Celebrating the Past and Future of Minecraft: Pocket Edition

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Xbox Wire.

Once upon a time, Minecraft: Pocket Edition had no clouds and no sun. It had no slimes and no melons. You may find this hard to believe, pocket crafters of the past year. But at the beginning, Pocket Edition had the most basic of gameplay features, forged by a single coder named Aron, who spun up the first build in less than three months for an E3 demo in 2011.

Crafting came to Pocket almost a year later with a new Minecraft Advanced Touch Technology Interface System (MATTIS), named after Mattis Grahm, one of Mojang’s pixel wizards. And then many crusaded to bring infinite worlds to earthly cellular devices – an unimaginable feat. The savvy members of the Pocket Edition team pioneered groundbreaking methods like the Advanced Cave Culling Algorithm™, or the Advanced Way-They-Rewrote-All-The-Rendering-To-Be-Shader-Based-In-GLES2/3.

We are feeling rather nostalgic on the Minecraft team these days, because November marked just about the five-year anniversary of Minecraft: Pocket Edition. It was fall five years ago when the team first began rolling out Pocket Edition on Android and iOS – beginning with Xperia Play. Since then, Pocket Edition has expanded to run on Kindle devices, Fire TV, GearVR, and Windows Phone. It’s grown to over 40 million players that can connect to each other and players on Oculus Rift and Windows 10 via online multiplayer and Realms. In just the past six months, we’ve ushered in redstone, witches, the Wither, Elder Guardians and pig riding. And Pocket Edition and the Windows 10 Edition are about to get the complete game loop with the upcoming 1.0 Ender Update. In fact, we’re ready to show it to you today, with this new trailer.

Minecraft Ender Update - Chosen Seed in World Seed Library

We’re also ready to reveal more features coming to the 1.0 Ender Update:

  • We’ll be adding a special feature called the World Seed Library to help you more easily find worlds with features you’ve been looking for. We’ll be populating the library and refreshing it periodically with a collection of dozens of amazing seeds for you to try.
  • Folks who are more partial to colder climes will find chilly locales in their worlds populated by polar bears, and happen across igloos whilst exploring.
  • MUSIC! Finally, Pocket Edition crafters will be able to join their Windows 10 Edition counterparts and enjoy playing the game with the original soundtrack. This is set as a separate, optional download rather than directly part of the main game download, so that we can be kind to your bandwidth.
  • For folks who enjoy playing the Windows 10 Edition in VR with their Oculus Rift, we’ll be adding support for Oculus Touch input.

It’s been an amazing past five years of crafting on the go, and we can’t believe that you’ll soon be able to carry the complete Minecraft game loop in your pocket. And who knows what the next five years will bring! The End may be coming, but we are far from finished.


See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire

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Take Flight in the Next Update for Minecraft: Console Editions
This Week on Xbox – November 11
End 2016 with the 1.0 Ender Update for Minecraft: Windows 10 and Pocket Edition