New Update for Minecraft Pocket Edition

For those of you who are a lot more open-minded than myself about control schemes and screen sizes, Minecraft Pocket Edition has gotten a pretty big, game-changing update: new mobs, item drops, and a new weapon.

For those of you who are PC Minecraft veterans, Minecraft Pocket Edition just got an update that will probably make you wonder how people played it without basic features that have been part of Minecraft for PC since before beta. But I digress.

On August 9, Lydia Winters, Mojang’s self-described “Director of Fun”, posted on the Mojang website, “Finally, Minecraft Pocket Edition 0.3.3 has been released and is available through App Store and Google Play.”

Here’s a list of the new features in 0.3.3:

New features:
Added skeletons and spiders.
Added bow and arrow.
Added bone meal and flint.
Mobs can drop items.
Torches can now be placed on fences.

Tweaks:
Item decay time extended to 5 minutes.
Boosted brightness slightly.
Item slots has been expanded to a minimum of 6 slots (minus one for inventory).

Apparently they’ve also fixed a lot of bugs, including (but not limited to):

Crash bug with furnace
You can no longer get unlimited diamonds, gold and iron by breaking apart blocks of them and building together as a new block.
Swords now take damage from hitting mobs.
Golden tools are no longer tougher than wooden tools.
The D-pad on ipad no longer intersects with the item slots.
Users can no longer place sugar cane in water.
Blocks placed on snow aren’t duplicated in multiplayer.

Well, there you have it. Lots of fixed…wait, what was that?

You can no longer get unlimited diamonds, gold and iron by breaking apart blocks of them and building together as a new block.

I’m telling you, kids these days have it way too easy. Back in my day we had to adventure uphill both ways to find diamond, and eleven times out of ten we’d drop it all in lava and get exploded by a creeper twice before we got back home. And we liked it.

Good on Mojang for dropping the noobs down a few pegs.