The Ultimate Guide to Minecraft - Spring 2016

SP PA148 EC GE IA L

VOLUME 10 SPRING 2016

CHOC-A-BLOCK

ARE YOU THE NEXT NOTCH?

EASTER SPECIAL Cra real life spawn eggs and more!

Make your dream game using Minecraft!

HUNT FOR THE TRUTH! Amazing secrets you can find inside Minecra

BLOCKBUSTER!

A TO Z OF MINECRAFT!

TOP 10 EXCUSES TO PLAY MOJANG’S NEXT MASTERPIECE

Everything you need to know in our huge 14 page feature

MINECRAFT QUIZ

STAR CRAFT

ESSENTIAL GUIDES

GO DEEPER

Are you top of the blocks?

Minecraft meets Star Wars

Command blocks cracked

Subterranean survival diary

P R E S E N T S

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO

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EDITORIAL

Editor Matt Elliott Art Editors Graham Dalzell, Mark Wynne Production Editor Roy Delaney

CONTRIBUTORS

“Make the most of Spring without having to put a blocky foot outside!”

Louise Blain, Emma Davies, Katharine Byrne, Kate Gray, Thryn Henderson, Leon Hurley, Tom Senior, Phil Savage, Jennifer Simpkins, Tom Stone, Iain Wilson

SENIOR TEAM

Editorial Director: Games Matthew Pierce

PRODUCTION

Production Controller Fran Twentyman Production Manager Mark Constance

ADVERTISING AND MARKETING

Commercial Sales Director Clare Dove Advertising Director Andrew Church (020 7042 4233) Advertising Manager Michael Pyatt Account Manager Steven Pyatt

SUBSCRIPTIONS

The brave green shoots of Spring are forcing their way through the frosted earth, and the clouds are finally parting. What better time to wrap up warm, take a hearty breath and rush back indoors to play Minecraft? This volume has everything you need to do exactly that. Together, we can make the most of Spring without ever having to put a blocky foot outside. Perfect! Here you’ll find a list of the best excuses to keep playing Minecraft, proving our favourite game can educate as well as entertain (it’s more fun than I’ve made that sound, promise). We’ve also got a breakdown of the best hidden Easter eggs in the game, plus a list of Spring-themed mods to make your game even more bloomin’ marvellous. And, if you want something more practical, how about learning to code using your favourite game? Nobody can tell you Minecraft isn’t worth playing when you’re a successful game developer living in a house made of gold...

Matt Elliott Editor

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LICENSING

Senior Licensing & Syndication Manager Matt Ellis (+44 (0) 1225 442 244)

FUTURE PUBLISHING

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PRESENTS MINECRAFT03 3 PRESENTS MINECRAFT

Contents KNOW YOUR BIOMES

NEWS

06 THE BEST KIND OF BATH

06

Why we’re excited about the 48-hour Build Bath In Minecraft marathon. Well, it’s on our doorstep after all.

TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL 08 NOT Minecraft Education Edition brings blocks and building to the classroom. Woo hoo!

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Plains

FORCE IS 11 THE STRONG IN THIS ONE Marvel as the Starkiller Base from Star Wars is remade in Minecraft.

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Mesa

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Sunflower Plains

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MINECR AFT A-TO-Z

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Deep Ocean

MINECRAFT A-TO-Z 30 THE An encyclopedia of just about everything you could want to know about Minecraft.

44 MINECRAFT MASTERMIND Test yourself on what you’ve learned in the A-to-Z to see if you’re a blocky genius.

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Stone Beach 44

04

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EXPAND YOUR GAME TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH 76 MINING

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How to set yourself a challenge and stick to it rigidly to the end, however silly.

OF SURVIVAL ISLAND 90 DIARY

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Cranking it up a notch with one of Minecraft’s toughest challenges.

Village

ENTERTAINMENT 102 MAPS Be the undisputed star of the show in these fifteen thrilling challenge maps.

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90

TEN EXCUSES TO KEEP PLAYING MINECRAFT

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Savanna

Tips and hints for tricking your mum/ partner/dog into letting you keep playing.

YOU BUILD THE 114 COULD NEXT BLOCKBUSTER? Creating games isn’t as hard as you think if you know a little bit of simple code.

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122

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CREATIVE COMMAND BLOCK CODING

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Swampland

The sneaky back-of-house tricks to make your building immeasurably better.

GAMES CREATED IN MINECRAFT 132 BEST Recreate your favourite console adventures in glorious blocky style.

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Forest

SPRING SPECIAL CRAZIEST 48 MINECRAFT’S EASTER EGGS To celebrate chocolate overload weekend, here’s a list of our favourite hidden secrets.

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LEAP INTO SPRING

The End

These Easter-themed crafting projects are blooming marvellous.

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OF THE 64 FULL MODS OF SPRING Add a springtime bloom to your Minecraft game with these uplifting mods.

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We’ve never noticed one of these in Bath, but we wouldn’t complain.

THE BEST KIND OF BATH Budding builders get to work at Bath Digital Festival

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I

t’s not every day you get a proper excuse to build your own city in Minecraft. It’s no wonder then that Bath Digital Festival 2016’s 48 hour ‘Build Bath In Minecraft’ competition was swamped with hundreds of blocky architects. Each entrant was given a plot on a shared server to build their own piece of the beautiful Somerset city. Projects could be anything from real life inspired pieces to visions of the Bath of the future and there were categories for the most creative plot, most futuristic, best historical influence and the judge’s favourite. Dave Boddington, production manager from Minecraft supremos The Yogscast, was along to deliver prizes and catch up with the competition. “Events like this are great.

They give students and all kinds of people from all kinds of walks of life the chance to get together and have fun with Minecraft and collaboratively build exciting things!” he tells us. “I’m most looking forward to seeing people create historical buildings. I’d like to see some Roman Baths, the Circus, the Royal Crescent, anything that’s exciting and interesting.” And the entries didn’t disappoint. Bath Abbey sprung up in blocky form, there were recreations of many famous sandstone buildings. Hot air balloons filled the skies and, of course, multiple versions of the famous Roman Baths and Pump Rooms sprung up. Local landmark Pulteney Bridge was also recreated (complete with weir) and there were plenty of visions of future Bath, too. Plus, as the event was held at Bath College, those taking a break from building could have a shot at making their own games in an Hour Of Code session. Water success.

NEWS

NEWSFLASH

Thankfully it’s not as tough as the real thing...

1

Go Ape!

2

X-Factor

3

Knead to dough

4

City block

To celebrate the dawning of the new Chinese New Year and the Year of the Monkey, you can now download skins based on the ancient Chinese novel Journey To The West.

Dark Souls’ Anor Londo is a terrifying gothic creation

Not only has Redditor MythicalSnowman crafted an incredible Star Wars X-Wing, Cubehamster has recreated it on the surface of the Death Star.

Lose your soul in Minecraft What to do once you’ve finished the achingly difficult FromSoftware action RPG? Recreate it in blocks of course, and that’s exactly what LNeoX on Planet Minecraft has done. The intimidating but beautiful Anor Londo from the original Dark Souls is challenging enough already, but making a blocky Minecraft version feels just as tough. LNeoX even added a monster dungeon in the biggest mountain. All planning and crafting was

done by LNeoX himself and the map is an incredible 1200 by 1200 blocks in size There’s a minecart system to take in the sights, and that aforementioned monster dungeon has a boss to take on in true Dark Souls style. “I planned the building with Paint to get the scale right,” LNeoX explains. “I then started building the position and scale in-game with wool. If you look closely this map is not 1:1. Dark Souls only inspired me to build this. For the castle facades it took me around 12 days.”

The landscape surrounding the castle apparently took up the longest time, just to get the right level of ultra-threatening detail. And it’s not just a pretty face. The inside of the castle is packed with atmospheric corridors as you quest to get to the boss. Other work from LNeoX includes a full recreation from Hogenzollern Castle in Germany and he’s currently working on a step-bystep download of how to build the ultimate medieval castle. Can we request Hogwarts next, please?

In a special appearance on baking show Cake Wars, Mojang brand director Lydia Winters was on the judging panel for some astonishing Minecraft themed cakes.

STAT ATTACK 22,593,158 $80

01

People who are playing Minecraft on PC or Mac. Rather a lot, then.

Minecraft’s position on the EU PS3 and PS4 digital download charts in January.

Official price of the Remote Control Quadcopter Ghast coming in Autumn (£60).

N11CK on YouTube is questing to build all of GTA V inside Minecraft. So far it’s a work in progress but it’ll total to 7500 by 7500 blocks by the end of the project.

