Differences between SP and MP

Redditors are collecting bugs and differences in Minecraft between singleplayer in multiplayer in an effort to assist Mojang in making the two more alike. Here they are so far.

Confirmed bugs/differences:

• On MP, After shooting an arrow on a block, it will first be stuck where you shot it at, about 1s later it will teleport to the top of the block
• Loading or creating a creative world puts you in survival mode
• Commands like /stop, /ban, etc are available in SP
• Piston-based T-Flip Flops appear incorrectly - Video - World download
• Pistons will occasionally appear glitchy as they extend. To Reproduce: Create piston-based clock, pulse some pistons with it for a while. After some time, you should see glitches appear. - World download
• SP GUI is indicative of being on a MP server, i.e. "Disconnect" instead of "Quit", "Logging In" while loading
• Glitched-head pistons. To Reproduce: Create and use instant wire. - Screenshot of result - World download
• Piston elevators break in MP - World download
• The Nether doesn't generate properly - Video
• When lighting a portal, fire appears for a short time until the portal blocks are created
• Rain and snow don't fade in or out
• You can't see if it's thundering or not (without looking at the thunder, of course) editor's note: I assume "thundering" should be "lightning"
• When entering or leaving the Nether or End, the client doesn't display "Entering the Nether" / "Entering the End"
• Critical hit particles don't show on arrows shot by fully drawn bows in MP
• Block breaking/clicking animation isn't shown for other players.
• Movement is sent from client to server, allowing for fly- and speed-hacks
• On MP, Minecarts and Boats glitch - Video 1 - Video 2
• When playing on laggy servers, sprinting sometimes doesn't work or switches back between sprinting and walking
• The End and Nether don't generate properly
• Bonus chests are not generated
• Riding a saddled pig in a Minecart that is not on rails can't be controlled in MP, where you could slowly move in SP
• The speed of mining on MP is worse. To reproduce: Dig a straight 2x1 tunnel down on SSP and SMP and compare mining speed.
• While in a boat in MP, tamed wolves will teleport to your head sometimes, instantly killing you
• In MP, you cannot see other players enchanted items.
• Dropped blocks sometimes can't be picked up
• When creating objects high in the sky on SP, the shadows on the floor would only appear once you walk under the object, you have to do this every time you relog
• In MP, when your player is insider a door while logging in, you will spawn on the highest block on that x/z coordinate
• In MP, the fishing line will not be aligned properly on non-default FOV settings
• The Nether and End are empty sometimes - Video
• The sound that usually plays when entering the Nether doesn't play on the loading screen in MP
• Playing in offline mode in your maps will create a new player profile, including position and inventory (snapshot)
• On MP, items will often glitch through blocks.
• On MP, buckets will occasionally show lava in them when there isn't any lava in them due to clicking too fast while picking up lava
• On MP, if you log out when your head is directly under a solid block, the game will occasionally teleport you on top of it when you log in
• On MP, just mined blocks change their state of existance back and forth with laggy connections
• On MP, mobs will appear to move around and push the player when they actually can't move - Video
• TNT does not propel the player in MP, but does in SP
• On MP, blocks sometimes display as other blocks - Video
• On MP, blocks influenced by pistons will occasionally be duplicated client-side- Video - World save - Important: destroy the sign below the hole before trying it
• When sneaking, the server doesn't have the right crosshair position of the player
• In MP, the seed is not shown on the F3 menu
• In MP, when fishing, sometimes there's a ghost fish item created, only visible to the player who reeled it in. It can't be picked up.
• In MP, magma cubes are missing their moving animation
• On MP, when throwing Eyes of Ender, it doesn't fly away from you as smoothly as it does in SP. After tossing, it sticks in front of your face for 1s before flying up into the air
• In MP, Spider jockeys behave differently. The spider moves in one direction, the skeleton lags behind.)
• On MP, sometimes other sneaking players will look like they aren't sneaking. To Reproduce: Teleport to someone from far away or re-log when you are near them, while one of you is sneaking
• On MP, chunk errors sometimes happen. To reproduce in a controlled environment, just set up a Linux server with a traffic control policy to throttle/randomly drop packets.- Video
• On MP, some enderman animations like the mouth opening and the trembling are missing
• On MP, you can't break blocks around spawn
• On MP, you can't see your inventory while sleeping
• On the new SP, when making a world in Creative, you don't spawn with items and you can gain experience
• In MP, spawning works differently
• In MP, the world doesn't save when you hit 'Escape'.

12w19a - Large Biomes and more!

