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Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition will arrive as a retail offering on April 30 in the United States for $20. Prepare thyself for the retail disc of the year-old Xbox 360 version of a 3-year-old PC game to outsell everything when the NPD data for April is released the following month.

The disc-based game includes all the features and content found in the current XBLA version, as well as the addition coming in the ninth title update. With an internet connection the disc version will also receive "all the same content and feature updates as the digital version ongoing."

The retail version will arrive in Australia, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan in early June. Seriously, start placing friendly wagers with friends now about that NPD crack earlier.

I think I’m right in saying that we all often worry about how Minecraft could possibly make any money. The poor folks at Mojang must be starving, freezing and wearing each other’s skin as thermal underwear by now. How many more developers must die before Notch comes up with a business model for his absurd, costly vanity project?

But what’s this? Now there is a new way for Minecraft to earn a buck or two. Mojang are planning to introduce Minecraft Realms, a paid monthly subscription service which allows the easy creation of private, controlled servers. The main aim of this is apparently to help parents keep their kids safe when playing Minecraft together online. And for said parents to pay $10-15 a month, of course.(more…)

While there's still no official word on when Mojang's next Minecraft-centric MineCon event will take place, the convention's potential location has at least been narrowed down to a specific country: "It'll be in the US, that's for sure. It's most definitely in the US," Mojang director of fun Lydia Winters told the audience during a recent SXSW Interactive panel.

"That's all I can say," Winters added. "I would like to tell more, but it's not 100 percent certain so I can't say anything yet." MineCon 2012 took place at Disneyland Paris, while the inaugural event stormed the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. In addition to her panel-hosting duties, Winters mentioned that her SXSW schedule included a meeting to discuss the next MineCon.

Prepare yourself for the Minecraft Redstone Update, which enables exciting additions such as the Redstone Comparator, a daylight sensor, weighted pressure plate, Nether quartz and ore, more detailed death messages, three settings in smooth lighting, and "many, many bug fixes." Minecraft 1.5, the Redstone Update, hits on Wednesday, March 13.

Update 1.5 provides a number of changes to Minecraft's Redstone, including variable signal strength, the introduction of a new capacitor block with one input and output each, new minecarts and more.

Take a look at the complete pre-release change list below, and grab it directly from Mojang here.

#mods The four seasons are all beautiful in their own rights, even if I do want to stab winter with its own icicles right about now. So while you're pillaging the land and creating massive structures, why not mimic the season you see outside your window inside your computer window? More »

#minecraft Minecraft on the Xbox 360 is no joke. In October, it briefly dethroned Call of Duty as the Xbox 360's most-played game, and is still a solid No. 2 five months later. So its viability as a console title isn't in question. More »

#watchthis Minecraft aficionado Tsarcorp is the one responsible for this gigantic, 42 square mile map of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. It incorporates an almost 1:1 replica of the Pripyat area, just as we've seen in the latest S.T.A.L.K.E.R. More »

#watchthis Real-world sunrises get more intense as we get closer to spring—but they pale next to what we can find in games. The lovely time-lapse moments you can see above, from Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto IV, among others, create living, breathing worlds that you just can't wait to dive into. More »

#minecraft There's a certain charm to Minecraft's default visuals, but it can also be argued that without help the game looks like ass. When you see jaw-dropping screens from the game, like these Game of Thrones pics, those slick graphics come courtesy of tricks like rendering, where what were once basic blocky tiles are passed over and given effects until they look like something you'd actually expect on a PC in 2013. More »

#watchthis We've seen a ton of projects play with the idea of building gorgeous worlds, using randomly generated landscapes—sometimes even paying tribute to Minecraft—but having much more sensitive building and editing tools in a world looking much more realistic, like, say, a sandbox RPG or FPS, is certainly new and refreshing. More »

#minecraft It's been inching its way through the rest of the internet all week long, so it was only a matter of time before "goats screaming like humans" made its way into video games. More »

Minecraft update 1.5 is set to arrive in "early March," according to a Twitter update from Mojang developer Jens Bergensten. To be a bit more exact, Bergensten says the PC update will be live in "roughly two weeks," placing it near the week of March 11.

