10 June, 2017

Minecraft World Of Colour update (1.12)

A Colourful Update

This'll be just a really short blogpost about a game I play a bit. I apologise that it's not up to my usual standard of post, but I can't think how to improve it yet. I've been watching the features gradually trickle in for this particular update while the snapshots rolled in, and I've got a final summation. Here's my rough off-the-cuff scores for 1.12:

Item Score
Parrots: 4/10
Colour Palette: 7/10
Glazed Terracotta: 4/10
Coloured Beds: 7/10
Bouncy beds: 1/10
Concrete: 5/10
Illagers: 3/10
Advancements: 2/10
Noteblocks: 6/10
Text-to-speech: 1/10
Toolbar saving: 4/10
Recipe book: 10/10 (I couldn't give 11!)
Exciting: 0/10
Total Score for 1.12: 54/130 (41%)

Mobs

They finally added parrots. Birds have been seen in mods before, but haven't turned up in the main minecraft until now. They're brightly coloured, come in five flavours, can be tamed with seed (NO, NOT COOKIES!!), and they dance when you put on a record. They hop off your shoulder when you jump, can't be fed cookies or you'll get dead parrots. They also appear to fly very very slowly, which puzzles me, as I've seen birds fly pretty fast in the real world.

Another Illager mob has also been added, the Illusioner. These are going to be a complete and utter PAIN to deal with for those of us with reflexes dulled by being older than 17. I'm already barely coping with updated skeletons. These might be a bit of a challenge for the CoD'ers and CounterStrikers amongst us.

Colours

An update to the game's colour palette affects sheep, glass, wool, coloured shulker boxes and the newly-minted concrete and beds. It increases saturation in most cases except for uncoloured shulker boxes (strange, that). I suspect there'll be people yearning for a slightly more muted palette, and maybe patching it back in via resource packs.

New/Modified blocks

Concrete blocks (and concrete powder) would have been boring if it weren't for the colours. They'll add to the available palette for creative mode, or to dress up builds with pure colours. It's also not flammable, unlike wool.

Plain colours are all very well, but how about the crazy blocks that are Glazed Terracotta? Basically a rename of hardened clay, the colours have been completely swapped out for wild 1970's patterns. I'm not sure about these blocks yet, they're a bit visually "loud" for me. I guess they'll add a little more interest to builds.

Coloured Beds. Haven't we all been waiting for this! They've even made them bouncy! Say wha?? Who bounces on their bed if they're over 8 anyhow? These are a nice addition. More's the pity they couldn't have coloured the sheet/pillows too. They've also made it so you can't just use three wools of any colour to build the bed. Now you have to find two or three sheep all of the same colours.

Additional Noteblocks. Now you can get five extra "instruments" (flute, guitar, bell, xylophone, glockenspiel) you can add to your musical creations. Again, not a big thing though it will slightly improve the quality of some music pieces that have been turned into noteblock tunes.

Interface modifications

They've updated the achievements screen and renamed them to Advancements. This screen has also had a reorganise into categories. I'm still bemused about this achievements screen rework. A nice feature for absolutely brand new players (the help boxes) can get rapidly palling the 14th time you see it if you're fond of starting multiple new worlds. Minecraft has also added the Narrator which reads out the text to the achievements you get throughout the game. This has the same fault that most text-to-speech engines have, that of not sounding natural enough. It's functional, but I'd not have bothered unless you need the functionality, i.e. you're "legally" blind but can sort of see the screen and just need a little help.

If you run purely creative mode (i.e. you're too wimpy to fight mobs and terrain for your resources) then Toolbar Saving will be a nice addition to the creative mode tools for building. This amounts to taking your hotbar and its contents and saving it aside in one of ten slots for later recall.

Have you ever forgotten how to build stuff like item frames, or redstone comparators? A new addition to the crafting screen now includes a button which opens a recipe book. This is by far my most liked update of the crafting screen. I've been waiting for an update like this, about the only thing I don't like is that you don't get all recipes by default but you work through the game getting them. It appears to be a rework of the crafting from MCPE/Console, and works well at least for me. I'm just waiting for resource packs to catch up with the button on the crafting interface. It's made a couple of minecraft recipe books somewhat irrelevant as a result though.

Finally...

This is a welcome update with new mobs, interface adjustments, colours and a recipe book. However, this isn't an exciting release. It seriously isn't, at least not for me. The best bit was the inventory recipe book. Now all they need to do is to include an onscreen map.

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