PRESENTS MINECRAFT 07

NOT TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL Minecraft Education Edition brings blocks to the classroom

F

Learning and playing? That sounds like a plan!

inally, everyone will listen! While we’ve all known that Minecraft is perfect for learning a whole raft of things from physics to design, now there’s an official Education Edition for use in schools. MinecraftEdu, a version of Minecraft specifically for the classroom, has already been available since 2011 and used in more than 40 countries around the world but now Microsoft has expanded

the game for a full official release. And in even better news, it’ll start off completely free. Minecraft Education Edition will initially be available as a cost free trial for schools who choose to sign up and will be improved by constant feedback from online communities of teachers. “In education, we are constantly seeking pathways to explore learning beyond the confines of a textbook. Minecraft allows us that opportunity,” said Rafranz Davin who is the executive director of professional development and learning for Lufkin Independent School District in Texas.

“When we see our kids enjoying the process of learning in this way, it’s a game changer.” As we’ve covered in previous volumes, Minecraft has already been used to teach students subjects ranging from science to art and even poetry, and the fact that it can be used to so widely means there shouldn’t be a lesson that it can’t improve. Add in the online communities springing up with lesson plan ideas for teachers, and a constantly updating set of features, and school might get even more fun. Sorry, we’re off to do our homework. In redstone.

TALKING HEADS

08

“One of the reasons Minecraft fits so well in the classroom is because it’s a common, creative playground. It’s an open space where people can come together and build a lesson around nearly anything.”

“At Telltale for the last two years we’ve all been playing around the office. Walk around and you’ll see horrific visions of scenes being made for Game Of Thrones and then on the next screen of people playing Minecraft. It’s been a relief and so much fun.”

“Of course, every Minecraft player learns essential life-skills like tree-punching and good creeper-defence but, when used in the right way, Minecraft can help people around the world to learn lots more. ”

Chief operating officer, Mojang Vu Bui @vubui

Head of creative communications, Telltale Games Job J. Stauffer @jobjstauffer

Director of communications, Mojang Owen Hill @bopogamel

PRESENTS MINECRAFT

“As we get closer to the first pre-release for Minecraft 1.9, we will release snapshots more frequently to get more feedback on our changes and bug fixes. In this phase of development all the bug reports and feedback on Reddit or via Twitter are helping us a lot to work on the right issues to get to a stable release.” Coder, Mojang Searge @SeargeDP

NEWS

Surely Notch must be running out of room for all these awards, now?

NOTCH WINS AGAIN Minecraft creator Markus Persson wins GDC Pioneer Award

N

otch’s mantlepiece in that LA mansion must be pretty full. Perhaps he’s started scattering awards across multiple rooms. The 16th Game Developers Choice Pioneer Award at the end of March will be the next shiny piece of named metal to arrive in his hands. The Pioneer Award goes to those who achieve ‘breakthrough tech and game design’ and there’s no arguing that Minecraft has done that.

Previous winners of the award - which was formerly know, quite bizarrely, as The First Penguin Award - include Elite designer David Braben, Riot Games founder Branden Beck, and Valve boss Gabe Newell. It’s not the first time Notch has picked up a GDC Award either. Back in 2011 Minecraft picked up gongs for the Best Debut Game, Best Downloadable Game, and the Innovation Award. Now, five years on, Minecraft no longer directly belongs to Persson, who sold Mojang to Microsoft back in 2014 for $2.5 billion. However, he’s had a staggering effect on the games industry since these wins.

There’s no question that Persson is a pioneer, either. As well as Minecraft continuing to be a best selling game - it was the January 2016 number one digital title on both PS3 and PS4 - it’s changed the way we play games altogether. It has revolutionised YouTube, changed the way we watch and interact with games and even changed games themselves. As well as the continued popularity of indie games, crafting systems, interaction and online play have all evolved since Minecraft won it’s Best Debut Game Award. The gaming landscape has changed forever, and we’ve got Notch to thank.

PRESENTS MINECRAFT 09

HOT OR NOT A Wii story

School points

Boxing clever?

2 soon

Minecraft: Story mode hit Wii U and we love it.

Education Edition is the best new reason to get crafting in the classroom.

A new Hot Wheels official Minecart is just a box on wheels with no character inside.

A sequel to Minecraft: Pocket Edition on iPhone? Hoaxes suck.

HOT

NOT

CODE TO JOY! YouTuber Seth Bling crafts working BASIC programming in Minecraft

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W

e’ve seen some incredible creations such as a fully working Pac-Man arcade machine and even Pokemon on a GameBoy in Minecraft. While it doesn’t look quite as exciting as seeing the Kanto region recreated in blocky pixels, it’s actually equally impressive. YouTuber Seth Bling has managed to build a working interpreter for the BASIC programming language. BASIC stands for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code and since its creation in 1964 has been used globally due to its ease of use to create custom programs, and is the base for software such as Microsoft’s Visual Basic. BASIC uses a series of commands that you can use to create rules and therefore certain types of actions. “This

This jumble of letters and numbers is very exciting - promise!

is probably the hardest I’ve ever worked on a command block creation,” says Seth Bling. “This is the BASIC programming language in vanilla Minecraft.” Bling has handbuilt a huge series of command blocks that allow him to program certain activities. In a video on his site he shows off the printing of prime numbers on a whiteboard before, and this is most exciting, instructing a pickaxe on a block to do his bidding. Nicknamed a ‘turtle’ - awww, cute! - the block can be programmed to clear a path through terrain. And here we were doing all our own mining… Bling also says it’s possible to program a block to actually do your own building for you. This took him two weeks but you don’t have to do the same. You can watch the full video and then download to try yourself on Seth Bling’s website here: http://bit.ly/minesethbling

NEWS

Smash it up and watch Kylo Ren have another tantrum...

THE FORCE IS STRONG IN THIS ONE Starkiller Base remade in Minecraft

T

here are fewer things deadlier than Kylo Ren in a strop in Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, but the Starkiller Base is definitely one of them. Capable of destroying entire planets across the galaxy, this deadly weapon is an err, force to be reckoned with. Of course someone has created it in blocky form. Definitely no need to be Poe faced when you see the detail that’s gone into it. Just watch out for the death Rey! We’ll stop now. Ervinache235 from Planet Minecraft has the honour of crafting the first recreation of Dark Side’s second favourite weapon (surely the first is the lightsaber). It’s his biggest

piece of work yet. He is still adding surface details to the planet but his piece is incredible. It even includes the laser and detailed turbines. So far it’s been over a solid week of work and while Ervinache235 has used MCEdit and WorldEdit all the details have been hand placed. And yes, he did it solo. Based on a couple of photos from the movie, the Starkiller base is currently 403 blocks wide, 476 blocks long and 143 tall without the laser. Add in the laser and it’s an impressive 256 blocks tall. Don’t worry, it’s far, far away from your biome and we’ll pretend it won’t reach. We’ll stop with the Star Wars puns. Starkiller is now available as a download and you can take a Luke at plenty of images here on Planet Minecraft: http://bit.ly/mcstarkiller

PRESENTS MINECRAFT 11

You’ll often find shallow waterholes, which are good sources of sugar cane or clay.

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T

he great, open grassy expanses on Minecraft are excellent places for finding cows, sheep and pigs to slaughter for meat, as well as horses for transport, flowers for dyes and grass for wheat seeds.

KNOW YOUR BIOMES

PLAINS

The PC version features a savanna plains variant that appears on plateaus and has numerous trees.

They’re the perfect place to set up farms to gather resources, as livestock is easy to lure back and pen in. The open landscape makes it easier to spot enemies nearby, too, which make plains great places for building your shelters. Handy!

Yellow and red flowers are common here and can be used to create dyes. Use these directly on sheep to make your own multicoloured herds.

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MINECR AFT ON Wii U

MINECRAFT

WII U

EDITION GOT SQUARE EYES YET? MINECRAFT FINALLY LANDS ON WII U C

hristmas is always a great time for Minecraft fans. It might seem like light years ago, but we can’t help looking back fondly at those cube-shaped presents, just waiting to be ripped apart under the tree. However, Nintendo fans got the best present of all this year, as Mojang announced not one, but two new Minecraft games for the Wii U – the regulation Minecraft: Wii U Edition and Telltale’s episodic Minecraft: Story Mode adventure. Just don’t tell Mario, okay – you know how that guy is around bricks. We’ve covered Story Mode before, but the Wii U Edition of Minecraft is particularly special, as it contains brand new features you won’t find anywhere else, such as Off-TV Play and a whole chest full of free skin and texture packs. However, rather than score the Wii U Edition like a traditional review – the game at its heart is identical to other console versions, after all – we want to see what Wii U brings to the block party that no other machine does.

