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The secretive world of Minecraft snapshots, the semi-official weekly updates that Mojang puts out to test the updates, delivered a doozy of an update last week. It supports animated textures. The theory goes that people will use the textures to animate small blocks. So you could have fizzing fire crawling along a Redstone circuit, or maybe a you could use it to animate a powered circuit, like the frightening magic picture above. Cool, huh? Of course, some people have to take it too far.(more…)

Last year saw a total of more than 15 million purchases of Minecraft across all platforms, with Pocket Edition the leader at just under 5.9 million across iOS and Android. As if we needed any more proof of the blocky sandbox's success, Mojang published concrete figures for last year's sales, demonstrating just how prolific 2012 was for its franchise.

In addition to Pocket Edition, there were just under 4.2 million purchases of Minecraft on PC and Mac in 2012, and just over 5 million on Xbox Live Arcade. This is only speculation since it assumes all purchases were made at particular prices, but based on the games' current North American prices our supercomputer reckons Mojang's figures translate into a whopping $254 million of revenue, just from sales of the games alone.

Even if those figures are a little off, this video link feels entirely justified.

#bioshock Kevin, Jake and Stewie of website hungercraft are to thank for this incredible recreation of BioShock's Rapture in Minecraft, captured perfectly not just in block form, but in a fantastic trailer as well. More »

Actually this isn’t written by someone called Mavis, but instead by RPS chum and former Wired staffer Duncan Geere, who you may remember from his Sim City 2000 retrospective. In this first of four parts, he takes you through the ropes of basic coding via the modern marvel that is Minecraft. Everything’s done in game, and it all begins by punching a tree. Take it away, Duncan(more…)

#minecraft Using a program called Worldpainter, a builder by the name of lentebriesje is trying to recreate all of planet Earth in Minecraft. At a 1:1500 scale. More »

Minecraft dug deep on New Year's Eve to reach 5 million sales on Xbox Live Arcade before the close of 2012. The news is maybe not surprising given the franchise's prolificacy across the board over the last 12 months, including 453,000 sales on Christmas Day alone, but the achievement still represents a momentous way for developers 4J Studios and Mojang to see in the new year.

Not that there's time for 4J Studios to rest on any laurels, as the team is off its festive break and back at work remedying some of the problems encountered with Title Update 7. The developer says a bug-fixing patch is being released later this month.

Minecraft dug deep on New Year's Eve to reach 5 million sales on Xbox Live Arcade before the close of 2012. The news is maybe not surprising given the franchise's prolificacy across the board over the last 12 months, including 453,000 sales on Christmas Day alone, but the achievement still represents a momentous way for developers 4J Studios and Mojang to see in the new year.

Not that there's time for 4J Studios to rest on any laurels, as the team is off its festive break and back at work remedying some of the problems encountered with Title Update 7. The developer says a bug-fixing patch is being released later this month.

#minecraft Here is a mod by Minecraft forum user Flammarilva which allows you to talk to Minecraft creepers/mobs...because the mod turns them into anime girls much like the ones you'd find in a Japanese visual novel. You can defeat (or befriend!) the mobs by speaking to them. There are multiple dialogue options and everything. Watch above. More »

It's Christmas, the presents have been opened, turkey and ham consumed - it's the midday lull. What to do? If you're like over 400,000 other people, you buy whatever version of Minecraft is handy. Across all available platforms, Minecraft sold 435,000 copies on December 25, according to the block maestro himself, Markus "Notch" Persson.

Be careful folks, that's not a festive, green holiday decoration - it's a Creeper.

#starbound More »

#wallpaper What was that? Did you say you were in need of some new wallpaper? And what? You love Minecraft too? Don't worry buddy. Dead End Thrills—the screenshot artist—has got your back. More »

#minecraft Minecraft: The Story Of Mojang premiered today on Xbox Live, with an $8 digital release and a $20 DVD release scheduled to follow soon. But it seems 2 Player Productions doesn't want your money; the production company behind the documentary has uploaded the film for free to the Pirate Bay. More »

On December 23, Minecraft fans will get their chance to pick up a DVD copy of 2 Player Productions' documentary, Minecraft: The Story of Mojang. This follows its debut on your Xbox 360 this Saturday, December 22.

The DVD will be on sale through Fangamer for $20, with the first 7,000 copies coming wrapped in a custom "dirt brown" case, and including a reversible cover and a code for a free download of the film in 720p HD. Otherwise, you can hit up the official site on Sunday and stream or purchase from there. But after you're done, get back to playing Minecraft proper - that massive lava tower isn't going to build itself.

#moviereview You've heard it a million times already. How Minecraft is not just some little game about surviving the night and making stuff, but a major milestone for the entire medium. Along with how it has forever transformed the way that games are made, played, even perceived. So on and so forth. More »

#minecraft There's a Minecraft Christmas song. It's by Area 11, a band from England. As of two days ago, it was apparently just outside the top 40 singles in the United Kingdom, given a massive boost by the popular Minecraft community program Yogscast. More »

#notch Notch and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban are each donating a quarter million dollars to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF says that the money from the maker of Minecraft will help fund efforts to reform patent law in the courts and in the court of public opinion. More »

#minecraft This is the trailer for Minecraft: The Story of Mojang, which comes out this weekend. On December 22, you can catch a one-time-only screening on Xbox Live (assuming you pay for Gold). On December 23, you can start buying the DVD online. More »

Minecraft: The Story of Mojang, a documentary from 2 Player Productions, will premiere on Saturday, December 22, on Xbox Live for Gold members in the US, UK, Ireland, Belgium, Portugal, Austria, France, Finland and Sweden. The documentary, strangely enough, tells the tale of Mojang founder Markus "Notch" Persson as he rises to indie fame with the development of Minecraft. It will air at 8 p.m. EST in the US and 8 p.m. CET in Europe on Saturday.

