grant you access to crafting recipes for higher tier items. Hytale's crafting feels more aligned with games like Valheim or Terraria than Minecraft.

5. There's mantling in Hytale

Mantling is another difference: in Hytale, you can jump and grab onto the edge of a block and pull yourself up and onto it. This may not sound like a major difference, but it's already come in handy for me a dozen times. It's useful when escaping from enemies, who can climb over single blocks easily but don't seem to jump up and grab ledges the way we can. It's also helpful when exploring, if the procedural terrain generation hasn't given you an easy path to the top of the hill or cliff.

The main benefit I've found is that you'll often encounter procedural caves and pits in the world. And since my method of exploring is to sprint as fast as I can everywhere I go, sometimes I don't even see those pits until I'm falling into them.

But mantling has saved me. Several times I blundered right off the edge of a block and into an open pit or crevasse, but managed to grab the edge of the block at the far side, hoisting myself up onto it instead of falling into the hole. Parkour!

Or, more accurately: a careless stumble that doesn't result in a stupid death. Either way, it's a nice feature, and something I wish Minecraft had.

Minecraft is as robust a platform for modding as it is anything else. Even Hytale, the long-awaited, standalone Minecraft-like due to release into early access Jan. 13, can have its origins traced back to one of the biggest custom Minecraft server networks around, Hypixel. Taking after its foremost inspiration, Hytale has ambitions to let players run wild with a suite of custom game creation tools—and the possibilities the team is showing off are tantalizing.

For instance, Hypixel Studios founder and CEO Simon Collins-Laflamme just showed off a brief snippet of a custom game on X. Far from the first-person survival fare you might expect, it's a 2D side-scroller with impressive set dressing. Collins-Flaflamme said in his post that it was made by one of the game's level designers, and "not a programmer!"

It's hard to say how intuitive these tools will be for complete newcomers to modding or level editing, but knowing what modders are capable of when their efforts are concentrated on a single project, I have a feeling we'll be seeing some pretty wacky stuff from Hytale players before long.

The "creative tooling" system was shown off a bit in a YouTube video uploaded by the Hytale team yesterday, though it focuses on placing objects in the world. What's demoed there reminds me a bit of a good MMO housing system, which is great news if you're like me and would rather pick out carpets for 5 hours than try to cobble together a completely custom side-scroller.

Fanmade tinkerers of all stripes should have something to look forward to when Hytale comes out, as there's even a suite of machinima making tools on the way, as well. The possibilities are certainly intriguing, and I'm looking forward to everything fans cook up when the game finally releases after its superlatively rocky development cycle.

Like roughly half of the internet, I am fascinated by Kowloon Walled City. Built on the site of a military fort, the Walled City was a Chinese enclave situated within former British Hong Kong. Its existence was tolerated by Britain provided China made no effort to exercise its jurisdiction. This peculiar legal status left it largely ignored by both nations, and as such it became the site of rapid, unplanned urban development through the latter half of the 20^th Century.

At its height circa 1989, Kowloon Walled City was the most densely populated place on Earth. More than 35,000 people lived in an area of six and a half acres, giving it a density ten times that of Earth's most tightly packed cities like Giza and Manila.

Classified as a slum, Kowloon Walled City suffered from destitution and poor sanitation, and was rife with illegal trading, prostitution, and at various points, organised crime. It was also architecturally unique, its distinctive facades concealing a maze of tight alleyways and buildings interconnected with ladders and informally constructed bridges.

The Walled City's distinctive architecture and labyrinthine layout make it a natural setting for a video game, and it has appeared in virtual form numerous times. The city forms the basis of a level in Call of Duty: Black Ops, while a fictionalised version of the Walled City (simply named Kowloon) appeared in Shenmue 2. Pretty much any cyberpunk-themed game is likely to have a little Walled City in it too, whether it's Cyberpunk 2077, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, or 2022's futuristic feline adventure Stray.

Nonetheless, I've always wanted to see a game that goes all in on Kowloon Walled City, that meticulously recreates its alleys, apartments, and many informal pathways and lets you explore them freely. That game still doesn't exist. But thanks to one intrepid Minecraft builder, you can now wander the streets of Kowloon Walled City in virtual form.

Sluda Builds is a qualified architect, Minecraft builder and YouTuber who specialises in extraordinary constructions within Mojang's digital Lego set. His previous projects include solarpunk cities, brutalist skyscrapers and industrial ghost towns. Kowloon Walled City is his latest creation (or in this instance, recreation), and as Sluda explains in the accompanying video, its construction was a monumental undertaking.

To recreate Kowloon Walled City, Sluda first built a 3D model of the city to ensure every street and building was accurately placed. As Sluda notes, every building in the city was completely unique as they were constructed with no real municipal oversight, so getting the position of every building right it important to recreate the shape, size and flow of the pathways between them.

Constructing the city also yielded some surprises that aren't obvious from images or top-down maps. Most notable is the fact that the city was built on a sloping incline, with a 45-foot difference in elevation between its lowest and highest points. This isn't evident in aerial photographs as one of the few building rules the Walled City's was subject to was a height restriction of 14 storeys, due to its proximity to Kai Tak Airport. Consequently, all the buildings cut off at roughly the same height, making the City appear flatter than it is at ground level.

Once laid out, Sluda recreated each building in raw blocks, before filling out details like the facades and the rooftops. The result, at a glance, is an impressive recreation of one of the strangest human-made places ever to exist. But I was curious how Sluda's map would hold up to closer scrutiny. So I grabbed a copy of the map (which is available for purchase via Sluda's Patreon), booted it up in Minecraft, and took a stroll through this quirk of civilization.

The map spawns you on the outskirts of the Walled City, where you can get a good view of what is probably Sluda's main achievement in the project, the facades. While they lack the grime and dilapidation evident in images of the real Walled City, Sluda effectively captures their wild variety, particularly the network of caged balconies protruding from each tower like architectural acne. The map also includes contemporary buildings that surrounded the Walled City shortly before its demolition, and their grey uniformity provides a powerful contrast to the Walled City's highly organic structure.

The map also provides an impressive sense of the City's scale, and just how imposing it would have been on approach. While the name "Walled City" harks back to its fortress origins, it also accurately describes how its tightly packed buildings loom like a single, solid wall when viewed from ground level.

Inside the city, the detail falls away considerably. Many of the inner buildings are constructed out of uniform Minecraft blocks, while building interiors are completely bare. Some of that detail comes back in the city-centre, however, where the facades return as they face inward toward the Walled City's yamen, the administrative office that survived as one of the few low-rise buildings in the city.

Nonetheless, the map does provide some sense of what a foreboding place The Walled City would have been to navigate. Most of its alleyways are alarmingly narrow, following no obvious logic in how they twist and turn, making it easy to get lost despite its relatively small footprint. One factor the map doesn't represent is how those alleyways often appeared more like tunnels, due to how the sky was often blocked out by masses of overhanging objects, such as cables, awnings, balconies, and informally constructed bridges.

On the subject of bridges, the map represents the Walled City's fabled interconnectivity to some extent. Buildings that physically touch one another have some walls "knocked through" letting you pass from one to the next, while you can also ascend staircases from the ground to the rooftops, where coloured banners represent the clothes-filled washing lines that crisscrossed the Walled City's skyline. There aren't that many connections between rooftops, however, meaning you cannot cross the city without touching the ground as its citizens were allegedly able to.

What's primarily missing from the map, of course, is the people who lived in the Walled City. The human traffic squeezing through its alleys, the ad-hoc stores, the whine of workshops and factories that were implausibly crammed into its tiny apartments, the unregulated schools, clinics, and dentists. While the map provides a good sense of the Walled City's shape, it doesn't really communicate what it might have been like to live there.

This, it should be stated, was not the objective of Sluda's build. But it nonetheless made me think about what I deem important in virtual architecture and level design more broadly. My favourite games are always those that give me a complex, natty 3D space to unpick, like Dishonored 2's Stilton Manor, Hitman's Sapienza, and Thief: Deadly Shadows' Shalebridge Cradle. But playing Sluda's map made me realise these levels are more than just environmentally challenging sequences of rooms and corridors. They say something about the people who lived in those spaces, exuding their virtual history from their grimy walls, spooky attics, and beautifully recreated gelato shops.

Without this internal life, the novelty of Sluda's map wore off quickly. This isn't to slight his sterling work in creating it, or to say that I expected the map to include imagined histories of 35,000 people. But it made me realise that the reason I want to explore a virtual Kowloon Walled City is not the reason I thought it was, and that while a building or even a city may be built for form or function, it is ultimately defined by the people who live there, and the ghosts they leave behind.

I'm sure we all get that sudden, seemingly random urge to boot up Minecraft every now and then. And like any game as intensely moddable as the venerable voxel sandbox, each revisit is bound to become further divorced from the intended experience than the last. But here's something really different: as if to explore the frontier of unintended ways to play Minecraft, YouTuber smillgames has elected to play it on a printer. The sort used in restaurants. Eyup.

Unlike the numerous attempts to play Doom on increasingly basic technology—a vape, or itself, for instance—this isn't about getting the game itself to run on the device. In smillgames' scenario, a different device is running Minecraft as normal. The receipt printer is merely used as a monitor of sorts, as he shared in a post on X.

There is precedent for this; I think smill is getting the same sort of FPS I was getting on Oblivion back in the day. But all the excess ink and paper, that's new! And hey, it might not be an ideal way to play Minecraft, but it certainly makes for a spectacle. When a commenter on X remarked he could have left fewer gaps of unused negative space on the receipt papers, smill replied "I would've but I just love deforestation."

Not all of it went in the bin (or wherever it ended up), though. Smill shared a trophy of his playthrough soon after: a framed series of screenshots showing the moment he "beat Minecraft" using the printer as his display.

It's a zany little stunt, but I'm starting to feel like we're running out of weird things to play videogames on, and that makes me a little sad. I'd like to see one of these bizarre challenge playthroughs truly shock me again. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever feel the high of learning someone played Overwatch using a bunch of bananas again.

Over a decade ago, when Minecraft studio Mojang was still a plucky independent outfit enjoying the fruits of developing one of the most successful games of all time, it unsurprisingly had a bunch of suitors. And one of them was Bobby Kotick.

Chatting on the Rushmore podcast, host Ari Emanuel, CEO of Endeavor, asked the former Activision CEO if he'd played Minecraft (cheers TWIV).

"Yeah, I almost bought it," Kotick replied. "I had to spend five days in Stockholm with Notch, the guy who founded the company, and then we offered him $1.5 billion."

But then Kotick discovered that, while he'd be getting the company and Minecraft, he wouldn't be getting Notch or the leadership team.

"He said, ''Oh, by the way, I'm quitting, and my top leadership guys are all quitting.' And they only had 30 employees at the company."

Kotick didn't want to have to take the reins. "We can't run your company," he told Notch.

Not that it mattered, since Microsoft swooped in shortly after. "And then he called me and he said 'Microsoft offered me $2.5 billion for the company.' And I said, 'I'll go airplane shopping with you, but you've gotta take that offer.'"

It certainly worked out for Microsoft, and it turned out that Notch wasn't the secret sauce: the game continued without him and reached new heights.

Its cultural relevance may have taken a few dings thanks to games like Fortnite and Roblox, but its influence remains vast. Heck, even the dire Minecraft movie managed to gross $957,949,195.

And, of course, Microsoft now owns Activision, too. And it paid quite a bit more for it. When the acquisition was completed in 2023, the cost was $75.4 billion. Kotick and investors originally purchased the publisher in 1991 for $500,000.

I think we can all agree that the creeper is one of the most iconic videogame enemies—next to the murloc, the goomba, and whatever the hell's going on with the tonberry. But it turns out that Minecraft's devs probably wouldn't have added it based on their current design goals.