Based off version 1.6.4, the Wii U Edition isn’t quite as up to date as its 1.8.8-based PS4 and Xbox One counterparts, but Mojang has already said it will be getting the 1.8.8 update later this year. In the meantime, here’s a handy list of every cool new feature and why it makes Minecraft even better.

PRESENTS MINECRAFT 17

THE GOOD…

01

OFF-TV PLAY The biggest and best feature of the Wii U Edition is Off-TV Play. This lets you play the entire game on the Wii U GamePad, which is great when other members of your family insist on reclaiming the TV remote. With Off-TV Play, the adventure never has to end, as everything that normally appears on the TV is mirrored on the touchscreen so you don’t miss

anything important. Of course, going from a Full HD TV to a display with a scrawny 854x480 resolution means that text in the inventory and crafting menus can be harder to read at times, but otherwise the game’s pixel art is well-suited to the GamePad’s smaller screen. The only disappointing thing about Off-TV Play is that there’s currently no stylus support

for easy inventory management. You can use the touchscreen to switch between items in the hotbar and change tabs in the crafting menu, but if you want to drag and drop items around your inventory or put something away in a chest, you have to use the GamePad’s analogue sticks – which can be rather fiddly on a screen that’s only a little bit bigger than your smartphone. Ideally, it would be great if the GamePad functioned as a second, separate display to show your entire inventory all the time instead of having to go into a separate menu system, but this isn’t supported in the current version. However, Mojang said this may be added as a feature in a future update, so watch this space.

02

MIIVERSE Sharing creations with other crafters has never been easier than on Wii U Edition, as the console’s in-built social network, Miiverse, lets you share and record all your Minecraft-related activities. You’ll need to make sure you turn off Online Game when you load up your world to take screenshots, but once you’ve got something you want to snap, just tap the Home button and select Miiverse. This will take you to the special Minecraft: Wii U Edition community page on Miiverse where you can save screenshots, post pictures and doodles, and add your very own Play Journal entries without having to quit your game. You can also use it to browse other players’ creations, which you can like with a click of the ‘Yeah’ button, and leave comments about their handiwork. Once you’re done, simply close Miiverse and you’ll be taken straight back to your game where you left off. YouTube already has its fair share of Minecraft superstars – maybe you could become the Stampylonghead of Miiverse.

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MINECR AFT ON Wii U

03

TEXTURE PACKS The Wii U Edition is a little bit more expensive than other console versions, but those extra coins get you six add-on DLC packs as standard. This includes the Battle And Beasts skin pack, the Battle And Beasts 2 skin pack (you can’t have too many battles or beasts, we find), the Natural, City and Fantasy texture packs, and the Festive Mash-

Up pack, giving Wii U players plenty of choice when it comes to customising the look of their worlds and avatars in whatever way they wish. It also comes with trial versions of the Mass Effect, Skyrim, Halloween and Greek Mythology worlds, but you’ll have to buy the full versions if you want to save your game.

There’s also the chance to buy additional skins from the Wii U eShop, including packs from Doctor Who, Star Wars and The Simpsons to name but a few popular styles and tropes. Okay, it’s not quite as cool as having a Nintendothemed pack, but if you squint just enough Yoda could kinda pass for Yoshi. Er, right?

04

SPLIT-SCREEN CO-OP If you have a Wii U Pro Controller, you can team up with a friend locally for some good old fashioned split-screen multiplayer. The screen is divided horizontally to give you the widest possible view in two player mode, but you can have up to four players at any one time, and you can assign players to existing Miis, or even use Mii templates. Sadly, in-game characters don’t look anything like your Mii creations, but you can always change your skin to something else if you prefer. Another downside of split-screen co-op is that you squeeze four sets of eyeballs into one television to play. One player can’t just use the GamePad, for instance, while another looks at the TV.

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THE BAD…

01

FRIENDS-ONLY ONLINE If Minecraft: Wii U Edition has one major flaw, it’s the fact that you can only play with registered friends online – so fear not if you find the Join tab completely empty on the main menu screen. A quick trip to the Miiverse shows hundreds of

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players looking for extra companions to play with, so if you feel like teaming up with someone, then you’ll need to send them a friend request first. The one upside of this is that when you do join an online game, it will be visible to everyone

in your friends list. Then, if they join, it will be visible to everyone on their list, too, like some kind of big chummy virus, making it a bit easier to play with larger groups of people if you’ve got a friend list longer than the phone book.

MINECR AFT ON Wii U

NINTENDO GAMES EVERY MINECRAFT FAN SHOULD PLAY 2 Minecraft: Story Mode

1 Super Mario Maker So you’ve finished sculpting your 1:1 replica of Hyrule from Ocarina Of Time, and visited every voxel of every Minecraft-themed Pokémon region. The next thing on your to-do list, then, is recreate every retro 2D platformer in Super Mario Maker, Nintendo’s incredible new level-editor for Wii U. With its vast array of items, enemies and power-ups, you can make almost anything in Super Mario Maker, from side-scrolling shoot-em-ups to Metroid homages. You can then upload and share them online, or download other players’ levels for inspiration. For that added touch of authenticity, tap an amiibo to your GamePad and you’ll unlock their costume as a power-up.

Recently announced for Wii U, Minecraft: Story Mode takes everything you love about your favourite sandbox game and turns it into an episodic point and click adventure story. It’s made by Telltale Games of The Walking Dead fame, so you can be sure you’re in for a thrilling yarn as you set out to fight the evil Witherstorm and find The Order Of The Stone – legendary Minecraft players who once saved the world when it was in peril. Every decision you make will affect the game later on, too, making it ideal for multiple playthroughs.

A Wonderful Life (pictured) is generally regarded as the best in the series, but Friends Of Mineral Town for the GBA is also excellent if you can track it down. Regardless of which one you choose, your farm will soon be teeming with all sorts of different crops and animals to share and trade with the local villagers. There are also new recipes to experiment with in your kitchen, and local lads and ladies to woo as you expand your farming empire.

4 SteamWorld Dig 3 Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life / Friends Of Mineral Town If spending your days ploughing fields sounds infinitely better than hunting creepers, then Harvest Moon is the farming-sim for you. GameCube’s

What could possibly be better than finding rare and beauteous minerals deep down in the centre of the Earth? Why, uncovering an ancient alien civilisation that’s hell-bent on destroying every last vestige of steamrobot kind, that’s what. In SteamWorld Dig, mining for jewels and treasure to upgrade your tools and rebuild the rusty ruin of Tumbleton is only part of the story, as the deeper you go, the more you discover about how the robot apocalypse came to be. It’s quite short, but it’s an absolute must-play for mine-crazy Minecrafters. Just watch out for those stinky human hobos on your way down!

5 The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess There’s nothing quite like the moment when you first tame and ride your very own Minecraft horse (or pig, for that matter), but those wishing they had more epic landscapes to canter across should look no further than The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Soon to be re-released in HD on the Wii U, this Wii classic is one of Link’s best and most fiendish adventures. It not only has excellent puzzles, brilliant dungeons and your very own horse, but eventually you’ll also gain the ability to turn into a wolf at will. There’s no annoying fairy to spoil your fun either. Perfect!

Minecraft history on consoles It might have taken over four years, but you can now play Minecraft on every major console. It first arrived on Xbox 360 in 2012, albeit

using the same code as a beta version of the then-PC release, and has since made the jump to PS3, PS Vita, PS4, Xbox One and the Wii U. The only one we’re still waiting on is the 3DS. Not all console versions of Minecraft were created equal, though. The Xbox One

and PS4 versions are much bigger than their 360 and PS3 counterparts, and each one has different consolespecific DLC packs. Meanwhile, PS3 owners can get a Vita copy for free, and you can also play the PS4 version on Vita via Remote Play.

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MESA I

ncredibly rare, mesa biomes are home to red sand, hardened clay, and stained clay blocks. Stained clay blocks are available in the same 16 colours that wool blocks are, so make a great alternative building material. If you manage to find the even rarer bryce variant mesa biome, then you’ll be treated to expansive views of hardened clay spires. These structures are inspired by the real life Bryce Canyon, in Utah, USA.

The mesa biome is, in many ways, quite similar to the desert biome. Of course, this blue stuff isn’t helping us to reinforce that claim, is it now?

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KNOW YOUR BIOMES

Dyed clay is a more resistant and reliable crafting material than dyed wool. Also, it won’t set on fire when struck by lightning.

Though the stained clay spawning naturally in mesa comes in 16 colours, you’ll have to gather some hardened clay to dye yourself should you want to get a specific colour combo.

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COBALT Is the Mojang-published combat platformer worth your time?