Known as the Redstone Update, version 1.5 will address the redstone ore, giving it variable signal strength in addition to a new capacitor block. The Redstone Update also fixes the south-east rule glitch.

#minecraft I realise that one reason for Minecraft's success is that it can run on older/weaker computers, but this is crazy. More »

How we had hoped to see Pat Garratt enjoying a hearty feast of broiled denim and shallow-fried zipper, but it was not to be. The editor of VG247 last year swore to eat his own trousers in the event Minecraft man Markus ‘Notch’ Persson made good on his talk of funding a sequel to Double Fine’s Psychonauts. Also, Persson has recently confessed that such a thing is not currently possible, as Double Fine’s estimated $18 million budget for the game was beyond even his mighty means.(more…)

#minecraft At only 1:42, it's not exactly feature-length, but don't let the brevity of this clip put you off. It's about a brother and a sister telling you why they play, and enjoy, Minecraft. And it's wonderful. More »

We already knew that 2012 was a particularly legit year for Minecraft maker Mojang, what with its principle product being purchased over 15 million times and everything, but now we have a better idea of what success like that translates to in dollars. Well, technically in krona and then translated again into dollars, but whatever.

Overall, Mojang's revenue for 2012 tallied up at SEK 1.5 billion, or $237.84 million at current exchange rates, according to GamesIndustry's translation of Swedish publication IT24. Nearly half of that revenue (SEK 640 million/$101.48 million) was derived from the collection of license fees. Meanwhile, pre-tax profits were reported at SEK 580 million ($91.96 million), although no post-taxes/net income figures were provided.

One of Mojang's biggest hurdles is the non-universal nature of its online payment system, CEO Carl Manneh told IT24: "We have so many markets where we are not very strong yet," he said, "where many play Minecraft but few have bought it simply because you can't use our online payment solution there. That's something we'll get our hands to during 2013."

#minecraft In 2012, Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson took home 640 million krona—$101 million US—in licensing fees for the game, according to a report in the Swedish financial press. What's he going to do with that kind of money? Well, he tells Reddit, he may finally get a car. More »

#heavymetal Sure, it's fun to play Minecraft with you friends. But what if you could play with your favorite metal band? Even better. More »

Minecraft on Xbox 360 gets a host of fixes in Title Update 8 today, but no Ender Dragon as Play XBLA previously reported. Ender Dragons certainly are sneaky beasts, considering their size.

Title Update 8 includes fixes for a few random crashes and freezes, to force a Nether Fortress, Blaze Spawner and Nether Wart to always be present in the Nether for a new world, increase the Mooshroom spawn rate, add an Awkward Potion, improve animal breeding mechanics, and change the "Download Content" menu to "Minecraft Store." Check out the entire changelist below, as provided by Play XBLA.

Ender Dragons, part of "The End" of Minecraft, are part of Title Update 9 and they will have sound, developer 4J Studios tweets. Rawr.

#gameofthrones We've seen some amazing Game of Thrones stuff from the people at Westeroscraft in the past, but these latest shots of King's Landing just may take the cake. More »

Duncan Geere is going to be taking class this morning, students. If you missed any notes for this lesson, you can find them here. Please open you Minecrafts to page 57.

Welcome to the fourth, and final, coding tutorial for ComputerCraft! If you’ve been following the series, you’ll now know how to navigate the operating system, save and load programs, use monitors, use disk drives, and send turtles scurrying around to do your bidding.

What’s left? Well, I’ll wrap up a few loose ends by introducing you to some nifty coding shortcuts called functions, tell you how to wirelessly communicate between computers using rednet modems, and explain how bundled cables work so you can make complex creations.