That's per a recent dev blog (thanks, GamesRadar+). See, present-day Minecraft has a few core principles. The relevant ones to everyone's least favourite critter are "be fair to players", "bad things can happen, but they're technically the player's fault", "find the right level of destruction", and "don't add features that wreck player's builds."

If you're sitting here thinking 'hey, wait a second, those are all things that the Creeper does!' then you'd be right. As Chief Creative Officer Jens Bergensten says in the video linked above, "If you followed the rules we have today, you would probably not add the creeper, because it would actually be so controversial to have a monster that would show up and just destroy what you built."

However, the "creeper is very iconic", which seems in direct conflict with all those lovely pre-established rules. How can this be?

If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say it's because games really just aren't meant to be frictionless. All of Mojang's practical advice is great to avoid moments of frustration, sure, but you need to have a little spice in there.

Dragon's Dogma 2 is a great example of this sort of philosophy playing out in the extreme. The entire reason that game is compelling is because it's not afraid to take a sledgehammer to your best-laid plans. In an RPG less afraid to bully you, I might've simply gone onto my ox cart and left Battahl with a nice pleasant JPEG to wash the loading screen down smooth.

Instead, I was ambushed by orcs, one of my pawn's spells destroyed the cart, a griffin decided to join the party, and said griffin immediately took off when I tried to climb on it, taking me so far away from my actual intended location I started laughing my head off.

Point being, inconvenience is memorable. It's a tightrope balance to walk, to be sure, and I think Mojang is wise to not add anything else like the creeper into Minecraft—but I'm glad it's there, and I'm sure Mojang is, too.

Minecraft has launched its third drop of the year, "The Copper Age." Much like the last two updates from this year, Spring to Life and Chase the Skies, a significant amount of content has been added including a new mob. If you haven't been testing any of the new features in Bedrock, then there's a lot to learn about what's coming.

Fortunately, a lot of this update revolves around getting your base neat and tidy. Rather than giving you another creature like the happy ghast to take you soaring through the air, the contents of the Copper Age will keep you well and truly grounded. Here's everything you need to know about the next Minecraft update.

When will the Copper Age update be released in Minecraft?

The Copper Age released on September 30, 2025.

What's included in the Copper Age update in Minecraft?

The Copper Age drop is all about bringing new purpose to a material that has already been in the game for years: copper. You can use copper to craft weapons and armour, as well as horse armour. Copper's durability falls between stone and iron, and if you need some gear in a pinch copper is a lot easier to find than iron.

In terms of entirely new content though, the most significant addition in this drop is the copper golem. This handy mob was originally showcased during Minecon Live in 2021, but didn't win the mob vote so didn't earn a place in the game. Now though, its features and functions have been reimagined to make it the perfect companion for any adventurer.

Copper golems are capable of opening and removing items from new copper chests, and carrying them back to your base to sort into your regular chests. If you're the type of player to just toss whatever items you've got kicking about your inventory into a chest before you head out on an expedition, having a copper golem about will save you a lot of stress.

These critters can be easily summoned too. All you have to do is place a carved pumpkin on top of a copper block, and you'll have yourself a little friend. There is a downside though, as copper doesn't last forever. Over time, your copper golem will oxidise and eventually freeze into a statue. You can either keep this as a piece of decor around your base, or use wax to bring it back to life. The same applies to any copper decor you've got around your base: It'll oxidise and change colour over time, so you'll want to keep on top of its maintenance. Unless you like the look, of course.

To coincide with the organisation skills of the copper golem and the new decor being added, Minecraft is finally introducing shelves as part of this update too so you can display the items you gather in your base, similar to picture frames. Except, a lot easier to grab and go since you can easily swap whatever item is in your hotbar to grab something from the display instead.

You'll be able to craft shelves from all sorts of different woods as well, like cherry and warped, to suit whatever aesthetic you're going for. A single shelf unit can display up to three items, but you can connect multiple shelves to display more, and even go as far as powering them with redstone which lets you swap up to nine items at once for all those moments your friends start leaving on an expedition before you've managed to clear your inventory.

The legendary rapper turned actor Ice Cube is amazing at inhabiting the image he's cultivated over many decades, and is comfortable playing around and sending himself up. And somehow, this is how we've ended up with Ice Cube as a Minecraft claims adjuster.

Last year Mr Cube starred in a new take on The War of the Worlds, a production that began around the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and had the neat idea of showing the invasion play out through our everyday screens: phones, tablets, what have you. This was of course riffing on Orson Welles' radio production of the same material, which used the technology of its time so effectively that some listeners were fooled into believing the invasion was real.

The film essentially features Ice Cube sitting at a PC for extended periods of time but, unfortunately, wasn't very good. In fact that's an understatement: several outlets called it the worst film of 2025. It has a Metacritic score of 6 out of 100.

Such a reception would cow lesser mortals but Ice Cube is the kind of celebrity who leans into the infamy and has some fun with it. Hence why he's now sitting in front of a PC, ready to judge players' Minecraft compensation claims from his "Ice cubicle"

In the annals of marketing stunts, the "Ice Cube Claims Adjuster" is a good one. There are several short skits being gradually posted across the Minecraft social media accounts, and doubtless there are some very confused parents out there wondering why one of the coldest gangster rappers of all time is now laughing at their kid falling off a Gast.

That's very much the joke here: players submit their "Cube claims" to the Minecraft social accounts, and every single one of them is then "DENIED" by a lucky social media manager who gets to pretend to be Ice Cube. Particularly good ones are being plucked out and get their own little video of the man himself chewing up the scenery before, yep, declaring that their claim is denied.

There's the endless punning possibilities of Ice Cube talking about a game built out of cubes, but also constant opportunities to joke about usernames and gently mock players for dying in dumb ways: as well as a whole range of retro-styled images of Ice Cube denying claims. You can tell that Mojang's already having a ball with this, and the Ice Cube Claims Adjuster could well become a minor fixture for one of the world's biggest games. This might be one of the more unexpected celebrity hookups we've seen, but the more I look through the skits and messages, the more convinced I am that it's genius.

In a recent snapshot shared to the Minecraft website, a couple of new features for the game's next drop have been revealed. Much like the Copper Golem, one of these additions is also designed to make organising your base a lot more convenient.

Rather than sifting through a room of chests, you'll now be able to craft shelves to display your items, which is huge news for anyone who runs into their base, fills their pockets, and immediately leaves again. Or, those who just want to make their house feel a bit more like a home rather than relying on paintings to decorate the walls.

Each shelf "block" can hold three items to start, and from the screenshot featured on the blog post, it looks like these can be crafted out of numerous materials too. So, don't worry, you'll be able to craft a shelf to suit the aesthetic of your base. Whether that's cherry wood holding your tools, or spruce wood holding all the monster parts you've collected from night time adventures.

You can also power these shelves with redstone, which opens up a few more functions for you to utilise. When interacting with a powered shelf, you'll be able to swap out all three items at once rather than individually. Powered shelves next to each other will also connect to form much longer shelves, and yes, you'll be able to swap out all of these items at once with a single button press too.

A new function for Copper Golems was also revealed, but there's less of an emphasis on organisation and more on decoration. Over time, your Golem will oxidise, and once they reach the maximum oxidation level they will turn into statues for you to decorate your base with.

There are four poses your golem could hold for the rest of time too which yes, you can change if you interact with it. If you want to get a little more work out of them though, and you need the extra pair of hands sorting your chests, you can wax them to bring them back to life.

Unfortunately, we still don't have a name or a release date for this drop. Although the new features are available for testing within Bedrock Edition, I imagine it will still be a while before we see them added to the game. If you're a Java player, these features will be coming to test soon, too.

I don't like change. When I first heard that Mojang decided to end the yearly summer Minecraft updates and do away with the controversial mob vote, my initial reaction was to deny it was even happening. Then, when my friends told me that this was our new lived reality, I got angry. I tried bargaining with some unseen force to undo what I saw before me, and in my lowest moment, I decided I'd never touch Minecraft again. Hours later, my friend told me to stop being such a baby and to jump on Realms, which I did, albeit reluctantly.

But almost a year on from this monumental change in how Minecraft is managed, I can finally admit to myself that the world didn't stop spinning on September 8, 2024, and that the game is actually in the best shape I've seen for a while.

Since then, we've had a shed-load of new content for Minecraft. Almost immediately after the announcement that there'd be no more major updates, we got the Pale Garden Biome accompanied by a new sinister mob, the Creaking, which everyone started shipping with the Warden (they tore each other apart like pulled pork).

There's also been a major aesthetic upgrade thanks to Vibrant Visuals, which introduced shaders into vanilla Minecraft, Chase the Skies, which brought the Happy Ghast to our doorstep, and the Spring to Life update, which gave us biome variants for pigs and cows. But there's much more embedded in these smaller updates than what I just mentioned; usually, they'll also bring small quality-of-life changes and cool new features like finally being able to craft saddles or bringing back the Copper Golem.

The last major update done in the old style was the Tricky Trails update in 2024, which brought trail chambers, automatic crafters, and even more dastardly skeletons, the Bogged. I'm always up for a new mob, but other than the Bogged, this update felt slightly lacklustre.

Minecraft reached a point where the annual updates were hit or miss. Having to encapsulate every new feature under one theme was predictably difficult. A good theme could produce any number of wonderful ideas.

I'll never forget how wonderful the Caves and Cliffs updates, both part one and two, were. Both were released during 2021, a time when I seriously rediscovered my love for Minecraft, and it brought a complete overhaul to Minecraft's landscape, adding more spectacular mountains and incredibly complex caverns, which saw to my undying need to mine for coal and create vast underground cities.

But an iffy theme that didn't lend itself well to what Minecraft needed could be quite dull. Those were the constraints that Mojang had to work within, and it was pretty restrictive. The Buzzy Bees update, for example, revolved around bees. Now I adore these fluffy little guys, but the entire update just added bees and bee-related items—it was pretty minuscule compared to some previous updates.

There was also a good amount of unrest from the community thanks to these yearly updates. Some players could grow frustrated about how infrequently we all got new features. I remember seeing a good deal of irritated players in the comments every Minecraft Live, saying that the devs aren't working hard enough. I never agreed with that, but at times it was easy to forget that things were changing in Minecraft at all.

Now players get bombarded with new content for Minecraft, and it's fantastic. As I mentioned before, there have been five major updates for Minecraft over the last year, each giving players so much more than they'd previously have gotten.

The updates also feel more holistic now. Mojang no longer needs to squash everything into one mould; the devs can just add new features to Minecraft when and where they see fit, as there's no overarching theme anymore.

The Spring to Life update added tons of new features pertaining to animals like pig and cow variants and craftable saddles, but that's not all. We also got several new maps that cartographers can sell, each one pointing towards a different structure or village, which will greatly help players quickly explore the terrain.

Thanks to all of this, Minecraft feels vibrant again, the creative space that I always knew it to be. It's really nice getting loads of announcements periodically about all the new great things coming up. I do still miss the excitement and grandeur of waiting for the big update to be announced at Minecraft Live, but it's something I've easily been able to get over once I realised how great the alternative is.

All parents of Minecraft-obsessed children have learned a new song by heart this year. "LA-LA-LA-LAVA CHI-CHI-CHI-CHICKEN" booms Jack Black from the treacherous Alexa for the thirtieth time that day, and I quietly put my head in my hands and weep.

The 34-second earworm Lava Chicken is the shortest song ever to crack the Billboard top 100, and now it's been adapted into the game itself. Minecraft's 1.21.94 update adds the music disc Lava Chicken by Hyper Potions (spotted by Dexerto), a remixed version of the track that brings it in-line with the game's audio style.

How do you get it? Mojang has gone double meme: you need to find and defeat a chicken jockey in the game, which is a baby zombie riding a chicken. These are pretty rare mobs: if there are no chickens around, a spawned zombie has a 0.25% chance of being a chicken jockey; if there are chickens around, this is bumped to 0.4875%.

