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News

New Minecraft Update Adds Beds, Other Stuff

by Jeff Marchiafava on Feb 22, 2011 at 10:55 AM

The new Minecraft 1.3 update adds beds, blocks, fancy pants lighting, and more. But before you go sleeping on your new piece of bedroom furniture, there are some things you should know.

First, here's a full list of the new additions, courtesy of Notch's blog:

  • Implemented a new lighting engine with the help of MrMessiahs (can be turned off)
  • Changed the options around, added a new “Graphics options” button
  • Added beds. If all players in a map sleeps in a bed during night, the game immediately skips until morning
  • Added three new half-size blocks
  • Added Delay/Repeater redstone dust blocks
  • Added whitelisting to the server. To use, enter “whitelist ” where cmd is “on”, “off”, “add ”, “remove ”, “list” or “reload”
  • New save file format, old maps need to be converted (that might take a while..)
  • It’s now possible to have more than five save slots, and to rename saves
  • Scrollbars in both the texture pack list, and in the map selection screen
  • Replaced the Mojang splash image to reflect the new logo colors
  • ...and a bunch of bug fixes and tweaks!

The new lighting engine sounds intriguing, and some variety for half-size blocks (cobblestone, wood, and sandstone slabs) will be nice for players who want to make their mines and homes easy to navigate, but don't want to deal with the weird orientation properties of stairs. The biggest addition is clearly the bed, but here's what players have already discovered.

First, the bed doesn't speed up time, but merely skips to morning, meaning you can't load items into your furnace and expect them to smelt while you snooze. You also can only sleep during the night, which means you can't use your new bed to skip to daytime, if say, you wanted to act like some kind of weird Minecraft vampire (maybe someday Notch will add a coffin for this functionality in a future update?). Finally, the Minecraft Wiki states that when you begin sleeping there's a chance a mob will spawn (even in lit areas) and attack you, abruptly waking you from your peaceful slumber. Are you telling me that Creepers can now attack me while I'm sleeping?! I'm never going to get a good night's rest again...

Thanks to Rocknrog for the news tip!