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REVIEW

C

obalt is a new game from Oxeye Game Studio, and is available to buy for £16 on PC, Xbox One and Xbox 360. It’s a 2D platformer with an emphasis on multiplayer combat – letting you and your friends (or strangers from across the internet if you prefer) fight against each other using a broad selection of guns and grenades. It isn’t very much like Minecraft, although it does support an active community of mapmakers. So why are we telling you about it? Because it was published by Mojang, and Minecraft developer Jens Bergensten helped to make it. Cobalt is interesting and enjoyable in its own right, especially if you like to compete

against your friends for bragging rights. As a multiplayer game it’s short and punchy, letting you get straight to the good stuff without any waiting around. If you’re looking for a new competitive action game, it’s a tempting choice. This isn’t a review as much as a guide to help you decide if Cobalt is a game you’d like to play. We’ll take a look at what it offers and run through a few of its best features, as well as some of the things that we think don’t work so well.

What do you do? In Cobalt, you play as a little robot. So far so good. There are two parts to the game: the story mode, and the multiplayer. In the story, you discover a distress signal that points you to an alien world. There, you find that the planet’s robots have turned against the humans. It’s up to you to discover why, and hopefully do something about it – mostly by shooting things.

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How can you go wrong when you play as a cute robot? Awww!

It’s a long campaign – around six-to-eight hours, depending on whether you like to root around for secrets and bonuses. It’s fun, but difficult. Each level is made up of multiple maps, with checkpoints throughout. You need to make your way across the maps and, if you die, you’re sent back to the checkpoint without your advanced weapons or items. To get them back, you need to go and pick them up from where you were killed – like in Minecraft, but with out the lava heartbreak. The multiplayer favours quick bursts of action. In the most basic modes, you fight with other robots – picking up weapons from the map and shooting, bashing or throwing what you’ve grabbed. As you might expect, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds. Each robot has a number of tricks to help them get away from danger.

How does it play? The cleverest thing about Cobalt is its slow motion mechanic. If you’re in danger – for instance if you’re standing in front of a bullet – the game will slow down, giving you the

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“THE STORY CAMPAIGN IS EXTREMELY CHAOTIC, WHICH IS FUN BUT VERY PUNISHING” time you need to decide how best to escape. Jumping is usually a good tactic, but if that doesn’t work you could try a roll. If you’re rolling, any bullets will deflect off of you and back towards whoever shot at you. That’s handy! Just be careful though because not even robots are sturdy enough to deflect a grenade, although you can use a melee weapon to bat one back to your opponent. The automatic slow-mo effect also works in multiplayer, although it’s localised to only affect players near the danger zone. It’s a good system, giving you chance to make precision movements without ever feeling like players on the other side of the map have any sort of advantage. There are plenty

of other tricks, too. You can slide down ramps to pick up massive speeds, skiing across the level as enemies look on bewildered. Or you can find and throw eggs, hatching friendly versions of monsters that follow you around and let you ride on them.

Any bits that don’t work? Unfortunately, yes. The story campaign is extremely chaotic, which can be fun, but also very punishing. It encourages you to be aggressive, but ammo is scarce. As such, it’s easy to die, which can make the trickier sections feel frustrating when you only have limited lives. It’s also not very good at teaching you how to play it – something

MODES Test your skills in a variety of madcap modes

Challenge A leaderboard mode designed to challenge your skill. There are two types: speed and combat. The former asks you to sprint, slide and roll across a course in the fastest time possible, while the latter surrounds you with enemies and gives you points for every one and everything you can kill. Each type has lots of different maps, offering plenty of variety. Challenge can be played either solo, or by taking turns with a friend.

Deathmatch The simplest of all game modes: giving you and your opponents access to a bunch of pretty nifty weapons, to see who can get the most kills. Each kill grants you a point, and the first to reach the score limit wins. Deathmatch is highly customisable, letting you choose which robot type players will be, and which weapons will spawn on the map. You can also change the score limit. Deathmatch can be played with friends, AI bots or online.

Watch out for that lizardy thing up above, little fella. He looks mean.

Team-Strike Here you play on one of two teams, and help your teammates fight to victory. Each player only has one life per round, but if you’re playing with bots you’ll be able to take over as one of the AI teammates if you die. It can be a tense and frenzied game type, especially once the grenades start flying. Just like deathmatch, Team-Strike can be played with friends, bots or online.

Plug Slam Plug Slam works a bit like the Capture The Flag modes you find in other multiplayer games. Here, you need to grab the glowing plug from the middle of the arena, and get it into the opposing team’s goal. Of course, they’ll be trying to steal the plug for themselves, and take it to your goal, the tricky tricksters. As with the other online modes, there are a bunch of setup options – including setting the time limit after which the team with the highest score wins.

Survival This is a wave-based combat mode that can be played solo or in co-op. At the start, you buy some basic weapons with your limited money, and try to hold out for as long as you can while a number of enemies attack your location. If you survive the wave, you’ll have more money with which to buy better stuff. Once you’ve done that, another wave of tougher enemies will attack. To survive every wave of each map, you’ll need both skill and good equipment.

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REVIEW

In case you’re harbouring any doubt, this game is definitely called Cobalt. Oh yes.

At times like these it’s often best policy to run like the wind.

Pick up stuff as you go along to make your little robot a mean old fighting machine.

If you want even more of a challenge you can set your own times for many of the modes.

MAP EDITOR Create the perfect level with this powerful tool The PC version of Cobalt lets you create and share the maps you’ve made. But this isn’t like Minecraft where building something just means loading up creation mode and letting your creativity go wild. Oh no. Cobalt’s map editor is more like Photoshop, but even more complicated because of game elements like triggers and spawn points. The one upside to the editor’s complexity is that it’s extremely powerful – letting you create single player story maps, as well as deathmatch arenas and challenges. If that all sounds too much like hard work, there are already lots of community levels to download through the Steam Workshop until you build your building confidence up.

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REVIEW

“IF YOU WANT TO ENJOY THE COMPETITIVE MODES, THEY’RE BEST PLAYED WITH FRIENDS”

Now how can you go wrong with a game that has giant malevolent hamsters in it?

you, as a Minecraft fan, are probably used to. There are some basic tutorials, but the more advanced tricks – such as the active reload system that gives you a chance to quickly reload ammo – isn’t explained at all. It can also be difficult to control on PC if you’re using keyboard and mouse. It’s possible to rebind the keys however you want, but, as you’re often required to switch back and forth between different weapon types and escape from danger, it’s easy to make a mistake. It feels much better with a control pad, and luckily supports both Xbox 360 and Xbox One pads, even on PC.

Is it worth playing? For the most part, yes, but mostly because of the multiplayer. The campaign can be entertaining, but also frustrating. It’s best thought of as a nice extra – something to do as a break from the competitive modes, or when you want to team up with a friend in co-op. Cobalt is multiplayer game, but the online community is a little sparse. If you want to enjoy the competitive modes, they’re best played locally with friends. If you to play with a friend, you can do that in survival or story mode. If you’d prefer to battle against your buddies, you can do that too. It’s hugely varied, and the multiplayer modes come with a bunch of different settings that let you customise each match.

Any other games like this? Yes, lots. If you find yourself enjoying Cobalt, or just want to know what alternatives are around, there are some other great local

multiplayer games around. One of the best is Nidhogg, a two-player sword duelling game in which you’re trying to get past your opponent. It’s fast, fun and very weird – your ultimate goal is to get to run to your side of the level so you can be eaten by a giant worm. There’s also TowerFall Ascension, which gives you a limited number of arrows to shoot at your friend. It’s filled with fun power ups that slightly change how you attack in interesting ways. Like Cobalt, it’s also got a co-op mode. If you want something even faster and more furious, there’s Samurai Gunn, a fierce, frantic sword fighting game that also lets you shoot a limited number of bullets. All of these games feel slightly more focused than Cobalt – it’s much more messy and varied – but that also means they’re often not as chaotic and silly.

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Don’t bother trying to place a sunflower in a plant pot. They’re two blocks tall and so, much like peonies and lilacs, won’t fit.

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f ever there was a biome generated specifically for two lost lovers to bound across before smashing together in a springtime embrace, then it’s this one. Flat, and peppered with those titular perennials, these plains are the only place you’ll find naturally spawning sunflowers. Alongside dandelions, these can be used to obtain yellow dye.

While other flowers tend to come across as pixelated messes of colour, sunflowers are easy to recognise, due to their perfectly round shape.

Having trouble finding a use for the humble sunflower? Well know that these yellow chaps will always face east – useful for navigation.