Mojang has clearly decided to fully embrace the movie's silliness, and this isn't the first thing to make the leap from the big screen into the game. The addition of Happy Ghasts with harnesses and leashes, basically a flying mount, allowed players to recreate the airship seen in one of the movie's big action scenes, where piglins chase the film's heroes through the sky on Ghasts.

No doubt Jack Black is currently beavering away on the song's successor: A Minecraft Movie looks to be the most successful videogame movie ever made, and the Warner Bros. suits have already confirmed a sequel.

Not a little of that success can be put down to Lava Chicken and the chicken jockey moment, which became something of an IRL viral meme: when the scene was playing in cinemas, kids would just scream "chicken jockey" back at the screen. It got so raucous on some occasions that the cops had to be called, though the prize surely goes to the guy who brought an actual chicken to watch the movie.

The Copper Golem was added to Minecraft as part of the Copper Age update, but unlike a number of mobs you'll find in the game, this one won't randomly spawn in the overworld. You'll need to handmake a Copper Golem for yourself, and the game doesn't exactly guide you in how to do so. Fortunately, it's incredibly easy, and once you know what you're doing you'll have a base full of tiny organisers.

If you're a big adventurer in Minecraft, or if you just like a neat and tidy base, having a Copper Golem around will massively help. They'll root through copper chests and remove items before taking them to standard chests, saving you the stress of doing it yourself. If you're looking for some helping hands, here's how to spawn them for yourself.

How to make a Copper Golem in Minecraft

To make a Copper Golem in Minecraft, all you need to do is place a carved pumpkin or jack o'lantern on top of a copper block. The mob will immediately spring to life once you've placed the carved pumpkin, indicating that you've done it correctly. If you don't immediately see a Copper Golem in front of you, it's worth noting that the pumpkin has to be placed last. The block of copper you use can also be at any oxidation or waxed stage, so there's no need to craft an entirely new one if you have a block lying around.

When the Golem spawns, the block of copper you've placed will become a copper chest, and the golem will take the place of the pumpkin. If you decide to create a golem next to an existing copper chest, a second chest won't spawn. Instead, the first chest will become a large chest, similar to when you place two wooden chests next to each other in the game.

Over time, the Copper Golem will oxidise like all copper products do. This has three stages, so it takes a decent amount of time for the colouration of the golem to start to change. But eventually, they will become copper golem statues if you don't wax them with honeycomb or remove the oxidation with an axe. You can bring them back to life by using an axe repeatedly to remove the oxidation until they reanimate, and waxing them with a honeycomb will prevent them from turning back into a statue so they can go straight back to sorting.

I remember it well. Four years ago my friends and I were gearing up for the annual Minecraft Live broadcast, excited to see what the big update theme would be this year, but primarily concerned with one thing: The Minecraft mob vote.

Back in 2021, the vote was between three mobs, the allay, the copper golem, and the glare. Each was predictably charming in its own way, but the one that my friends and I had our sights set on was the littlest guy, the copper golem.

This funky little dude would be the best base helper a Minecraft player could ask for. Being something of a redstone wizz, it would press buttons when and where it was needed meaning you could place it on a production line and it would help keep work chugging on, it was just an all-around good guy.

But despite our best efforts (four votes) the copper golem didn't make it out of that year's mob vote, losing to the fairy-like allay who would pick items up for players and ferry them back to their bases: very helpful, but not the little guy I was hoping for.

Fast forward four years and the Minecraft Mob vote is no more as a Minecraft spokesperson explained: "We understand players’ frustrations with having to choose among multiple fun options. After last year we began thinking about new ways to set the game up for success while giving the community more of what they want. We ultimately reached the decision to go in a new direction." But that doesn't mean we have to wave goodbye to past contenders.

Welcome back to the copper golem. As part of Minecraft's third update drop of the year Mojang is bringing back a revamped version of the littlest guy. Instead of pushing buttons the copper golem will act as a base organiser.

The copper golem will sort every item that you place in a special copper chest into designated chests around your base. It'll put books, tools, weapons, food, and more all together in one place to make finding what you need easier. Kind of like a miniature automated sorting system.

But these guys can't be found wandering around in the wild or down in dark caves: you have to make them. "To make a copper golem, all you have to do is place a carved pumpkin on a copper block," a blog post says. "Once that’s done, the golem will spawn, together with a copper chest."

The worst part of the mob vote was always watching creative mob designs get buried in the mob graveyard, resigned to only live on in players' memories. The most famous resident here is probably the glorious yellow Moobloom, a cousin of the cow and closer relative of the Mooshroom. It's adorable and exactly what I've always wanted for my flower farm. So if Minecraft can bring the copper golem back, it can bring the Moobloom back, please I beg you Mojang.

But the next update doesn't just stop there. In honour of the copper golem's arrival, copper is also officially becoming an equipment tier, meaning you can make tools, weapons, and armour out of it.

"Its durability sits somewhere between stone and iron, which reflects onto the equipment you craft from it, be it a weapon, tool, or piece of armour," the blog post says. "For example, a copper pickaxe will help you mine a bit faster and for a bit longer than a stone pickaxe but won’t allow you to mine any additional materials—you'll still need to upgrade to iron for that."

Copper is abundant in Minecraft so it'll be a useful early-game resource for players who don't want to search creepy dark caves or just want to get the essentials under their belt quickly.

You can test all of these new features right now by enabling previews/beta for the Minecraft: Bedrock Edition. All of this is still under development so we can probably expect a few tweaks before the copper golem is released to the rest of us, but I certainly can't wait to welcome it into my base. You've been a long time coming, little buddy.

Minecraft has shared more details on what is coming in its second drop for 2025 in a post on the official blog, including its title—Chase the Skies. But, as excited as I am to take a trip aboard a Happy Ghast and appreciate the beauty of the world thanks to the Vibrant Visuals overhaul, one feature that I am thrilled the game is receiving as part of the update is the player locator bar.

Rather than begging your friends time and time again to share their co-ordinates after they decided it would be funny to run off mid-expedition, you'll now be able to track their whereabouts on a small bar at the bottom of your screen—where your XP bar usually goes.

Your fellow players will be represented by little coloured squares on the bar, a different colour for each player, making them a lot easier to chase rather than having to pull up your detailed co-ordinates and figuring out which direction will get you to theirs the fastest.

However, if you are the friend that is constantly running away, or you're playing a game of hide and seek, you'll still be able to remain undetected by crouching. I know, this isn't an ideal solution, since you'll have to spend a lot of time moving very slowly if you want to be unfindable for the entirety of your game session, but at least it's an option. The blog post didn't share any sort of information on whether or not the feature can be toggled on or off either, so I think it's safe to assume that it's a permanent addition for now.

Rather than just showing you which direction to head in, the locator bar goes that extra step further too. A little arrow will pop up when you get closer to your friends to show whether they have fallen deep underground or ended up stuck on the side of a mountain.

It's the ultimate tool for players who have an unreliable gang of fellow explorers, but as the friend who is constantly finding themselves in dire situations, I'm happy to finally have an easier way for people to come and pull me out of trouble. I'm just surprised it has taken this long for them to add it.

Minecraft is preparing to release Chase the Skies, its second drop for 2025, featuring the anticipated launch of the Happy Ghast among a number of other frequently requested features. In a post shared to the official Minecraft blog, all the details of the update were shared, alongside its Chase the Skies title. A release date was left out, but a lot of signs hint at it launching pretty soon.

There's a huge amount of content to sink your teeth into within the Chase the Skies drop, and alongside a new mob, a number of useful items are getting new functionality too. Here's everything you need to know so you can prepare your world for such a significant update.

Does the Minecraft Chase the Skies drop have a release date?

The Chase the Skies update will be rolling out on June 17 alongside the Vibrant Visuals update. This will be the second game drop of the year, but arguably a lot more significant than the first, Spring to Life. Chase the Skies will also be available for both Bedrock and Java players, whereas the Vibrant Visuals update will only be available for those on Bedrock.

What's included in the Minecraft Chase the Skies drop?

The highlights of the Chase the Skies update are:

• Happy Ghast mob
• Player locator bar
• Updated leads
• Craftable saddles
• Vibrant Visuals

One of, if not the most anticipated feature of the Chase the Skies drop is the Happy Ghast. This mob gives you a new mode of transportation around the overworld, letting you and four friends hop on top to take to the skies together rather than having to run around on foot. As is the way with any mob in Minecraft, you'll need to spend some time taming it first. But it's well worth the effort going off the trailers and screenshots we've seen of it so far.

The Chase the Skies drop also introduces a player locator bar. Gone are the days of begging your friends to stop running off when you head off on an adventure together. You'll now be able to use a bar that sits on top of your toolbar and below your health and hunger which shows you which direction your friends are in. So, if you need to rush in and help them if they've got themselves in yet another sticky situation, you won't have to pray they can find their coordinates in time now.

Leads are also getting new functions. Rather than being a way to tie single mobs to fence posts, you can now use leads to chain multiple beasties together to create your own train of mobs, and the crafting recipe is getting simpler too. You'll only need string to craft them now, rather than having to hunt for slimeballs as well. What's more, if you're travelling by a Happy Ghast, you'll be able to attach a lead to a boat and then to your Ghast to make sure your mobs have a safe mode of transportation too. Saddles are also becoming craftable, which is huge for adventurers who have spent hours running around praying one pops up in a chest.

Finally, the much anticipated Vibrant Visuals update is rolling out as part of Chase the Skies, bringing a well-needed visual overhaul to the game. It won't affect the gameplay, but there will be some new features added to the appearance of the game. For example, water has reflections, forests now feature shady patches, and fog will drift across different biomes. This section of the drop will only be available on Bedrock Edition devices, but fret not, there are plans for it to come to Java Edition eventually.

At long last, the ability to craft saddles for your horses and pigs is finally being added to Minecraft. Gone are the days of traipsing through caves, mineshafts, and villages on the hunt for one specific item. Since its launch in 2010, the only way we've been able to get saddles is by hoping and praying you come across one in a chest somewhere or as a reward from fishing and certain mobs. But finally, we'll be able to make our own, and it's upsettingly easy. I'm genuinely annoyed this hasn't been a feature until now.

Before you get too excited, this update is currently only available in testing. It will be part of the second game drop for the year, which yes, also includes the happy ghast. But with no release date yet there's no saying when it will officially launch, so we could be stuck in testing for a little while yet.

The news of this update was published on the official Minecraft website, and even had the cheek to poke fun at how long players have been asking for this feature. The crafting recipe was also shared, showing that you just need one iron ingot and three leather to handmake your own saddle. Rather than crafting a week's worth of bread, cooking a lifetime supply of pork chops, and noting down your co-ordinates before your head off on the adventure of a lifetime.

That's not all either. This testing update features new music, which is a pretty drastic change since Minecraft's soundtrack is already so iconic. Five new tracks are being added, all of which were carefully created by Amos Roddy. As shared in the news post, there's a track specifically for "cruising across the Overworld on top of a happy ghast" and everything. What more could you possibly ask for?

Another ambient track, called Tears, is a new music disc within the game which can only be dropped by a ghast. Not a happy ghast either, oh no. You have to trek all the way to the nether and face the perils of taking one down if you want to add this record to your collection. But, if you're not quite brave enough or you don't want to risk losing your diamond armour, you can listen to it on Spotify too. That's probably what I'll be doing.

A Minecraft Movie has proven an enormous success, thanks in no small part to an all-out marketing blitz that's seen the game popping up everywhere from McDonalds to Monster Munch. One tie-in might make you pause for thought, however: Minecraft "Vanilla Green Lowfat Milk", which is also known as Creeper milk.

The product is being made by TruMoo (alongside a Minecraft chocolate milk) and is available in the US until June 30 (thanks, GameSpot). It also uses "petroleum-based synthetic dyes" to get that distinctive hue: Minecraft Vanilla Green milk contains a food dye known as Blue No. 1, which is scheduled to be phased out of foodstuffs by the end of 2026.