The documentary secured funding through Kickstarter, raising $210,000 of a requested $150,000 in March 2011. 2 Player Productions isn't new to the video game documentary world, having produced films for Double Fine, a chiptune documentary called Reformat the Planet, and more. Check out the launch trailer for Minecraft: The Story of Mojang above and click the Minecraft tile on your Xbox Live dashboard for viewing times in your area.

With Indie Game: The Movie and now this, gaming has officially entered the realm of sans-serif white letters and Sundance hipster chic. Good job, everyone.

#minecraft There's a tendency to go straight for the fantastical when designing Minecraft worlds, to castles and islands in the sky, but just like we see with LEGO and its City sets, the mundane can be just as good. More »

Take a moment to enjoy the beauty of a man-made horizon, metal and glass glittering under the orange rays of a setting sun, pixelated blocks positioned seamlessly together at the click of a button. Minecraft maven Rikkuness builds beautiful Minecraft cityscapes to awe our senses, similar to the one shown above.

A collection of Rikkuness' creations can be viewed here, as picked up by the fine denizens of Reddit. Obviously these images involve a lot of mods and texture packs, so maybe don't be so disappointed when your vanilla Minecraft version of a Philadelphia skyline looks more like a wet sandcastle.

Minecraft Pocket Edition sales are now over 5 million, proving the iOS and Android versions are anything but lagging behind their XBLA and PC siblings. Mojang's Johan Bernhardsson revealed the figure this morning, which now sees sales across all Minecraft games at over 17.5 million at least.

Pocket Edition is missing a lot of what's included in the XBLA and PC versions, which is of course not surprising given the platforms. Nonetheless, one of the biggest and most asked-for absentees is online multiplayer - users can play together via local Wi-Fi, but not through the Internet. According to Bernhardsson, online multiplayer is now in the works.

It won't however feature in the next update, which would be 0.5.1. That's being targeted for late January/early February and mostly features "behind the scenes" fixes and tweaks.

The Minecraft Halloween Skin Pack racked up a total of $770,448 for charities, developer 4J Studios revealed today. All proceeds from the spooky add-on, sold on Xbox Live for a month at 160 MSP ($2), are being split between the Block by Block, SANDS Lothians, Child's Play, and Macmillan Cancer Support charities. Based on the price, the figure suggests roughly 335,000 players bought the pack, making it a veritable graveyard smash.

4J Studios is hard at work on further Minecraft updates. The next in line, Title Update 7, includes among other things experience points and animal breeding, while Title Update 8 features The End and its Ender Dragon boss.

"The End" of Minecraft, which involves battling a giant Ender Dragon in a barren, vast void, is coming to the game's XBLA version in Title Update 8, Play XBLA reveals. Title Update 7 is next on the list, and it will bring most of the features from PC version 1.0.1, including animal breeding, potion brewing, experience points, enchantment tables, the mushroom biome and nether fortress.

XBLA developer 4J Studios handed out a few extra details on Twitter, noting that leveling up takes 30 experience points, rather than 50 as in the PC version, and XP is earned by mining, smelting and breeding. Ender Pearls will teleport and can be thrown in creative mode. Title Update 7 will not include ocelots, jungles, spawn eggs or Iron Golems.

While Minecraft's upcoming January update version 1.5 churns away in the cauldrons of Mojang's most diligently studious wizards, a smaller update (version 1.4.6) is being coded in parallel for release sometime before Christmas.

Available to more adventurous adventurers now as Snapshot 12w49a, version 1.4.6 adds the ability to craft fireworks and enchanted books that can then be used to enchant items. Various bug fixes are also bundled with the patch, tough the Snapshot version of 1.4.6 is not itself guaranteed to be bug free.

The most important part of all of this, however, is that skulls can be added to the firework formula in order to make them look like Creepers when they explode, which is ironic and wonderful, as seen above.

#minecraft More »

#minecraft When you play Minecraft, it's in your face, it's blocky, and it's all rather immediate. You rarely get the sense of scale, or even wonder, that an entire world can contain from any single vantage point. The game's simplistic graphics don't help things. More »

#minecraft Life in Minecraft can be a scary thing, but also a romantic one. Build a life together, away from everything, and do your best to stay alive. But what about when that's no longer enough? More »

Threadless now has 10 shirts in its brand-new Minecraft collection, with most available for guys, gals, babies and kids. Each shirt is a winner of the Threadless Loves Minecraft design challenge, which offered the three top artists $3,000, a $500 Threadless voucher and a trip to MineCon Paris.

Each of the Minecraft shirts has its own brand of charm, such as Love Bomb, which features a lovesick, cartoonish Creeper courting a box of TNT, and Attack of the Giant Creeper!, a retro Hollywood homage. All shirts are $19.50 for adult sizes.

#bastion Maybe I'm just a sucker for pretty things, but Minecraft re-creations never cease to amaze me. More »