Cocoa Plants

New Cocoa Bean texture

This week's snapshot has brought with it an amazing new "Large Biomes" world type. As if the current biomes, which were made larger in 1.8, weren't enough, the new world type will make the biomes something like 5x bigger! Great if you want a more real exploration experience. Let's take a look at the other features.

• Cocoa Plants now grow on Jungle trees. These appear as little pods of either green (not grown) or brown (grown) on the side of some jungle trees. Break a fully grown one and get two beans, breaking an un-grown one will yield only one.
• As previously mentioned, the large biome world type. This is the most prominent feature of the update.
• The sandstone bricks now have names! The hieroglyph sandstone brick is now the Chiseled Sandstone block and the other one is now Smooth Sandstone.
• The texture for the Cocoa Beans have now been changed. See above right.
• Torches will now spawn around the bonus chests if they are on the same height level as the chest.
• Cookies now recover 2 hunger points (1 hunger drumstick thing) rather than 1 (half a drumstick thing).

Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition - it's here!

The long-awaited Xbox 360 Edition of Minecraft is finally here! If you have an Xbox 360, be sure to grab a copy for 1600 Xbox Live points.

The Xbox 360 Edition is basically Minecraft as it was in Beta 1.6, except it's now ported to Xbox and contains bugfixes more recent than 1.6. It supports up to 4 players on split-screen and 8 players on multiplayer. The Edition is in Beta phase, much like the version it is based on, and will most certainly be updated. Be sure to enjoy the pre-1.8 features while you can!

You can grab the game as well as other goodies, merch and such here, on the Xbox Marketplace.

Xbox 360 Minecraft coming very soon!

With the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft coming this Wednesday, HatFilms made an official trailer for the game. It appeared on Mojang's YouTube channel today.



If that video wasn't enough, HatFilms also put overviews for the tutorial and the multi-player for the Xbox edition.

12w18a - Singleplayer is multiplayer

This week's snapshot doesn't have many new features, but it does have one big change, which has finally opened up the possibility of single-player world sharing, and can already be done right now with the latest snapshot.

• Your single player worlds automatically become servers, ready for you to give your IP out to share your world easily. There are some problems with this though, namely that when you pause the game, the world won't pause around you anymore. This can be quite problematic on occasion. This also brings with it support for server-recommended texture packs. Hardcore mode is also available as a result.
• The debug screen (F3) has had a few changes. The most obvious is the co-ordinates are now rounded to around 5 decimal places. This is a great feature, and generally makes the screen cleaner and allows you to see a bit more of your actual game. Also, walking speed (ws), flying speed (fs) and ground (g) have been added below the co-ordinates. Not too exciting, but then again, it's not meant to be, it's a debug screen after all.
• Some outstanding bugs with block pick have been fixed.
• Wooden tools now apply as furnace fuel. They can smelt 1 item per tool, which is not too efficient, but great for getting rid of early-game tools, or ones you make to get achievements.
• Cocoa beans drop from Jungle tree leaves, much like apples already do from oak trees.
• Villagers spawned from eggs will now be automatically assigned a random profession, rather than a default.
• The Mojang logo screen now appears for just one second, instead of three. Seems to be perfect.
• Added names for wooden planks and logs, to reflect their wood type.

As can be expected, there are a few major bugs associated with the snapshot. As you can see, most of them are quite substantial:

• Enchanting doesn't work at all.
• Sounds sometimes do not play or have a delay.
• Minecraft sometimes won't close the local server after you quit the world.
• The nether and the void are both empty.

Moar stats!

Tobias Mollstam from Mojang has been working on a site to make some statistics more available to the community. As already discussed, these are anonymous statistics. Here's the stuff they're making public:

• ISP-level player location (not your street address or necessarily your city)
• Server location
• Other data in raw files, hardware data, Minecraft version etc. for both clients and servers.

To access the data, you can see a map of players connecting to servers (dots and lines connecting over the world) right here. From the same place, you can also download the raw hardware data, at the bottom of the page.

Tobias Mollstam on The Shaft!

This Monday's guest on The Shaft Podcast is none other than Tobias Mollstam (@mollstam on Twitter) who is a web and backend developer at Mojang. He was in the original 6 employees, joining Mojang in January 2011, and is the second Mojang employee to be a guest on The Shaft.

The first being Lydia Winters, who was the only guest on the show for three episodes, all before being announced as Mojang's Director of Fun. Also, the voice of Carl Manneh could be heard via phone at the end of one episode. Bit of trivia there.

To find out more, follow @theshaftpodcast on Twitter or visit www.theshaftpodcast.com.