Blue No. 1 is one of various synthetic colourings being targeted by the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA), because of concerns over potential links to behavioural changes in kids including hyperactivity and allergic reactions.

"For too long, some food producers have been feeding Americans petroleum-based chemicals without their knowledge or consent," said US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. "These poisonous compounds offer no nutritional benefit and pose real, measurable dangers to our children’s health and development. That era is coming to an end. We’re restoring gold-standard science, applying common sense, and beginning to earn back the public’s trust. And we’re doing it by working with industry to get these toxic dyes out of the foods our families eat every day."

The FDA's goal is to make the food industry switch to natural alternatives. "Today, the FDA is asking food companies to substitute petrochemical dyes with natural ingredients for American children as they already do in Europe and Canada," said FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. "We have a new epidemic of childhood diabetes, obesity, depression, and ADHD. Given the growing concerns of doctors and parents about the potential role of petroleum-based food dyes, we should not be taking risks and do everything possible to safeguard the health of our children."

Perhaps it needs saying, but Creeper milk is not a thing in Minecraft or indeed in A Minecraft Movie. And I'm not really sure why one would wish to drink the milk of a creature whose main behaviour is violently exploding: but then I'm not in marketing.

A Minecraft Movie pleasantly surprised me with its mostly accurate depictions of how people play Minecraft, though some of its antics understandably stretched beyond what's currently possible in the game. One of those impossible antics is now very much possible in Minecraft's Java's latest snapshot updates: Ghast airships are real, and they have a lot of potential.

It started with April 8's snapshot, a preview of features coming to all Minecraft versions this summer, which introduced friendly flying Ghast mounts. Happy Ghasts are nifty: You grow one by leaving a Ghast fossil in water for a while. Then it hydrates enough to become a baby Ghastling, and eventually grows into a full-sized smiling Ghast that serves as your personal taxi. Happy Ghasts can be equipped with a harness that seats four players.

A flying mount is already one of the biggest additions to vanilla Minecraft in years, but yesterday's snapshot added a cherry on top: upgraded leashes. Now, leashes can bind two creatures together (Just Cause grapple hook-style) and suspend them in the air. You can also leash a Happy Ghast to a boat to create an airship—a setup that looks very similar to that part in A Minecraft Movie where Piglin soldiers chase Jack Black and friends across the skies suspended on platforms under Ghasts.

As players are discovering, the combination of Happy Ghasts and leashes is useful for moving animals over a large distance, taking chests full of goodies with you without fiddling with minecarts, and generally looking extremely cool. Leashed entities can freely dangle from each other while attached to a Happy Ghast, which already has players experimenting with their air cargo capabilities.

"This is 20 villagers... you can carry way way more if you wanted to," YouTuber Prowl8413 wrote on X under an image of a Ghast boatship daisy-chained to 15 other boats in what now qualifies as the most precarious transportation method in all of Minecraft.

"Minecraft has peaked, you can't get better than this," wrote user silentwisperer_ after dangling a family of helpless pigs and cows over an 80-foot drop.

X user Bobicraft shared an extreme example of the Happy Ghasts passenger flexibility, hoisting what appears to be 20 to 30 boats and chests with upgraded leashes (though it's possible console commands intervened to make this one possible).

Leashes that don't break whenever you stretch them two feet longer than you're supposed to have other knock-on benefits, like the ability to chain boats together into a sea convoy—no more trying and failing to keep the group together on a multi-day sea voyage.

There's just one omission that players are already asking Mojang to remedy: Minecarts cannot be leashed together in the same way as boats or mobs, so the dream of functional trains in vanilla Minecraft is still just that for now.

The movie "A Minecraft Movie" (the movie specifically for Minecraft) has continued to haul in some absurd cash—hitting $150 million in its first opening weekend, and inspiring a wave of problematic popcorn-hurling behaviour as it takes the box office by storm.

It's shown no signs of slowing down—its worldwide haul is now at $552 million, putting it on pace to, potentially, dethrone the 2023 Super Mario Bros movie as the highest-earning videogame adaptation of all time.

It's a little hard to get the week-by-week play-by-play for worldwide ticket sales, since different countries report their returns at different times. However, if we go off domestic cash? A Minecraft Movie is certainly in with a chance of beating everyone's favourite plumber.

After 10 days at the Box Office, The Super Mario Bros Movie had raked in $283,480,285 at the domestic box office. Meanwhile, A Minecraft Movie is breathing down its neck, with $278,864,857 earned in the US.

Whether or not A Minecraft Movie will keep enough momentum to overtake Super Mario Bros is another question entirely: Here's the daily domestic play-by-play courtesy of boxofficemojo.com. As you can see, A Minecraft Movie had a sharper domestic falloff during weekdays, whereas the Super Mario Bros movie was still pulling numbers throughout. Mario also had the advantage of his cinematic debut falling on Easter Sunday, whereas Minecraft won't enjoy that box office boom until this weekend.

Part of me wonders if that's due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The US wouldn't declare an end to it until May 2023, but restrictions were still winding down at that point. In theory, that means the Super Mario Bros. benefitted from a bigger pool of theatre-goers caught in the venn diagram of 'I've got time to kill, because I'm either unemployed or furloughed' and restrictions that were already winding down.

It really is going to be a fascinating race. It's easy to forget that, in the face of Minecraft's worldwide presence (and the movie's made-in-a-lab marketability), this is still a game that started out as a little indie survival number. I remember an age when it was still spreading through word-of-mouth with popular youtubers.

To chart its journey from that, into a world-wide phenomenon that can go toe-to-toe with one of gaming's oldest mascots at the box office? It's, quite frankly, wild. No wonder Warner Bros is making a sequel.

The original music for Minecraft, alongside the reboot jingle for Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system, have been inducted into the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress and are now part of the American audio canon.

These were two of the 25 recordings that make up 2025's additions (thanks AP), all of which were chosen for their "cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage."

"These are the sounds of America, our wide-ranging history and culture" said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. "The National Recording Registry is our evolving nation’s playlist."

The Minecraft OST was composed by German producer Daniel Rosenfeld (known professionally as C418) and released as the 2011 album "Minecraft: Volume Alpha." The reboot sound for Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system was composed by Rock & Roll Hall of Famer and producer Brian Eno.

They're in pretty incredible company. The other inductees include Miles Davis' seminal 1970 album "Bitches Brew", considered to be among the greatest jazz albums of all time, and a recording that the Penguin Guide to Jazz describes as "one of the most remarkable creative statements of the last half-century."

Also inducted was Elton John's 1973 album "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", Tracy Chapman's eponymous 1988 album, Mary J. Blige's 1994 recording "My Life", 2006's Back to Black by Amy Winehouse, and the 2015 original Broadway cast recording of the Hamilton soundtrack, composed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. As well as albums the singles "I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar" (Helen Reddy, 1972) and "My Heart Will Go On" (Celine Dion, 1997) enter the archive.

As for the Minecraft soundtrack, in an old Reddit AMA Daniel Rosenfeld recalls that "Markus [Persson] found me pretty early on, on an old IRC channel from a similarly old blog called TIGSource. We hung out there basically daily throwing our work back and forth until something clicked for Markus. I think our specific weird kinds of music interests just clicked in a way that made Markus choose for me to do it all.

"Making music for videogames is arguably three- and sometimes four- dimensional. The player oftentimes controls the screen, which means we have to predict the outcome to make sense. In the case of Minecraft for example, that was mostly a big fat ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I mean, there was thought put into it, but we chose the music to specifically be random because it was an easier solution than for it to trigger specifically to events. The game is completely random, so I chose to go into that as well. And that's just for Minecraft! You could go so wild with conceptualising audio design."

PC users of a certain vintage will recognise Brian Eno's Windows 95 startup theme instantly:

Eno was given a list of concepts that the composition needed to capture, and a target running time of just over three seconds. The final composition ended up more like six seconds long.

"The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas," Eno said in a 1996 interview. "I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, 'Here’s a specific problem—solve it.'

"The thing from the agency said, 'We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,' this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said 'and it must be 3.25 seconds long.'

"I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel."

Eno ended up producing 84 miniature compositions. "I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music," said the musician. "I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time."

Funnily enough, the iconic composition was created on an Apple Mac. "I’ve never used a PC in my life," Eno told the BBC in 2009. "I don’t like them."

Herobrine is a legend that's nearly as old as Minecraft itself, first being referenced in the game's alpha before stories of the character proliferated in the early 2010s. The question with Herobrine, especially if you were on the younger side in those days, was always whether he was real and could be found in the game: or whether it was just a meme that refused to die.

There's an enormous amount to unpack about Herobrine's story over the years, but the short version is that he's supposed to be a ghost that haunts the worlds of singleplayer games, and the subject of endless creepypasta accounts of how he's interfered with players' worlds. Herobrine looks like Steve, who I guess we could call the main character of Minecraft, except for one detail: blank white eyes.

A Minecraft Movie features what seems to be an unmistakable nod to Herobrine and I'm going to explain what happens so, if you want to see the movie spoiler-free, maybe stop here.

Halfway through A Minecraft Movie the character Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hansen) meets an Enderman at the Woodland Mansion, who casts some voodoo and makes Henry have visions of Steve (Jack Black) saying nasty things to him. But the version of Steve in this scene has glowing white eyes.

Given that this is a movie that's been made in co-operation with Mojang and features endless in-jokes and Easter eggs about the game, this seems like a fairly obvious nod to the ultimate Minecraft urban legend. But Mojang Studios’ creative director Torfi Frans Olafsson, a producer on the movie, claims it's unintentional (thanks, GR+).

"It’s super strange that all of their eyes were supposed to be purple," says Olafsson, "but when it was rendered one of the characters' eyes kept coming out white in the final rendered frames so we wound up keeping it like that, because the VFX studio ran out of time."

Hmm. Far be it from me to question someone who actually worked on the movie but this just doesn't seem plausible, and Olafsson clearly likes teasing about Herobrine specifically. In response to someone asking about Herobrine being in a possible sequel, Olafsson jokes: "I think Herobrine was patched out of the game a very long time ago. Repeatedly."

So call me a cynic but it seems like this is a Herobrine nod that, in deference to the actual myths and backstory of the character, the creators have decided is best left unacknowledged. It just got in there somehow. The VFX people ran out of time. Herobrine wasn't supposed to be in A Minecraft Movie and yet, somehow, there he is.

We'll see: perhaps the white eyes will be corrected for the streaming release, but I'm betting not. A Minecraft Movie has proven to be a tremendous success so far, even if the film itself is a bit of a mixed bag, so a sequel (and another Herobrine cameo) feels like an inevitability. The director himself says he'd love some more money to make a sequel: "It'd be amazing!"

This week, Helldivers 2 celebrated the first anniversary of Malevelon Creek, the game's most famous battle that saw participants holding the line on the jungle planet against a massive automaton incursion. A new robot offensive to take the Creek is currently ongoing. But despite having a war to fight, one errant helldiver chose to commemorate the battle outside of the game entirely, recreating Malevelon Creek in Minecraft.

That player is Helldivers 2 YouTuber Red Monster Thing, who posted a video of his bespoke Malevelon Creek map earlier this week (via Reddit). And I have to say, it's an impressive creation. The map features detailed recreations of automaton factories, complete with buildings like laser gun turrets, signal disrupters, and the eye of Sauron-style detector towers.

There are also automaton dropships suspended in midair as they fly new units into battle, while Helldivers 2's super destroyers are also visible in orbit around the planet. There's even a detailed recreation of the interior of one of those super destroyers, complete with parked Pelican 1 transport shuttle.

