Minecraft, the huge successful mine-em-up from Swedish developer Mojang, has just been patched to 1.3, yesterday evening.
Mats Nylund


The patch is actually called 1.3.1, and for the Mac users there will be a further patch to correct some issues, shortly. The major feature is of course the adventure mode, that allows players to interact with non player characters and the environment, but not build or set fire to things (or, indeed, put them out). The idea is that a server host can create an adventure that the players can then play through, and the mode will be further fleshed out with the introduction of the adventure control block in the next major upgrade, 1.4.

There is also trading. The NPC villagers will now trade emerald for stuff, and help you with enchants. This way you can obtain items you would not be able to otherwise, and hopefully this will decrease the frequency of willy-nilly NPC village burning on servers across the world. Other changes include the ability to write in books and some fixes that make entities in the world less likely to glitch through walls online. Whether this means that I can finally start that mega-farm without having the animals run off through the fences all the time remains to be seen.

If you happen to be one of the five people in the world who hasn’t bought the game yet, this patch also includes a demo mode that lets you try the full experience for five days.