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KNOW YOUR BIOMES

SUNFLOWER I PLAINS

to MINECRAFT Going back to school with the ABCs of Minecraft

I

n the immortal words of Motown sensation The Jackson 5: “ABC, it’s easy as punching trees.” Okay, so that’s not really how the song goes, but let us dream/misquote – because we’re bringing you a complete alphabet of Minecraft in all its glory. Minecraft’s all about the fundamentals, you see: the building blocks, if you’ll pardon the pun. Whether you’re going for broke in Hardcore Survival mode or creating a 200-block-high portrait of your cat (hey, we’re not here to judge), building upon a solid foundation is vital.

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Step away from that sandy biome, then, and let’s take it back to the basics. The very basics. In just 26 letters, we’re going to give you the rundown of everything essential you need to know about Minecraft – and, er, probably some weirder stuff you don’t need to. Well, every little bit helps. That’s right: this isn’t your standard pre-school fare. There’s plenty of series staples spelled out here – but there’s also secrets, surprises, and loads of IRL evidence that proves the whole world is speaking Minecraft’s language now. So gather round the glossy pages of this bookazine, don your diamond thinking helmet, and let’s learn our ABCs all over again – Minecraft-style. Remember kids, learning is fun!

A-Z OF MINECR AFT

ALPHA Looking at Minecraft now, it’s hard to believe that it was once just an ickle baby, equal parts bugs and promise. Unbelievably, the first-ever version of the game took a mere six days to make. Notch began work on Alpha Minecraft on May 10, 2009, working until May 16 to get it spick and span for its public release the very next day. There was just one mode – Survival – and Notch would frequently post “Seecret Updates” on Twitter announcing or confirming major changes to the game, like minecarts, redstone and sneaking. Simpler times. If you’re getting all mistyeyed thinking about those long-forgotten days, never fear: you can still play ye olde Minecraft through the in-game launcher.

A

APPLE A is always for apple in alphabets, isn’t it? Well, the humble fruit isn’t so basic in the world of Minecraft. Sure, it’s the first food you’ll find, but its mystical powers don’t stop at “can be shoved into your pie-hole to restore four food points”. They’re also a great way to bribe horses into giving free rides, the key to making the super-secret Mojang banner, and like everything, extra-delectable when dipped in obscene amounts of gold. What’s more, Golden Apples are a reference to Greek myths involving blingin’ apples that granted immortality (we’d prefer Immortality Pizza, if it’s all the same). Munching one down triggers enhanced health regeneration for five precious seconds, with Enchanted Golden Apples dishing out 20 seconds of regen plus absorption. Also, you won’t get scurvy! Always a bonus, right?

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BLOCK Biomes, buckets and blazes are all very well, but blocks are literally the stuff that Minecraft’s made of. When Notch’s procedurally-generated universe rocked up in 2009, its cuboid charms appealed to us graphically-spoilt gamers. Other games sweated over making hyper-realistic worlds; Minecraft gave us square pumpkins, put on a sweet pair of shades and told us to deal with it. Those blocks make reminiscing about epic Minecraft adventures a bit mind-boggling. One block is equal to one IRL cubic metre – meaning each in-game world is bigger than some planets. Go ahead and scrape the remainders of your mind off the wall. Done? Here’s a different kind of block fact: update 1.9 adds craftable shields into Minecraft to let you block mob melee and projectile attacks.

A-Z OF MINECR AFT

C

D

CREATIVITY

DIAMONDS

There’s only one thing about Minecraft beginning with the letter C that’s worth mentioning. That’d be creativity of course, and definitely nothing horrible, green and explody, perish the thought. Minecraft’s free-roaming, resource-stuffed Creative Mode has prompted works of art: impossibly-detailed reconstructions of the Game of Thrones fantasy continent of Westeros; working 16-bit computers; a playable guitar; the entire country of Denmark; that 200-block-high portrait of your cat (still not judging, we promise). Thanks to Creative Mode’s infinite possibilities, if you can dream it in Minecraft, you can do it – meaning the game’s used as an educational building tool in schools around the world. What ‘C’ could possibly be more important than the spirit of artistry that Minecraft inspires in all of us? NOTHING… Oh God, it’s right behind me, isn’t i- *CREEPER EXPLOSION*

Ah, diamonds. Light of our lives, fire of our torches, object of all our late-night mining sessions (just five more minutes… honest) Why do we players worship them so fervently? Is it because they make the strongest, most efficient gear? Perhaps. Is it because crafting an Enchantment Table is impossible without them? Probably. Is it because we want to build ourselves a throne made entirely of blocks of diamond and force our friends to bring us cake as we sit in it, cackling madly? Ding ding ding! Our survey says: undoubtedly! A tough dream to realise, as diamond is the second rarest item in the game behind emerald – but strip-mining around the tenth or eleventh layer next to lava increases the likelihood of treasure-hunting triumph. Gimme that bling!

E

ERROR You can’t have Minecraft without failure. It’s an essential characteristic of the game. In fact, if you’re not regularly failing at Minecraft, you’re doing it wrong. Every grisly death, misplaced pickaxe, wasted resource and accidental base bonfire is a step in the right direction. All the best Minecraft stuff comes from mistakes. The iconic creeper itself was a coding error: Notch attempted to make a pig and mixed up the X and Y coordinates. The awesomely creepy Enderman sounds are actually warped English words like “hiya”, “what’s up?”, and “this way” played in reverse. The $2.5 billion behemoth game itself was even born of failure: Notch never finished high school, coding the sensation we know and love while living in his mother’s basement. Error equals WinRAR with Minecraft.

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F

G

FRIENDS

GHAST

There’s many a thrill to be had playing Minecraft in single player mode. It’s all kinds of fun to tell anyone who’ll listen the harrowing tale of that one time you were all alone, backed up against the dungeon wall, fending off three – no, five! – angry zombies with just a pork chop and your wits to call on. But multiplayer Minecraft on the game’s servers is even better. Whether it’s surviving the Nether together with friends, or constructing an elaborate free-running map to race for the title of Master Of Hardcore Parkour, a little company goes a long way when you’re off in search of fame and the Farlands. And if you’re the shy, retiring type and aren’t too keen on real meat-based people? Dogs, ocelots, iron golems and snowmen make great in-game pals, defending you from mobs. Here boy, nice kitty…

Minecraft’s most weird and wonderful mob just had to have its very own place in our A-to-Z (because it threatened to fireball us into crispy oblivion if it didn’t.) There’s so much to know and love – well, tolerate – about the demon jellyfish ghost. Oh, you thought the Ender Dragon was king of the mobs? Pshhh. Ghasts are even bigger by volume – the biggest baddie in the whole game. Their childlike gurgling/ cooing/screaming is shudder-inducing: there’s actually an unused sound file in the game’s code called affectionate_scream.ogg. We’d be enchanted, if we weren’t seriously disturbed. That auditory horror is based on a recording of the Minecraft music producer’s sleepy cat, apparently. Aww? Stock up on cobblestone before you head off to the Nether to meet a ghast: it’s the only block they can’t destroy.

HEART

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HOUSEKEEPING If there’s ever a game that turned us all into neurotic housewives, Minecraft is it. “JEREMY/COLIN/SANDRA!”, we’ve all hollered, horrified, our adventuring buddy tracking zombie guts onto our freshly-carpeted saloon. Er, we have all been there, right? Hurried first-night dirt bunkers aside, crafting the perfect base is one of the greatest bits of playing the game. There are some truly epic specimens online: intimidating fortresses; sleek modern pads; cosy alpine lodges; whole skyscrapers filled with apartments; epic headquarters with waterfalls and trees built right into the structure. With gorgeous texture packs and detailed furniture mods, staying in is the new going out in Minecraft. Until a creeper blows up your brand-new wet room, that is. Then it’s war. Angry war.

Don’t get too excited, okay? We just see you as a friend. The heart symbol is a complex signifier in Minecraft, meaning many important things when it pops up around your UI. Breeding your cows, sheep and chickens will result in a scarlet flurry of happy little hearts bobbing around, indicating that you’ll soon be hearing the pitter-patter of tiny hooves. or claws. Or whatever sheep have. It’s also the shape of your health meter. Red hearts lined up like ducks in a row = good. Empty containers jumping around like they’re bunny rabbits at a trampolinecarpeted rave = bad. They’ll go all lovely and golden if you’re under the effects of Absorption – and if you’re playing on Hardcore difficulty? Check out those angry little eyes. Cute!