It isn't just the meticulously recreated automaton paraphernalia that makes the map neat. It also replicates the moody colour palette of Malevelon Creek precisely. The purple trees, the perpetual twilight, the hazy jungle atmosphere that led to the Creek being coined 'Robot Vietnam': it's all spot on. The one part of the map not created by Red Monster Thing is the helldiver skin he's wearing, which was made by Minecraft skinner Dr_Martex and can be downloaded here.

The map has clearly been in production for a while, but Red Monster Thing says it's now finished. The video above is apparently "one final preview" before he releases another video that details specifically how the map was made. Oh, and the YouTuber also states he'll release the map for free once his channel hits 1,000 subscribers. Currently it's at just under 350, so there's some ground to make up before the map will be released.

Very large man Jason Momoa has been out and about promoting the so-close-you-can-taste-it Minecraft Movie recently, touting his role as Garrett 'The Garbage Man' Garrison in the picture with his winning smile, easy charisma, and borderline-Amish child-rearing philosophy. The star says he doesn't let his kids play videogames, despite his starring role in the upcoming flick.

"We don't have a TV," Momoa told Deadline on the red carpet recently. "My son doesn't even have a phone—he's 16 and doesn't have a phone. We're different, dude. Sorry, man." Which, honestly? Probably a pretty smart move as parenting goes. I don't envy the poor, doomed zoomers and gen alphas out there today growing up in the poison swamp of social media, AI slop, and sugar-sweet algorithmic brainrot. "[Smartphones] are new to the world," says Momoa. "Everyone was doing just fine. You and I didn't grow up with phones, no one told me what to do—I had to find it."

I don't fault Momoa for wanting to keep his own kids out of all that, but I do find it quite funny to trumpet the philosophy on the red carpet for a film that will pretty much live or die depending on how many screen-obsessed tweens it can pull into movie theatres. Maybe he's trying a digital equivalent of making them smoke the whole pack.

Regardless, Momoa continues: "Because he's gonna be 18, he's gonna have a phone, he's gonna be out of the house and he can explore the world after that." Which does make it sound a bit like the Hollywood star is raising his teen son in some kind of replica of The Village, but that's probably just an issue of phrasing. "I just want them to use their creativity in a different way, so we do a lot of other things."

What other things? Momoa doesn't really say, although he does mention that he and the family "Watch movies together, and that's beautiful." Presumably not on a TV, though.

A Minecraft Movie releases properly tomorrow, April 4, but you might not want to rush and see it. Our Elie Gould scored the movie a respectable-but-not-remarkable 65% in their Minecraft Movie review, saying it "manages to show off the beautiful vistas, creative fun, and the wacky adventures that Minecraft is known for, but its story is seriously lacking."

Some of my favourite films discuss the idea of how important it is to hold onto the spark of creativity and passion as we get older; the fact that no matter how much the world weighs you down, getting back up and pursuing your passions is an inextricable human trait. While I wasn't expecting A Minecraft Movie to take that angle, it does make sense.

Minecraft is all about creativity. Whatever you can think up, you can make in this game, whether that be a completely automated sorting system, which I managed to cook up over the pandemic, or a fully functional PC. Anything's possible, and that freedom is Minecraft's greatest trait, so it tracks that A Minecraft Movie would focus on how important it is never to stop creating.

"People say, 'No, I'm not creative' or 'I'm not an artist', or 'I can't do that', but deep inside all of us, there is still that spark," producer Torfi Ólafssonon tells me during an interview. "What this movie is trying to talk about is that we shouldn't let anything stifle that spark and we should enjoy making things."

In the film Jack Black's character Steve temporarily gives up on his dreams to mine and be creative as he grows up, but eventually goes back to the mines and finds a portal to the Overworld where he can have fun creating all sorts of things like statues of his dog Dennis, working ferris wheels, or houses made entirely out of pink wool. Then there's Henry, a young inventor who's bullied for messing up on his inventions. Despite a couple of setbacks, he also learns to have fun and that failing at first is usually an important part of making something new.

"It presented a really amazing opportunity to be able to tell a story within that world where our characters also have to be creative to survive," director Jared Hess tells us. "It's hard to be creative in life, and you're judged, and you risk failure and embarrassment and all of those things that come with being an artist. But to see our characters navigate that and come out better because of it and because they had the courage to be creative was super fun."

Hess and Ólafssonon discussed some of the harder moments on set, and how creating A Minecraft Movie wasn't always super straightforward and fun. "There were definite moments where we thought 'This is probably not happening' or 'This is all going the wrong way'," Ólafssonon says.

"It was a long process," Hess continues. "I came on board right before the pandemic started. So much of the development of the script and everything happened then, and I think everything that was going on in the world was hard for everyone. But it was such an amazing opportunity. I mean, here's this just incredible game. It's the biggest video game of all time."

But everything worked out in the end, and the finished product is a pretty fun watch. It may not be the Minecraft film that some older fans may have wanted, those who perhaps were looking for something slightly more serious and nuanced, but it still does the Overworld and Nether justice.

With this in mind, Hess stressed how crucial perseverance is: "Never stop playing. Never give up the spark. Never stop being playful or creative, and do it just for the sake of being creative. Not for an end, like you're trying to achieve something. We should always hold on to that. Never stop playing."

I can only imagine how much fun it must have been to work on the set of A Minecraft Movie, surrounded by incredible sets, Minecraft memorabilia, and, of course, getting to watch Jack Black as he mined mountains of lapis lazuli. But it turns out that the best part was just how creative and enthusiastic everyone on set was.

"People were playing the game a lot when we weren't shooting, in the evenings, and over weekends," producer Torfi Ólafssonon tells me. "Everyone talked about the game between shots. There was this sense of unbound, collaborative creativity and adventure, which you experience when you are playing with friends on a Minecraft server."

The vibe of working with friends towards a shared goal on a Minecraft server is unmatched. I've created mutant chicken farms in Tekkit, survived for years on a shared skyblocks server, and created a massive white room underground, which we then proceeded to fill with endermen trapped in boats. You know, good Minecraft fun.

"The fact that we were all there together in New Zealand, the set designers, the choreographers, it reminded me of the vibe of being in an indie game studio," Ólafssonon continues.

There are a ton of cool moments in A Minecraft Movie, which make it clear that the people working on it do have a special love for Minecraft. Other than showing off cool areas like redstone mines and the Woodland Mansion, I noticed a nice little nod to Technoblade as a little pig wearing a crown waddled into shot. It may seem small, but I'm sure that's a moment which will mean a lot to Technoblade fans and longtime Minecraft players.

Seeing the core group of characters travel through the Overworld, crafting cool weapons, and encountering things like iron golems, villagers, and the piglins for the first time was also a lot of fun. But my favourite moment had to be the chase scene in which Henry, Garett, and Steve all jump off a cliff to escape a group of piglins, only to fly off through the mountains with the help of elytra. It was the best depiction of what it would be like actually to use these wings that I could've hoped for.

If nothing else, A Minecraft Movie has brought on that bi-annual itch to return to that one unfinished Minecraft world and carry on my hard work.

"It's harder to create than to destroy. That's why cowards tend to choose the deuce." You may be wondering where this quote is from. Could it be Aristotle, or maybe Friedrich Nietzsche penned it in The Birth of Tragedy? It's certainly thought-provoking enough to be mistaken for the work of any notable philosopher.

But this theological statement is actually from one of this generation's greatest minds: Jack Black in A Minecraft Movie. It sums up the core message of this film: No matter how difficult it is to create something, hard work and practice always pay off; a very Minecraft sentiment.

Instead of trying to become the new canon Minecraft experience, A Minecraft Movie decides to focus on a few individuals and their experiences within the game. Jack Black's version of Steve isn't the Steve; he's just a Steve. And while there is a story in the form of the Piglins trying to get the precious orb back from Steve and friends to complete their domination of the Overworld, this is more of a vessel for the core cast to explore and interact with Minecraft.

The best parts of the film (other than all of Jennifer Coolidge's scenes) were all the times when characters interacted with Minecraft just like any other player would. During a zombie/skeleton invasion on the first night, Henry, the young protagonist, manages to create a fortress to protect himself and his friends from the unfriendly mobs. Later on, we get to see more builds that Jack Black, aka Steve, made during his time in the Overworld. There's a working Ferris wheel, a booby-trapped diamond mine, and of course a fitting tribute to his trusty wolf dog, Dennis.

It's a very human experience to point at something familiar and go, "I do that!" which is probably why I enjoyed seeing the Dennis statue or Steve, Garrett, and Henry fly through canyons with elytra whilst getting chased by a swarm of Ghast-riding Piglins so much. Playing Minecraft is a very relatable experience, something that binds all of us who play. Everyone's hidden in a hole or a little dirt hut on their first night, celebrated once they cracked their first redstone build, or aspired to build the magnificent diamond block house. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that this movie thrives when it's simply being a relatable Minecraft experience while also showing off just how limitless Minecraft's world is.

Unfortunately, this film isn't just about gazing at vistas and watching its characters make cool builds. The problems with this film lie in its character development and rushed story.

It ender drags-on a bit

From the start, you can see that one of the issues that the creators had to overcome was how to get their characters from point A (the real world) to point B (Minecraft's Overworld) as fast as possible. There would've been a couple of nifty quick ways to do so, one of which being a Jumanji-like scenario in which Steve would've been swept into the Overworld via some old grey PC, later to be followed by the rest of the core group.

But instead, Steve decides to break into an abandoned mine, breaking some poor man's ankles when he sidesteps him into oblivion on the way in. This is where Steve finds the orb and the earth crystal, which he combines to create a gateway to the Overworld.

After making a couple of cool builds, Steve gets robbed of his orb by the Piglins and their leader, but to save the Overworld from complete destruction, Steve hands the orb to Dennis to hide in the real world.

It's at this point where we're introduced to the rest of the group, and where the film really struggles with finding the right pace. Most of the character introductions are rushed to get to the Overworld quicker, except for Garrett, a pro retro gamer, who got an odd amount of backstory for someone who I think was meant to be a secondary character or at the very least behind Henry.

Because of this, most of the characters don't feel massively rounded out. Occasionally, there'd be a moment or two where there'd be some attempt at character progression, only for it to be cut short to retain the attention of its younger audience.

But to be fair, A Minecraft Movie never marketed itself as a film with a ton of layers, so I can't really be angry that it yells about crafting tables instead of providing a deep character study.

A decent block-buster

Once I looked past some of these pitfalls and just decided to enjoy this movie for what it is, some good light-hearted fun, I started to enjoy my time with it a bit more. Instead of dwelling on why the Piglins didn't attack Steve straight away as he had no gold armour on, I instead found myself smiling at fun references to creeper farms and a lovely little Technoblade tribute.

It's obvious that this film is really meant for the younger Minecraft playerbase rather than those who played the game back when it first released, with Jack Black regularly yelling out the name of items like flint and steel or crafting table. But there's just enough cool references and some funny jokes to help you sit through the movie.

Jennifer Coolidge's scenes, which take place in the real world as she romances a lost Minecraft villager, were the most consistently funny scenes in the entire movie, and her story arc alongside the lost villager made me laugh way more than I thought it would. I'm not going to lie, her mid-credits scene made my day.

So, to older fans of Minecraft, I'd say go check out A Minecraft Movie if you're up for some casual fun and want to check out a pretty impressive visualisation of the Overworld and Nether. A Minecraft Movie probably isn't the serious storytelling that some players want, but it'll make you laugh a couple of times, and at least in my case, it's given me the bi-annual itch to play Minecraft again.

A Minecraft Movie is hitting theatres, and while it's something I've got no real opinion on myself—I've got better things to do than eye-roll at a kids movie plenty of little'uns and their parents will enjoy—it's probably not really the solution to the world's problems. Or any problem, really, beyond broadly making children happy. Which is a net positive, don't get me wrong, but… It's a movie about Minecraft. What d'you want from me.

Enter Jack Black and Jason Momoa who, apparently flooded with good vibes that border on mania, are preaching that A Minecraft Movie is just the ticket for whatever's ailing you at the moment.