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Check out Castle IGN, a recreation of the castle from Valkyria Chronicles, a giant lava logo built by Code Foo and more as Destin and Jim take you on a tour of IGN's server.

Look, Creepers are dangerous enough on their own - people don't need to be going around giving them powered suits of armor like Ronimo Games has done in its latest Awesomenauts update, which is now live on Steam. Well, technically it's not a Creeper, but rather a Creeper skin for existing 'naut Clunk. Still, creepers shouldn't have a role model like this to look up to.

The Creeper Clunk skin can only be acquired by finding someone wearing it in-game and killing them, thus becoming "infected" with it. Since the skin can't be bought or obtained otherwise, we expect that equipping it will be somewhat akin to painting a giant bullseye on your chest. Which is how it should be, honestly, since all Creepers deserve to die.

All Creepers deserve to die.

Minecraft's PC version has sold over 9,000,000 copies. The word comes from Minecraft developer Jens Bergensten, who believes the total sales for the game across all platforms is somewhere around 20 million units.

Bergensten also noted that in terms of pacing, Minecraft Pocket Edition has stamina, with over 5 million units sold last year. This week the diminutive edition's total is at 7.3 million units and "not slowing down."

The man with wires in his brain, Duncan Geere, is here with the third part of our guide for learning programming with Minecraft. You can catch up with the whole series here.

Welcome to part three of the RPS guide to learning how to code in Minecraft. If you’ve been following the tutorials so far, you should have a decent grasp of the basics of coding – how to put programs together and what several different commands do.

This week, we’re going to introduce something new to get your head around. The turtle. Turtles are autonomous moving computers with an inventory, basically the Minecraft equivalent of a robot helper. With their help, we’ll be automating some of the duller functions of the game – chopping down trees and mining a dropshaft.

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Duncan Geere returns with the second part of his guide to coding in Minecraft (first part here).

Welcome back! When I left you last week, you’d built a computer, explored the filesystem and written your first program. That was easy, so it’s time to climb the next rung on the difficulty ladder.

Today, we’re going to make a passworded door, an alarm that notifies you when intruders enter your base, and a digital clock for your base. Basically, you’ll be the most punctual hermit on the block.

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#minecraft Even allowing for Minecraft's low-res visual style, no, sports fans, this is not "sim" basketball. The game played on this court (well, map) is more like NBA Jam, with profligate fouling and a "block" button that really puts a lid on the rim. More »

People amaze me. I look at Minecraft and see a terrifying leafy, deserty, landy, watery blank slate. I’m as creative as a one year-old, and most of my acts destructive and sad. I am still rubbish at the damn game. I don’t have the brain to look at Minecraft and end up with a mod that adds a fully working basketball game to it. The people that made this are, to me, the Harlem Globetrotters of Minecraft. They’re spinning things on their fingers and wearing short shorts while chewing bubblegum. They probably majored at Globetrotter University in razzle dazzle Globetrotter calculus. I am jealous.(more…)

#charts Welcome to the all-new, all-improved, all much simpler formatted as to not kill myself every morning weekly app rankings. The ponderous and sloppy image-heavy format has been exchanged for a tasteful table, which makes it much easier to notice things like Minecraft proper and a 2D Minecraft "homage" holding both number two spots in the charts this week. More »

One school in Sweden added Minecraft to its curriculum for 13-year-old students in an effort to teach lessons of building in virtual worlds, city planning, environmental awareness, preparing for the future and completing goals. Also, hitting livestock with wooden swords.

The Minecraft lesson plan spawned from a Swedish competition called Future City, which asked for ideas on how to improve education. This school, Viktor Rydberg, liked the idea so much it made Minecraft compulsory, and so far "it's been a great success and we'll definitely do it again," Monica Ekman, a teacher at the school, said.

So far 180 students have used Minecraft as a learning tool, which Ekman compares to arts or woodcraft. "The boys knew a lot about it before we even started, but the girls were happy to create and build something too," Ekman said.