A-Z OF MINECR AFT

I

INVENTORY Your Minecraft inventory says a lot about you. Do you harbour a messy hodge-podge of tchotchkes you’ve accumulated on your blocky travels? You utter slob, you. Or a clinically-sterile, hyper-organised homage to mining efficiency? Congratulations – you’re a serial killer! Stay away from us. We jest, we jest. But we spend so much time staring at those neat little rows of grey boxes that it’s left a permanent gridded overlay on our vision. Taking inventory is such an essential Minecraft experience that you even get an achievement the first time you open it. Soon, it becomes your best friend: holding all your important tools and tidbits in its hotbar; waiting patiently as you eject all and sundry to make room for new loot; offering you life advice and cups of tea during those difficult break-ups… Okay, so maybe not that last one, but it’s still pretty handy. You’ll have to sort out the beverages yourself, mind.

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JUKEBOX What’s even more fun than bopping zombies on the head? Why, bopping to a fire mixtape as you do so, of course! Enter the jukebox, Minecraft’s resident quadratic DJ, with sick beatz for all and a heart of diamond. Yes, of diamond, not gold. Its jewel-centric crafting recipe is likely a reference to the diamond-tipped needles of Edison phonographs. The music discs it plays can be found in dungeons chests, or dropped in the happy (yet rare) event of a creeper getting skewered by a skeleton’s arrow. All the tracks are composed by Minecraft music producer C418 – and the guy’s so jive-crazy that his character skin has a jukebox for a head. Now that’s commitment.

A-Z OF MINECR AFT

K

KILLING

All together now: it’s the ciiiircle of liiiife… Murder is sort of a given in Minecraft’s Survival mode. It’s them or us, after all. At least the constant massacring is sort of humane, as conquered creepers and crawlers disappear in a puff of smoke, XP and loot. It’s alright, Timmy, they’ve just gone to a nice farm somewhere. The real kicker is when they get the best of you, though. There’s nothing quite like dropping a full set of diamond tools down a dangerous ravine upon death – except maybe sick puppies and eating glass. At least the game’s death messages have a sense of humour about it all: reading that your friend “tried to swim in lava” after they take a dive in a too-hot spring is always chuckleworthy. And anyway, everything respawns in Minecraft! Take note, real life.

L

M

LEGO

MODDING

Everybody’s favourite plastic stickybricks were most likely the unintentional inspiration behind Minecraft. Notch himself has a sneaking suspicion that his childhood stash of LEGO influenced him to create a blocky game about, well, creating. And we’re just going to throw this out there: Minecraft is better than LEGO. Stay with us. There’s no boring clean-up process, no accidentally-on-purpose-swallowed pieces (in our defence, those studs look remarkably like Skittles), and no soul-splintering agony induced by stepping on rogue bricks. Plus, Minecraft’s got monsters to battle and integrated quests to complete – so we’ll pass on your silly little dioramas, thanks. Hang on. Is that Minecraft LEGO over there? Mother of Ender Pearl, that’s all our dreams come true! We take it all back. Get in our bellies. Er, we mean, collections. Obviously. *burp*

There’s nothing wrong with good ol’ fashioned vanilla. But if it’s a choice between that and triple-fudge rocky road sprinkled with rainbows and drizzled in dreams, we know what we’d pick. This is a convoluted ice-cream analogy through which we’re trying to explain that modding the vanilla game is one of the best parts of playing Minecraft. But all it’s done is left us hungry and you a little confused. Forget the ice cream. Booting up mods via ModLoader or Forge totally changes your game. Sample thousands of new, exotic foodstuffs; explore hundreds of fantastical biomes; marvel at the majestic sight of an entire farm of exploding chickens. You can even alter or add in entire game mechanics. Mods are a bit complicated – but take care to back up those save files, proceed with caution, and you can keep Minecraft fresh forever. There’s literally no excuse to stop playing! (Sorry, Mum).

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NOTCH Well, well, well. Look who’s somehow sneaked into our alphabet. We’re kidding, Notch! Please don’t patch us out! Markus ‘Notch’ Persson is the man who created Minecraft, and he actually started making videogames from the tender age of eight. It may not surprise you, then, to learn that the loveable, fedora-clad meatball is actually a part of the Swedish branch of Mensa. (The gang for smart folk). Mojang’s founder is no longer involved in Minecraft matters *sob* after he sold it to tech giant Microsoft for mad cash. Why would he be, when he could be chilling out at his $70 million pad next to his M&M-DISPENSING WALL? Yep, that’s a real thing. And that mysterious moniker? Well, it means… absolutely zilch. He picked it because it sounded cool, apparently.

A-Z OF MINECR AFT

0

OCEAN Endless and imposing, the cavernous depths of the game’s procedurally-generated worlds hide the most unbelievable secrets. The blue biome is an infinite source of delicious sashimi for those savvy enough to rustle up a fishing rod, and zipping around its azure surface in a wooden boat is a pleasant diversion. But beware, all ye landlubbers: what lies beneath is far more chilling than you could possibly imagine. Here be dangerous ocean monuments guarded by, er, guardians, as it happens. The strange, spiky cyclops-fish has a death-stare that’ll fire a laser at you as soon as look at you. Gulp. Just think of the awesome rewards! Whole blocks of gold – and sponges! You’ll never want for a dishcloth again: definitely worth the risk of drowning.

Q QUIZ Heads up off your desks, Minecraft scholars. We’re quite a way into our alphabet here, so let’s check you’ve been paying attention. Time for a pop quiz… Question 1 What S is a brand-new item that lets you block enemy attacks? Question 2 What C is a type of block that ghosts can’t destroy? Question 3 What E speaks English backwards? Question 4 What D is the key ingredient in crafting a jukebox? Question 5 What G can be found in ocean monuments? Turn in your test papers, please. What do you mean, prize? Your prize is a quiet sense of satisfaction and us not expelling you from Mineschool.

Behold, the golden rule of Minecraft (and of life): when in doubt, bacon. Just the goofy expressions on the faces of these pixelated porkers can get you through the hard times. When a creeper lays waste to the labour of love that was your redstone auto-farm, solace arrives in the form of some light-hearted piggybacking. A saddle, a stick, some string and a tasty carrot later, you’ve got yourself a regular rodeo. Until you get peckish, of course. A heartbreaking coincidence, indeed, that your porcine pal also happens to be made of crackling. C’est la vie. At least the boss-eyed effigy of Minecraft’s benign swine will live on eternally in the form of the adorable Reuben the pig, star of Telltale’s Minecraft: Story Mode series.

Answers 1. Shield 2. Cobblestone 3. Enderman 4. Diamond 5. Guardian

P

PIG

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S

R

STEVE REDSTONE So you’ve just seen a player press a button and automatically farm a whole field of wheat like it ain’t even a thing. Magic! Sorcery! Burn the witch! Calm down, it’s just redstone. No-one could accuse Minecraft of being a simple game. It has its very own and surprisingly deep circuitry system built right in, and players have done amazing things with it. Epic minecart rollercoasters stretching on for miles, automatic machine guns that can farm and fire arrows… There’s even a redstone mod called bitCraft that lets you work lights and alarms IRL by using in-game redstone communications. And if you can’t quite wrap your head around all those repeaters, all you need to know is that mining the red stuff will net you mad XP.

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He’s a man of few words, our Steve – and by few, we mean none. Minecraft’s silent protagonist stands 6’1” tall and is now shorn of his luxuriant beard (the one that looked like a goofy grin). But don’t be fooled by his affable mug: the stats suggest that Steve’s actually some sort of terrifying demi-god. Not only can he fly in Creative mode, his casual walking pace is a blistering 9.7mph. Good grief, Steven, don’t you ever stop to smell the roses? He’s also capable of sporting a full set of golden armour, which would weigh roughly 2892kg. When he’s not chilling out in two-ton duds, he’s holding his breath underwater for a maximum of 15 seconds – and seeing as though the Minecraft day is only 20 minutes long, that’s a real-world time of 18 minutes. We’ll just back away slowly…

TORCH We never thought we’d be the sort of people to cuddle inanimate, virtual objects while crying, but Minecraft’s wonderful torches have saved our custom skins on more than several occasions. You’re never alone with a torch. Got lost on a jaunt away from your base and now the inky darkness of night-time is upon you? Torch. Mobs spawning on your roof and plopping down your chimney like unseasonable Santa Clauses? Torch. Exploring the ocean floor and swiftly running out of that oxygen nonsense you so desperately need to live? Potion of Water Breathing. Only joking, that stuff’s expensive. TORCH. There is only the torch. Yep, the humble fiery tool can even be used to create temporary air pockets underwater, when used correctly. As soon as torch/human marriage is legal, we’ll be straight down the registry office. Did we just write that out loud? Ahem…

A-Z OF MINECR AFT

U

UNDERGROUND Much like the Seattle music scene, most of Minecraft is underground. You can go several Minecraft days, if not weeks without seeing the light of day – and that’s just how we like it. Each randomly generated cavern branching off into winding tunnels must be combed for exposed ore; each lava lake doused in our efforts to mine obsidian; each ravine explored for an entrance to abandoned mineshafts. You’re certainly not going to get to The End without hours of world excavation, as strongholds house end portals (and silverfish, but we try not to think about those. Ugh.) Cheerio, sunlight. Vitamin D be damned: it’s all about Vitamin DIAMOND.