That's as per a report by The Hollywood Reporter, fresh off the green carpet at Leicester Square during the movie's world premiere. When asked what he enjoys about the movie, Jack Black burst into song—choosing to select "What the world needs now is love, sweet love," by Burt Bacharach, circa 1965.

"We’ve got to work together, my God," Jack Black continued. "There’s so much violence and war and hatred. And that’s what I love about this movie—there’s a lot of love in it and there’s a lot of creativity. There is some anger and violence too, but in the end it’s about friendship and working together to make [the world] a better place."

I mean… sure? There's economic chaos and global destabilisation and the ever-looming spectre of climate change, and for some goddamn reason the Whitehouse posted an AI-generated Ghibli meme of ICE deporting someone, but Jack Black does the thing where you throw a bucket of water at the ground and land in it. There's the horrors, but there's also Minecraft!

Jason Momoa, speaking with THR, also said: "I think everyone needs to escape a little bit right now. It’s nice to sit back and have a really fun adventure and giggle and laugh." Technically true. I guess.

Look, I'm being a little crotchety. Lord knows there are more deserving targets of ire than a couple of Hollywood stars getting effusive during a world premiere—and again, it's a film that'll make some kids happy. But considering the state of—gesturing broadly at everything—I'm not sure A Minecraft Movie is going to be the opiate of the masses these two famous actors with lots of money are saying it is. Maybe I'm just jealous that Jack Black's having more fun than me, right now.

Minecraft has announced the Vibrant Visuals update, which plans to visually overhaul the entire game—it's basically built-in Minecraft shaders for Bedrock with plans to bring the overhaul to Java edition later. Unlike the Spring to Life update, which was also announced at Minecraft Live, Vibrant Visuals won't add any new blocks or mobs itself, but it has been designed to bring the world as we know it further to life and will launch as part of the Chase the Skies update which adds the Happy Ghast.

The bad news is, we still don't know exactly when the release will be. We've got a window, but there's no use marking your calendars on any specific date. For now, here's what you need to know about the Vibrant Visuals update ahead of time.

When will the Vibrant Visuals update release?

Vibrant Visuals will hit Bedrock edition on June 17 alongside the Chase the Skies update. Unfortunately though, this does mean Java players will have to wait a little bit longer before they can experience the visual overhaul for the game.

According to the official blog post announcing the update, it will take a lot of time to get all the elements that go into such a significant update right, but it is time that the team wants to spend. Hopefully we'll get an update on when we can expect the update to roll out for Java once it has hit Bedrock edition.

What does the Vibrant Visual update include?

As the name suggests, the Vibrant Visuals update is a visual overhaul for Minecraft. Although it won't alter the iconic, blocky look, it will make the experience more visually appealing by adding elements like realistic shadows, directional lighting, volumetric fog, and reflections. It doesn't sound like a huge amount of change on paper, but the screenshots shared on the official blog are really similar to the Minecraft shaders that Java edition players have installed as mods for years—something Bedrock has always left out of.

But the environment isn't the only thing getting a visual upgrade, either. Mobs and certain items are getting the same treatment. For example, spider eyes will glow in the dark to make them more ominous, and torches will give off a more realistic shine to light your way. These updates are designed to help immerse you further into the world, but have no effect on gameplay.

You don't have to worry about any of the Vibrant Visuals features affecting your gameplay, actually. If the rays from the sun don't directly hit your crops, they won't stop growing, or if mobs are standing in the shadows and not in the direct sunlight, they'll still burn. Vibrant Visuals is exclusively a visual upgrade and these elements will have no impact on the game as you play. This is particularly good news for anyone playing on a Realm, since you'll still be able to play with friends even if they don't have the update yet.

Much like the Spring to Life update which launched this year, the aim of the update is to bring the world of Minecraft to life without losing its traditional look. As stated by Jens Bergensten, the Chief Creative Officer, the update is "a new look that still stays true to our creative principles." The update will also be backwards compatible with any of your old worlds, so you won't even need to start a new one once it does hit your platform.

It's Minecraft Live time, and developer Mojang has announced the latest content coming to the perennially popular block builder: including, in the year of our lord 2025, fancy new shaders.

One topic raised was the game's business model. There are various deluxe editions, but the standard version of Minecraft is the "Java and Bedrock" edition that retails for an upfront price of $30 / £20. On top of this you can buy skins, texture packs and so on in the Minecraft marketplace, and there are two optional subscriptions: Marketplace Pass and Realms Plus. But the important thing is that the base purchase really does have everything you need, and the game never feels like it's trying to upsell you.

But this is one of the most popular games in the world, at a time where alternatives like Fortnite and Roblox are free-to-play. Mojang, however, is not into that way of doing things.

"Yeah, it doesn't really work with the way we built it," Ingela Garneij, executive producer of Minecraft Vanilla, told IGN. "I mean we built the game for a different purpose. So monetization doesn't work in that way for us. It's a purchase of the game and then that's it.

"For us it's important that our game is available for as many people as possible. And so I think that's a very core value that it should be accessible for everyone. It's the best deal in the world."

Garneij isn't wrong. I bought my son Minecraft on Switch for £20, since when he hasn't played a single other title on there, and I don't think he even realises there's a marketplace of paid-for content. I'm not sure it's "the best deal in the world" but it is unquestionably excellent value-for-money.

Asked whether Microsoft puts any pressure on Mojang to find new ways to monetise the experience, Garneij says "no, no. What's important for us is that many people can enjoy it still, and that's going on strong still.”

Hey, you want to get highfalutin about this? Let's get highfalutin. "For me it’s part of the important values of Minecraft," says game director, Agnes Larsson. "I think it's become such an important thing of what Minecraft is and the perfect culture and values, and I think we all here can agree on that. It's a thing for the game and it's one part of what makes the game strong. It has strong values.”

I'm not sure what values Minecraft really has beyond "mine stuff" and "kill creepers", but one could extrapolate the wider point that this remains a phenomenon among younger people and, especially, children. I do think it's important that every kid who's into Minecraft gets the "full" experience for the standard price, and to be fair to Microsoft it has done a lot since acquiring Mojang but never touched this aspect of the game.

And let's not beat around the bush either: Minecraft is an absolute cash cow, and will continue to be so for a long time to come. Hell A Minecraft Movie is about to come out, and may well be the first film to make a trillion dollars (OK, I'm kidding, but it'll make a lot).

The new Spring to Life update is released today, free for all players naturally, which adds more ambient features and different mob variants, as well as some A Minecraft Movie-inspired minigames. But the most exciting change, as someone who's spent way too much time staring at their colour palettes, is that spawn eggs are getting a visual overhaul.

There's a ton of new content coming to Minecraft over the next year. The Spring to Life update will add more ambient features and different mob variants. A new block and mob will be added alongside some A Minecraft Movie-inspired minigames. But one of the most exciting new additions is the new vibrant visuals features, aka shaders.

"How do you upgrade the look of Minecraft without messing up 15 years of design," Mojang says in a blog post. "We think we’ve worked it out. Our developers have been hard at work on a new graphical set of enhancements to Minecraft. We’re calling it Vibrant Visuals."

This will provide a new "visual upgrade" for vanilla Minecraft, with the sunlight shining through the trees, pixilated shadows, and better water effects. It will be added to Bedrock devices first in the coming months and will then be made accessible in Java sometime after that.

"Vibrant Visuals brings thousands of individually crafted elements while preserving what makes Minecraft unique," Mojang says in another, more detailed post. "Chief creative officer Jens Bergensten describes it as 'a new look that still stays true to our creative principles', as biomes and builds come to life with the addition of a range of graphical enhancements. But what you will notice the most is the interplay of light and shadow."

Volumetric lighting will make the sun's rays more noticeable across the Overworld, and will mean that every block will cast a shadow. "You’ll be able to see reflections in water and on the surface of metallic blocks, while subsurface scattering brings a gentle glow to leaves and grass," the post continues.

The new feature will also impact mobs and items. Things that already glow, like spider eyes, will now look even more vibrant, or menacing if you're not a fan of our eight-legged friends. It'll also mean that places like The Deep Dark will look even better than before: "The sculk is now more emissive, more immersive, and it creates a really magical scene."

Ever since I can remember, I've had a constant rotation of shaders in Minecraft. I've spent hours searching for shaders that would make the leaves move, give me prettier lighting and flowers, and provide realistic water effects on places like Curseforge or Modrinth. All in an effort to make my cosy cottages and flower grottos look as idyllic as possible.

Getting shaders isn't too tricky, but depending on how many you install, it can really suffocate your PC, causing longer loading times and a bit of stuttering, especially if you have a long field of view. Because of this, shaders were something that I had to use sparingly or a feature that some of my friends just didn't bother with for fear of messing up their games. But Mojang's vibrant visuals will change this for the better, making shaders more accessible.

"As a cosmetic update to the game, vibrant visuals graphics will not impact gameplay mechanics," the blog post says. "This means that existing lighting mechanics, such as when hostile mobs may or may not burn, crop growth, daylight detectors, mob farms, and more, will all still work exactly as before. This also means that players on a Realm can all play together regardless of whether or not they are using Vibrant Visuals—as the gameplay of Minecraft remains the same." This really is a massive win for those who haven't been able to indulge in the beauty of shaders until now.

I wasn't expecting too much from Minecraft Live 2025. We've already got new cow and pig variants coming in different biomes, and with A Minecraft Movie just weeks away from release, I was sure that this broadcast from Mojang would just be a recap of what's coming out and not much else. But it appears I was wrong.

Alongside the upcoming Spring to Life update, which will bring the new warm and cold animal variants and ambient features like crunchy leaves and fireflies, Mojang Studios' Agnes Larsson and Jens Bergensten revealed that we'll be getting built-in shaders, some Minecraft Movie-inspired minigames, and a new mob—the happy ghast.

Anyone who's ever ventured into the Netherworld knows what a ghast is—they've likely come out of nowhere to hit you with a fireball which has sent you barrelling down into the fiery lava below, or just acted as a general nuisance while you've been fighting Piglins or trying to find your lost Nether portal. Needless to say, I never liked them and honestly went out of my way to strike them down with my bow and arrow, but now Mojang has revealed the history of the ghast, I feel really bad for my past transgressions.

Later this year, Minecraft will add a new block, the dried ghast. This is a baby ghast that you can pick up and bring to the Overworld. There, you can rehydrate it with a bucket of water to make the ghastling, which will eventually grow up into a happy ghast, a friendly mob that you can put a saddle on and ride through the sky with up to three other players: "This update brings new mechanics, a new level of cute, and a new perspective on the Overworld."

So it turns out that the ghasts in the Nether are so sad because they're actually aquatic mobs which have been trapped in the Nether. They cry to try and keep their young alive and fight you out of pain and confusion. Meaning this update has confirmed that I'm officially the worst person ever, or at least I feel like it for hurting so many ghasts.

I'll be rescuing as many dried ghasts as humanly possible, and you, too, can join in on the effort soon during testing or later on in 2025 once the new block and mob are finally added to the vanilla version of Minecraft.

We don't have a confirmed date for this addition yet, but we do know it'll be added as part of the second Minecraft game drop of 2025. At the beginning of the Minecraft Live 2025 stream, Agnes and Jens explained that instead of one big update, Mojang will be adding features gradually throughout the year in what they now call game drops. This is part of Mojang's new initiative, which was first introduced at the end of 2024 with the Pale Garden biome to give players more consistent new additions instead of one big update irregularly.

Minecraft has announced the Spring to Life update at Minecraft Live 2025, which marks the first significant drop for the year. We've seen a major chunk of what's planned for this update, and while it won't be adding any new biomes or mobs like the Pale Garden release did, it's still one to look forward to if you're an avid explorer of Minecraft's biomes.

The Spring to Life update intends to bring a new life to some of Minecraft's most iconic landscapes. Places we've spent hundreds of hours wandering around, such as the desert or the forest are getting new blocks, new ambient sounds, and even new passive mob variations to help make them feel more immersive and, frankly, more alive. Here's everything you need to know about the Spring to Life update, and when you can expect to see it for yourself.

When will the Spring to Life update be released?

The Spring to Life update will roll out on March 25, only a few days after its announcement at Minecraft Live 2025. This applies to all platforms too, so no one will have to wait around for this one.

What is included in the Spring to Life update?

There's a lot to look forward to in the Spring to Life update, with one of the most significant changes being passive mob variations depending on which biome you're in. Cows, chickens, and pigs will receive visual overhauls to give them a new look each time you change climate. For example, cows found in the snowy areas will now look like highland cows, and chickens in this area will look similar to Polish chickens rather than their traditional white variant. Each mob still has its iconic look Minecraft is known for, just with a slightly different appearance to help each biome feel more unique.

These biomes will also be receiving new sounds, such as wind and sand around the desert and leaf litter crunching. This goes hand in hand with the addition of new movement animations. We've seen things like floating particles or pops from lava pools in the past, but these new animations—the glow from a firefly bush or falling leaves—have been designed with the intention of making each biome feel less standstill. New blocks are also being added to each, but we won't know the full extent of what they are until we jump in for ourselves.

The firefly bush is an example of one of the new additions, which was shown in detail during the livestream. This foliage block can be used to attract fireflies to your area, but unlike bees, you won't be able to interact with them like a mob. Instead, they seem to be like a light source. According to the livestream, players will be able to 'turn them on and off' since the fireflies will glow when it's dark, and disappear when it's light. So, I don't doubt all the Minecraft players who have a field day programming Redstone will love this addition.

Cartographer villager traits are getting changed too, so you'll receive more maps that guide you toward other villages in different biomes. This has been designed to keep you exploring the world a bit more and encourage you to move to different areas rather than staying in your home base and eventually getting bored of the setting. Knowing that there's something worth exploring in a biome, such as another village, is the incentive some players will need to get out a little more.

Finally, one of the more minor additions of the Spring to Life update is an overhaul of the spawn eggs. Before, each egg had a color palette related to which mob it would spawn, but given how many mobs the game now has, these eggs were starting to look incredibly similar. Now, each spawn egg will be decorated with a significant feature from each mob, like gill stalks for an axolotl or spider legs. It's a small change but will make all the difference for creative mode players who are used to checking each egg to see what monster it will bring to life.

Two things immediately occurred to me when I saw the first teaser for A Minecraft Movie. First, I can't believe my supposed pals at PC Gamer made me write about this. And second, why is it called A Minecraft Movie? Why not The Minecraft Movie? It is, after all, the Minecraft movie.

It turns out there's actually a reason, and it even sort of makes sense. "We’re calling it ‘A Minecraft Movie’ because we’re respecting the fact that there’s no one story that drives the game," Legendary Entertainment's chairman of worldwide production Mary Parent told Variety.

Jared Hess, the director of A Minecraft Movie, concurred. "We’re not canonizing anything. We’re just one of a zillion stories."

Well... yeah, okay, I guess. It sounds like the sort of thing that gets cooked up after the fact to justify a dodgy decision, but it does fit with the narrative underpinnings of Minecraft, which are essentially non-existent: Even Steve, one of the most immediately recognizable characters in videogame history, was only given a name because of a joke that got out of hand. So if you imagine Minecraft as a sort of continuum of infinite universes, and this movie is just one of them, then yes: A Minecraft Movie makes at least a passable amount of sense.

That approach to Minecraft's non-canon extends to Jack Black, who portrays Steve in the film—but just one of many Steves. Mojang senior director of original content Torfi Frans Ólafsson said Black's character was originally a talking pig, and he didn't become Steve until "very, very, very late in the development," because the film "needed an expert and host." But Black, like the film itself, is not really Steve—he's a Steve.

"This is not my Steve or your Steve—this is Jack Black’s Steve," Ólafsson said. "A lot of fans responded when they saw the first teasers and trailers, like, 'Hey, wait a minute—this is just Jack Black. This isn’t Jack Black being someone else.' And maybe it is, because this is literally him interpreting this character and what it means to him."

One might argue that Jack Black plays Jack Black in pretty much everything he appears in, but apparently he took the role seriously: The Variety report says he went "full Method" on set, and when Ólafsson got Xbox consoles and set up private Minecraft servers for the cast and crew, Black "was just completely manic" with the game, putting more than 100 hours into it—not a lot by some measures, but quite a bit when you're supposed to be making a movie.

It will be very interesting indeed to see how all of this ultimately works out: PC Gamer's Morgan Park said A Minecraft Movie's villagers "look like what I imagine Hell is," which is generally not the sort of thing you want to see plastered across a movie poster, but Chris Livingston predicted "A Minecraft Movie will make A Trillion Dollars," although he also suggested that Warner could've accomplished the same thing for a lot less money "by just having Jack Black stream himself playing Minecraft and yelling item names." So, maybe not the most resounding endorsement ever.

A Minecraft Movie is set to debut in the US on April 4. Now if someone can just explain Jason Momoa's whole thing to me, we'll be all set.

As the upcoming Minecraft film creeps closer, one modder has found a creative way to blur the lines between film and game. By adding Jack Black's voice to Minecraft, players can now feel even closer to the one who calls himself Steve (via GamesRadar).

It all started after a player compiled all the times Jack Black says something from Minecraft verbatim in A Minecraft Movie trailer. There's "Steve", "Enderpearl", "Overworld", "water bucket", and who could forget "crafting table". Then another player pitched an idea where someone could make a mod "where every time you pick up an item or hit a mob, you get a clip from the movie of Jack Black saying it like this, like that one mode that flashes Jesus at you at low HP."

A few hours after this ingenious pitch, a mod popped up that did just that. "Now you can be Steve from the hit movie Minecraft in the game Minecraft based on the movie Minecraft," SnailMan says. "Three hours of my life that I'll never get back went into making this."

So far, all you get is Jack Black's voice saying "Steve" when you load into Minecraft or "crafting table", whenever you build or interact with that item in-game, but I'm sure there'll be more to come: "I'm squeezing everything I can from these voice lines, nothing will be wasted." SnailMan intends to release the mod on Modrinth but still has to jump through a couple of hoops before it's released to the public.

"I submitted the mod for review on Modrinth," SnailMan says. "No idea how long it's gonna take. Will link it here once it's accepted." I have no clue why an epic mod like this wouldn't be allowed. I mean, who doesn't want to pretend they're Jack Black, pretending to be Steve playing Minecraft—it seems like a dream. I also want to point out that as A Minecraft Movie isn't out yet, we can't say for sure that it'll be a hit movie, even if the new trailer does look like the film will make a trillion dollars.

Not long ago, we got the news that Minecraft would be getting a couple of new pig variants, the warm and the cold pig. Following that, we've just heard that cows will also be getting the same treatment, meaning we'll get fluffy highland Minecraft cows which you can test out before it gets added for good.

"Strewn like confetti across biomes, your next expedition might entail meeting two moo-some cow variants, spotting dancing firefly particles glimmering in the dark, hearing howling wind and other ambient desert sounds, or picking up a lush new plant block: the bush," a Minecraft blog post says. "Coated in fluffy fur, our cold cow brings cozy with them wherever they go—which is lucky, since it’s picked the snow-swept chilly biomes as its home. Our auburn, warm cow can instead be found kicking up dust in the sandy biomes."

You'll be able to find the warm cow in hotter biomes like the Badlands, Desert, and Savannah, while the cold cow will be found pretty much anywhere there's snow on the ground. This will be in snow biomes, up high in the mountains, and particularly chilly dark wood biomes.

But unlike the pig, this isn't the first time Minecraft cows have got a new variant. Players can already find the Mooshroom roaming around rare biomes, and while the Moobloom never officially made it into Minecraft after losing out the mob vote to the Glow Squid, it's still very much alive in all our hearts.

These variants may also be a little underwhelming if you're used to using mods to enlarge your livestock farm. I use the More Mob Variants pack, which not only gives me more variants for cows and pigs but also means I get new dogs, sheep, and chickens. The cows on offer in this mod pack are also, dare I say, better than the cold and the warm cows.

The wooly cow is essentially the same thing as the cold cow, and the pinto cow is the same as the warm. But there are also cookie, dairy, ashen, and umbra cows to collect and look after, thanks to this mod pack. Plus, if you add on the More Mob Variants x Fresh Animations pack, your animals will have more idle animations, such as sitting down or rolling around in the grass.

Different shades of cow aside, there are a couple of other new features coming to the first Minecraft game drop of 2025. There will be new ambient desert sounds like howling winds and rustles coming from clusters of sand and terracotta blocks. Then there's the bush; a new lush plant block that is basically just a sprout of greenery that can be found in forests, birch forests, plains, windswept hills, and other green biomes.

But the absolutely best part (other than the new cows) has to be the introduction of fireflies. These little critters were teased way back when frogs made their first appearance in Minecraft, and players have been clambering for them ever since. "This new plant block spawns dancing firefly particles that – listen to this – glow in the dark," the blog post says. "As if that wasn’t enough, you can bury the firefly bush below other blocks to make them sparkle! Trek to swamps and bodies of water (during the day, obviously) to retrieve the firefly bush, and then you can use bone meal to grow more in the safety of your own home."

I have never been so excited to see sparkles on my screen, and together with my army of frogs that worship a newly built frog shrine in my main server, I think my aim of creating a truly magical forest scene is finally about to come together.

As much as I love throwing myself into the depths of ravines on a desperate hunt for diamonds, or trekking to the Nether and immediately plunging into lava, sometimes I think Minecraft needs to chill out a bit. There are only so many times a creeper can blow up your house before you go into your settings, switch from hard to peaceful, and start a new life as a surface-level farmer. Yes, I might be projecting, but there's a limit to how often I can lose my inventory before I lose my mind.

Fortunately, Minecraft has launched a brand new expansion that focuses on the game's more laid-back side. The Hello Kitty and Friends DLC changes Minecraft's standard survival crafting gameplay into a farming simulator while bundling in some adorable characters to accompany you. Rather than being thrust into a gigantic world as you would with a standard Minecraft game, you're limited to a town in which you need to build and manage a farm instead.

There are new crops to grow, alongside new animals to tend to which is pretty refreshing given Minecraft's passive mobs have changed very little over the years. You'll also get to decorate the entire thing with brand-new Hello Kitty and Sanrio-inspired decor. Gone are the days of sticking a pressure plate on top of a fence post to make a table, we finally have actual furniture to decorate with.

On top of that, the DLC comes with four seasons that rotate while you play which affects your farm in different ways. This is bound to keep you on your toes and stop the daily to-do list of water crops and care for animals from becoming boring, and as someone who's poured an ungodly amount of time into farming simulators, this is something I appreciate a lot. When summer rolls around the risk of a heatwave rolling in and wilting your crops is more likely. Or in the later seasons, you might have to prepare for a typhoon to hit. There's nothing quite like a rainy day in a farming sim to take away the pressure of remembering to water your crops, but it's nice to have an extra layer of challenge to consider as well.

Though for any Sanrio lover, the main appeal of this DLC is the charming, blocky characters you'll get to complete quests for while you go about your farm life. Rather than the DLC only featuring Hello Kitty, lesser-known characters like Tuxedo Sam, PomPomPurin, and Bad Badtz Maru are also ready to hang out. Even Hangyodon has a place in the DLC, and I frankly never thought I'd see the day he starts getting the attention he deserves. These characters act a lot like Animal Crossing villagers in the sense that they wander around and occasionally give you tasks to complete in return for rewards like furniture. You'll also unlock them as you go, so if you don't immediately find your favourite character they're likely to join later down the line.