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V VISTA It’s all too easy to get caught up in the busywork of Minecraft and miss out on the little things. It’s astonishing that a world composed entirely of 1x1 blocks can randomly generate such sublime horizons. Each corner you round can confront you with new landmarks. Struggling to find a picturesque rambling location? A quick Google search will provide you with world seeds famed for their natural beauty – simply copy and paste the number into the corresponding field when creating a world, and voila! Forget building your house in a structurally-sound location: really, you just want a view of those floating falls when you’re drinking your morning coffee/Health Potion. Load up some fancy shaders, apply a gorgeous texture pack, and build those glass windows high…

W

X

WEATHER

X MARKS THE SPOT

We’re a British bookazine, so of course we’re going to talk your ear off about the weather in Minecraft. The forecast’s clear and sunny by default (if only we could extract the code for this from the game’s files), and you can toggle rain and snow on and off with a simple “/weather rain” command, which would certainly come in handy in real life. Easier than a brolly, too. But things really kick off when it gets stormy. Thunderstorms are preceded by a darkness so complete that you’re able to sleep in a bed during it. The lightning’s the worst bit: everything it strikes, it sets on fire… including you, to the tune of five hearts of damage. A short, sharp shock hurts us, but gives certain mobs superpowers – how is that fair, Notch?! Zapped pigs turn into zombie pigmen, villagers into witches, and creepers into glowing blue charged creepers. Oh well – we were indoors people, anyway. Might brighten up later.

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Squash together a compass and a few sheets of paper, and you’ve got yourself a map that’ll update in real-time as you explore your individually-generated Minecraft world. But what good is a map without a lovely, fat, juicy X to encourage you to hunt something shiny? If you’ve got a predilection for piracy, searching for treasure with your pals is a brilliant way to raise the stakes. Thanks to downloadable maps and server plug-ins, it’s possible to decipher and follow player-made clues to find hoards of jewels and gold hidden in them there hills. Pack a sword, some steaks and grab your mates for the epic adventure ahead, but don’t be too discouraged if the plunder proves elusive – the greatest treasure you’ll find is friendship. D’awww.

YOUTUBE

One thing’s for sure: Minecraft would not be the worldwide phenomenon it is today without the power of the Internet, and specifically video-hosting website YouTube. Don’t believe us? Well, get a load of this actual science we dug up: a doctoral student at the Annenberg School of Communication conducted a study that showed one third of early Minecraft players discovered the game through YouTube videos. Stampylonghead, Sky, CaptainSparkles, iBallisticSquid, iHasCupcake… No, we’re not spouting nonsense – these are just some of the usernames of the YouTubers who’ve shown the world, with their own unique brands of yelling and #YOLO’ing, why Minecraft is so much fun. And Minecraft has honoured them. In one console version of the game, you could find an obsidian-based, four-gold-block high Tower of Pimps: a reference to popular YouTube channel Achievement Hunter.

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ZOMBIE Finally, bringing up the rear as usual, shambles in the Minecraft zombie. The reason you never see a zombie in a stylish pair of specs? They’ve got the best eyesight in the game. They’ll spot you from 40 blocks away, compared to other mobs squinting at your wobbly knees from just 16 blocks. They can still accessorise, though, occasionally sporting a fetching pumpkin hat or even diamond armour. The Rotten Flesh that they drop on death is as gross as it is useless, but we love ’em anyway. Seeing a baby zombie speed around on a chicken is a magical Minecraft moment. So let’s celebrate the green guy: spawn a giant one into your world with the command /summon Giant.

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A-Z OF MINECR AFT

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MINECRAFT MASTERMIND How much do you really know about your favourite game?

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et’s be honest: even your nanna could probably identify a creeper by now. “Is it that scuttly green thing, dear? Ooh, I don’t care for him. Best make sure he doesn’t go boom.”

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What light levels do you need to maintain in order to prevent creepers from spawning? A) 8 B) 4 C) 11

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How many biomes are there in total? A) 22 B) 10 C) 16

In what year was the first alpha version of Minecraft released? A) 2001 B) 2009 C) 2011

What is the name of the female player character? A) Joanne B) Stevena C) Alex

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What is the name of this block? A) Redstone B) Glowstone C) Cobblestone

Which of these materials is the hardest? A) Iron B) Gold C) Obsidian

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Of course, if you consider yourself to be a Minecraft devotee, your knowledge should probably go a few blocks deeper than that. So take our quiz, and test your trivia smarts…

How many adjacent blocks can be powered by one block of redstone? A) 4 B) 2 C) 1

What do you get if you cross a cow and toadstool? A) Mooshroom B) Killer bunny C) NIghtmares

How many platforms has Minecraft been released on in total? A) 14 B) 8 C) 12

What is the missing ingredient in this cake recipe: sugar, egg, wheat…? A) Flour B) Water C) Milk

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What is Minecraft creator Notch’s real name? A) Markus Persson B) Jens Bergensten C) Daniel Frisk

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What is the name of the infamous ‘ghost’ (who does not exist) that some people have claimed to see in Minecraft? A) Zerowine B) Herobrine C) Spectral Gary

Which British politician was recently turned into a Minecraft character? A) David Cameron B) Ed Miliband C) Boris Johnson

Where would you find a zombie pigman? A) Forest biome B) The Nether C) The End

What colour eyes do villagers have? A) Green B) Blue C) Brown

How many items can you fit in a single chest? A) 25 B) 27 C) 32

What kind of mobs are squid? A) Hostile B) Passive C) Neutral

Which of these will not stop an enderman from attacking you? A) Not looking at them B) Wearing a jack o’lantern C) Standing still while staring at them

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Which of these is the most sensible weapon against the Ender Dragon? A) Bow and arrows B) Sword C) Axe

What was Minecraft’s original title? A) Block Digger B) Cave Game C) Special Steve’s Subterranean Adventure

RESULTS

ANSWERS

0-5: Skeleton

11-15: Creeper

Not many Minecraft facts in your mind, are there? Must try harder!

You may not be the main man, but you still pack an explosive punch.

6-10: Villager

16-20: Steve

You know the lay of the land, but you’re not the most adventurous.

Top of the blocks. You know the game inside out – well done!

01: B 02: A 03: C 04: A 05: C 06: A 07: B 08: A

09: C 10: C 11: A 12: B 13: C 14: B 15: A 16: B

17: B 18: C 19: A 20: B

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MINECRAFT’S CRAZIEST EASTER EGGS

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Rainbow sheep and killer bunnies? You’ve got to be yolking

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aster is, as everybody knows, a most sacred time of year. Easter is about sacrifice. It’s about rebirth. It’s about the holy ritual of shoving novelty chocolate into your face-hole until your pores start to leak whatever the hell it is they put in Creme Eggs (paradise goo? Liquid unicorn? Best not to ask). Of course, Easter’s really about easter eggs - and by that we mean hidden secrets, not actual eggs - and Minecraft’s got loads of them stuffed inside its ravines. But like all good things in Minecraft, they’re buried underneath the surface, revealing their delicious

mysteries to only the most persistent pickaxes... Too busy battling a serious case of the chocolate sweats to move? No matter – we’ve dug through every crevice of code to bring you Minecraft’s super-secret treats. And what did we find on our easter egg hunt? Upside-down animals! Encrypted puzzles! Spelling errors! Barefaced lies! Other things you probably don’t want to put in your mouth! And most of all, hilarious hacks that remind us why Minecraft is so freakin’ sweet. But don’t be April fooled: some of the lore you’ve heard about is total tosh, so we’ve supplied a guide to which easter eggs are the real deal and which ones are, ahem, eggs-aggerated. Crack on!

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01 CHISELLED GOOD LUCKS Take a moment out of your hectic, world-dominationoriented schedule to actually look at what you’re using to build that terrifying obelisk monument to yourself. Grab a chunk of chiseled sandstone in your blocky hands (it’s two sandstone slabs stacked on top of each other), and take a squiz at it. Closer. Cloooser. Not that close, you’re getting drool on it. Back up a little, and check out those two shady little blobs right in the middle, complete with droopy mouth underneath. Yup, that’s a creeper face alright. Who knows how Minecraft’s most famous mob wormed his way into the sandstone block texture, but his ‘orrible mug is unmistakably there. And if that wasn’t suspicious enough for you, chiseled red sandstone is quite clearly harbouring the spooky, three-skulled shadow of the wither. Now you can rest easy in the knowledge that your empire is built from the petrified corpses of your enemies. Hardcore.