Even though everything still has the traditional blocky Minecraft look, it's easy to forget that you're playing the same game. As a huge farming sim fanatic and a lover of all things cute, I can't even try and hide my excitement for this DLC. With that said I guarantee there's still something that will inevitably frustrate me to the point where I have to take a breather and ponder how I can still do something wrong in arguably one of the easiest genres, but at least I'll have an array of cute characters to offer a shoulder to cry on when that day comes.

Minecraft started 2025 off with a bang by adding falling leaves, new flowers, and the absolute pinnacle of development, different pig variations. Now, instead of just having the boring old pink pig in your farm, you can also keep the cold pig and the warm pig in the pen alongside it.

There have been pigs in Minecraft for the last 15 years, but until now, they've all just been cut from the same cloth. The new warm pig can be found in hot biomes like the desert or the badlands, while the cold pig is covered in fluffy fur to keep them warm in sub-zero temperatures found in the snow biome.

If, like me, you can't wait to get your hands on these little fellas, then you can test this and the other new features out by enabling snapshots for the Java Edition or turning on previews/betas in the Bedrock Edition.

If you do end up checking this update out early, then you can also report any bugs you encounter: "The Pig Positivity Score (which I’m pretty sure pigs themselves made up) has shot through the roof since this came into testing," the official Minecraft blog post says. "But when you trek out to meet our new pigs, please report any oink-usual behavior to your nearest pig representative at bugs.mojang.com."

I'm just so happy that we're finally getting more variations for pigs. Last year, Mojang introduced nine new dog types to vanilla Minecraft, which was a huge move for collectors like myself. But since then, I've been eagerly waiting for more mob variants. There are a couple of options for animals, like cows, which also have the Mooshroom and the sadly deceased Moobloom, but otherwise, animals in Minecraft can get a little boring at times.

There's nothing wrong with this, but as someone who likes customising builds for the biome that I'm in, I've ended up using mods to give me more animal variations for every kind of climate.

My favourite mod right now is the More Mob Variants pack, which adds more types of cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, dogs, and more. With this, I can have a French bulldog or a husky instead of a plain old wolf, collect tons of wooly, cookie, or umbra cows for my farm, or even keep amber, golden crested, and stormy chickens as pets.

There are other mods available that do a similar thing, but this one in particular, created by nyuppo is by far the best and currently has over 10 million downloads. The modder also released further support for the More Mob Variants pack called, the More Mob Variants x Fresh Animations, which gives animals more traits like cats loafing or pigs rolling around in the dirt and getting all muddy—a critical masterpiece if you ask me.

The two new pig variants may not give players as many options as mods like this do, but it's still a great change, which I'm sure will be appreciated by those who just want to stick to vanilla Minecraft.

This update also includes more than just the warm and cold pigs. There are also new ambient features in the forest biomes, such as wildflowers, falling leaves, and leaf litter on the ground, making a crunching sound when you walk over it.

"On your next expeditions into forests, dark forests, and wooded badlands, listen out for the crunch of leaves underfoot," the blog post says. "Leaf litter makes a rustling sound when you walk through it and can be used to decorate other blocks. In meadows, birch forests, and old-growth birch forests, you will instead find wildflowers. These yellow and white flowers can be crafted into dye and have four growth stages that speed up with bonemeal. Place them at different angles to have your builds bloom in different patterns!"

Ambient features like these are one of the silent heroes in Minecraft. It's what makes this game so peaceful and cosy (provided you're not playing on hardcore), and it has always been one of my favourite elements of the game. So crunchy leaves are a huge win in my books.

Lastly, the loadstone's recipe is changing, making it easier to build the beacon that'll lead you back to your base, so you'll never get lost foraging or exploring again. The new recipe just calls for an iron ingot and eight chiseled bricks.

Last September, during Minecraft Live, Mojang announced that it would be approaching updates differently from there on out. Instead of releasing new features as part of a massive update that would be announced during Minecraft Live, the decision was made to scrap these and release updates holistically throughout the year.

I was initially quite sad to hear this news as I've always seen Minecraft Live as a milestone of my gaming year, and I fondly remember the excitement and anticipation of waiting to see what the new theme would be—Caves and Cliffs is still my all-time favourite update. But since this news, we've received a whole new biome, The Pale Garden, and a new mob, The Creaking, as well as this new update with the ambient pigs. So I'm actually starting to prefer the little and often method, if only because we're getting fun little features to explore on a more regular basis.

It's been weeks since I've seen any shred of light, trapped down below the surface of a group-modded Skyblock server. My so-called friends all roam the top layer of dirt working on their factory chicken farm, but I haven't been able to see any progress at all—I've just heard of all the wondrous miracles being performed up above.

Someone always gets left behind, even in the age of science, and this time, it's me, sacrificed to the silk mines to kill worms for dirt so the topsiders can carry on expanding their precious chicken farm.

It all started after I suggested jumping back into modded Minecraft. My friends and I used to play Tekkit and the like back in the day, and after trying and failing to make any real progress in Satisfactory due to creative differences, we all decided it would be best to stick to what we know and start a new factory in Minecraft.

I'd like to point out that a modded Skyblock server was my idea, so I was a little shocked when the group came together to assign project roles, which landed me providing the dirt for the expanding factory. I admit I may not be as useful as my friends, who are actually engineers, but I can string pipes and red stones together just as well as anyone else.

I think my exile was in part due to my friends still not forgiving me for the Red Night of '14. This is when I got a little carried away with expanding our Skyblock base, and neglected to place any lights down. Without light to ward the evil away, every hostile mob that had been waiting to spawn for weeks suddenly dropped into our world. We all died, and the creeper explosions wiped out half our base, taking most of our crops and all of our water with it. But that's just one mistake made a decade ago, so I don't think trapping me down below the world to farm dirt in 2024 was a fair punishment.

But I begrudgingly continued to gather muck for the topsiders previously known as my friends so they had space for their precious chickens. It wasn't too bad at first. All I had to do was farm silk worms from trees and compost the waste, which could then be made into dirt blocks. Before long I got into a rhythm, becoming an absolute dirt-producing machine. Then I started to get bored.

I began trying to use my dirt blocks to build a way up to the surface, but every time I got close, someone would get wise to my plan and hit me back down. So, instead, I started tunneling around below the surface, leaving decoys everywhere so they wouldn't know where I'd be coming from, but that didn't seem to work either. In the end, I decided the only way I'd ever be allowed on ground level again would be if I bargained for it.

If the price is right

They had everything they needed: food, chickens, and an endless supply of dirt. But one thing they hadn't got their grubby hands on yet was an endless pot of XP for enchanting the chicken eggs (I don't actually know why this was necessary, but from what I heard, it was a vital part of the factory process). So, with this knowledge, I pitched a compromise: I got allowed back on the surface, and they would get their mob farm for endless XP.

To my surprise, the topsiders went for it and allowed me back on the surface to make them a mob farm. I was surprisingly underwhelmed with what they had achieved so far with all my dirt. It turns out that they had been bickering about whose plan for the factory would be best, so much so that all they had made was a skeleton factory and a chicken run.

Despite their failures, I made quick work of the mod farm. I've constructed hundreds of these over the years, and I know the schematics by heart. The only problem was I forgot to tell them not to break any of the bottom blocks where you kill the mobs to collect the XP, although I thought this went without saying.

After only a day or so, someone got too excited at the prospect of collecting XP and tore open a hole at the base of the mob farm, unleashing hordes of zombies, skeletons, and creepers into the chicken factory. Before I knew it, there was no more topside—as creepers blew craters in the Skyblock base, obliterating everything, even some of my dirt farm. The whole ordeal didn't end until someone had the quick thinking to simply log off and then briefly turn the world to Peaceful. But the damage was already done.

Predictably, I was blamed for this blunder just like I was 10 years ago, and after some infighting, we all decided we ought to give factory sims a rest for a while as we weren't even cut out for the simplest form of sim, Minecraft. Although I rest easy knowing that even if I didn't manage to make impressive technical advancements, I did my job mining dirt well enough.

Minecraft is cramming in one more game update before closing out the year, Mojang announced today. The next Minecraft update, called The Garden Awakens, is coming next Tuesday, December 3.

The update's main feature is the new Pale Garden biome where the creepy new "creaking" enemy lives among the spooky greyish trees.

"Venture into the pale garden during the day and you’ll find it surprisingly quiet. Mobs don’t spawn here, leaving you to mine for pale oak logs, pale hanging moss, and pale moss carpets in peace," Mojang says in its announcement post. "The pale garden is home to the creaking—an unsettling type of mob that’ll freeze in place when you look at it and follow at terrifying speed when you look away."

This update is what Mojang is now calling a "drop" as opposed to a major version update. So instead of a 1.22 update in summer 2025 we have the smaller Bundles of Bravery update from October and the Garden Awakens update that have been announced. Based on the current available snapshot builds, it looks like The Garden Awakens will be Minecraft version 1.21.4.

Mojang has pulled this sort of surprise before by adding the armadillo mob earlier than we'd anticipated and expanding how wolves work in another small update. But this year is the first time we're getting a "drop" without any bigger title update following after.

We'll see how these smaller updates are received by the community. Without a big version number release to rally around, updates could feel a bit quieter. They may also put more pressure on the creators of the best Minecraft mods and our favorite Minecraft texture packs as they try to keep up with an increased release schedule.

But hey, we're getting a totally white wood set. That's something to celebrate. I'm already anticipating a huge influx of new "Minecraft modern house" build videos to crop up over the holidays.

Correction: The first version of this story referenced The Garden Awakens as Minecraft's first content drop but Bundles of Bravery actually released in October.

Minecraft and Merlin Entertainments have signed a deal to create two theme parks dedicated to the game in the UK and US (thanks, The Guardian), at a cost of around £85 million ($110 million). Merlin Entertainments is the largest theme park operator in Europe, second only to Disney globally, and runs attractions including Legoland and Madame Tussauds.

The parks are due to open in 2026 and 2027, though the sites are yet to be confirmed, and the tagline is "Adventures made Real". Get ready for some excited executives:

"We are everywhere digitally, Merlin is everywhere physically," said Microsoft's Kayleen Walters. "It is about how do we expand Minecraft beyond the game. Mojang and Microsoft are experts on Minecraft and the brand, Merlin are the experts on location-based experiences; it is a shared vision."

Love a shared vision. Microsoft treated Minecraft with considerable care following its 2014 acquisition of Mojang Studios for $2.5 billion, but this is the latest of several major brand extensions, most notably the dodgy-looking Minecraft movie and an upcoming Netflix series.

"When we look for partners we look for the right people, scale and community," said Merlin chief executive Scott O’Neil. "We are in 23 countries: What brands can play at that level? You have to be one of the biggest brands in the world. We have partnered with the number one toy brand, Lego, the number one toddler brand, Peppa Pig, and now in Minecraft the biggest videogame. Bringing Minecraft to life is going to be one of the greatest joys; This is just the beginning; our aspirations are very big."

The parks will apparently contain "digitally enabled real-life experiences", as well as "touchpoints" where guests can unlock "exclusive in-game content." Alongside this we are promised "first-of-its-kind concepts" for Minecraft-themed accommodation and restaurants, so if you've ever wanted to sleep in a bed made of blocks then start saving.

The announcement comes with a bunch of concept images, which are a little freaky because they're populated by silhouette ghost people, and a short teaser video that shows off a (virtual) Minecraft rollercoaster, complete of course with a Minecart. Who knows what relation these images will have to the final parks, but they show various biomes from the game, characters like Steve, and kiddies petting various Minecraft animals (surely this is just like rubbing your hand on a table).

There's no denying that the deal makes commercial sense, with Minecraft easily one of the most bankable game properties ever, and Nintendo World having proven that the concept can work. In 2023 Microsoft announced that Minecraft has sold over 300 million copies since it launched in 2011, making it the best-selling game of all time (Grand Theft Auto V sits behind it on a mere 205 million), and it remains perennially popular with young children.