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LOADING WITH A CHANCE OF MEAT-BOATS Okay, so the sweet stuff isn’t for everyone. Fortunately, there is a savoury easter egg hidden deep within Minecraft’s code. So deep, in fact, that this particular menu screen mishap only has a 0.01% chance of floating to the surface every time you boot up the game. Even though it’s spelled out in huge cobblestone letters, only the keenest of peepers will notice the game’s title appearing as the jumbled-up “MINCERAFT” once in a blue moon. We’ve only heard legends of this tasty typo. But if you’re convinced it’s just a tall tale, you’d be wrong. Notch confirmed the easter egg’s existence on the Minecraft subreddit back in 2013, calling the butchered title an “old running gag” and part of the never-ending quest to “hide stuff in plain sight” in his game. Good to know that this one was an intentional misteak (that’s a pun and an anagram. You’re welcome.)

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OUT OF THEIR GOURDS Sometimes, the world can get too much. It can’t be easy, being a Minecraft mob and having to share your turf with a bunch of other baddies. Perhaps that’s why each Hallowe’en, many skellybobs, zombies and creepers hide their heads inside pumpkins and jack o’lanterns for the night. This easter egg isn’t just adorably spoopy – it can actually be very useful if you’re well-prepared for October 31st. Upgrade a tool with a Looting enchantment, get cracking those scary skulls, and you’ll find that the veggie visors will plop right off enemy heads and into your inventory. Quite apart from the visual appeal of the pumpkin parade prancing through Minecraft’s forests, there are definitely agricultural rewards to reap: with a savvy farming set-up in place, you’ll be munching pumpkin pie (usually a rare delicacy) throughout the entirety of November. Whoever said easter eggs weren’t part of a balanced diet?

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04 STEVE-IL TWIN You haven’t heard of blocky protagonist Steve’s demonic doppelganger? Oh boy. The first sighting of the anti-Steve came courtesy of Brocraft streamer Copeland’s infamous video. He’s rumoured to be symbolic of Notch’s deceased brother, which would be enough to make us do a widdle in our iron boots… were it not for the fact that Notch has confirmed that he never had a brother. Awkward. Turns out the creepy tale is totally fabricated, and there’s no source code that would ever spawn something like Herobrine. That hasn’t stopped Mojang from fuelling our nightmares, however – the milky-eyed topiarist has repeatedly popped up in official art, and is referenced in every set of patch notes... FALSE (at least, we’re pretty sure. Oh God.)

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ALPHABET GET! Those odd little symbols that whizz about the table when you’re riffling through your bumper book of enchantments don’t half look mysterious and impressive. But they’re far from random squiggles: they’re actually part of the Standard Galactic Alphabet. Tom Hall dreamed up the simple code for his Commander Keen series of videogames on MS-DOS in the early ‘90s. Each symbol corresponds to one of the 26 letters of the alphabet, meaning that it’s possible to decipher coded words in some of the enchantments you perform on your various bludgeoning bits and bobs. The enchantment names are randomly generated, so most are likely to be utter nonsense, but that doesn’t mean you can’t freak out your friends with your knowledge of this easter egg. “Hm”, you’ll announce, visibly consulting your SGA chart and stroking your luxuriant beard, “The runes are telling me there’s something green and explody in your near future…”

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SPRING SPECIAL

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06 CORE BLIMEY They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But what about the Notch? One of Minecraft’s most discussed easter eggs is what exactly Papa Minecraft’s character drops upon meeting a sticky end in the servers. Rumour has it that somewhere, buried in the game’s code, is a command that produces a single, shiny red apple once a player manages to slay digi-Notch. The urban myth seems to have been generally accepted, although there’s been no concrete evidence such an event ever occurring. If it was once an easter egg, it was quickly patched out of the game, and now we have only the shaky testimony of those players lucky enough to have met their Minecraft maker. He’s too busy swimming in an M&M-and-cash-filled infinity pool in Beverly Hills to make it online much anymore. Guess we’ll have to find a more reliable source of making apple pies.

UNKNOWN

07 RABID RABBIT It just wouldn’t be Easter without fluffy bunnies. Sorry, did we say “fluffy”? We meant “killer”. Killer bunnies. These cuddly little harbingers of doom are a reference to a scene from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which one flopsy little cottontail single-handedly takes down several armed men. Your diamond armour has no power here. The Killer Bunny used to be a rare natural spawn, but these days you’ll need a command block to summon one into your game. We’d recommend extreme caution when doing so, as they’ve got a vicious streak a mile wide (by which we mean they do damage equal to that of withers. Ouch.) Pure white with red eyes – actually significantly less horrifying than their original blood-stained texture – and a crimson temper to match, TNT’s probably your safest bet when fighting one, seeing as there’s no Holy Hand Grenade in Minecraft.

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FOOL ME ONCE We’re breaking open some vintage Mojang trolling for this one. Rewind all the way back to April 1st, 2011, when every chunk generated between the first and the fifth of the month had a small chance of containing a locked chest. But it wasn’t a locked chest, was it, Mojang? It was a regular ol’ block with a fancy paint job, you monsters. Trying to open the Steve Co. Supply Crate would result in being forwarded on to the Minecraft Store, where if you decided to proceed to checkout with its ridiculous microtransactions, you’d be treated to a faceful of screeching Velociraptor. A midi version of the Rick Astley classic “Never Gonna Give You Up” was the bittersweet icing on the cake.

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08 WHAT’S IN A NAME? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet tried to teach us that when it comes to the crunch, names don’t matter. Listen, bard-brain: us ‘Crafters beg to differ. Renaming Minecraft’s animals changes their very DNA, leading to some unique easter eggs. Hunt down a name tag, whip up an anvil and gather your motley crew of critters. Dubbing a humble sheep “jeb_” will cause it to turn into Disco Sheep, a high-evolved mammal with a constantly colour-changing woolly coat and an insatiable appetite for Motown bangers. If you can’t get down with the grooviest grass-muncher in town, there’s an equally brilliant alternative. Name any mob “Dinnerbone” or “Grumm” (all these magical words are the nicknames of Mojang developers, by the way) and they’ll instantly be flipped upside-down, their stubby little limbs flailing comically in the air as they go about their business none the wiser. Cow-flipping trumps cow-tipping any day of the week.

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FACE IN THE MUSIC You’ll have done your fair share of digging if you’re a tried-and-true player, but getting to the bottom of this mystery requires diamond-hard determination. For starters, you’ve got to get hold of a music disc – that means finding one as a rare dungeon drop, or somehow convincing a skeleton to shoot and kill a creeper – and it needs to be Music Disc 11. That’s the strange, broken-looking one that plays one minute and eleven seconds of someone breathing heavily while running away from an unknown danger. No, don’t set fire to it, we need it for science! Root around in your game’s Minecraft folders and grab the disc’s .ogg file. Next, run it through spectrogram software to reveal… well, just look at it. It doesn’t take much to spot the Minecraft-esque face and the numbers 1241. There are endless theories on what this could mean. We’re carefully ignoring the fact that the face looks like Herobrine’s.

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FOOL ME TWICE Last year’s April Fools’ shenanigans made creepers even more… creepy. The 1.10 build (hang on, what happened to 1.9?!) was entitled the “Love and Hugs Update”. Creepers blew kisses instead of holes in buildings; harming any living being was completely impossible; zombies became super-cuddly; minecarts got a fluffy pink interior; nasty lava was replaced with liquid cheese. It was all terribly progressive… but things got progressively more terrible when we discovered that we couldn’t ride horses, Mojang gleefully deeming it “unfair” to the animals. We all breathed huge sighs of relief once normal, meanie Minecraft service resumed – although we would have been perfectly happy to hang onto those lakes of fondue.

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HACK ‘N’ SPLASH On logging into the game, you’re always greeted by a “splash” slapped over the game’s title – that is, a sunny yellow message in Minecraft’s trademark pixelated font. Witty references to gaming and geekery abound, but there are some even more esoteric easter eggs that can pop up from time to time. For instance, firing up the game on 1st June (a.k.a. our glorious creator’s cake-day) prompts the “Happy birthday, Notch!” splash to appear. Aww, Minecraft – you shouldn’t have! Even more intriguingly, there’s a nod to Pokemon buried deep within that splash code. Uncover the hidden reference by dipping into your Minecraft folders and deleting the one named splash.txt, making sure not to delete META-INF before that. The splash then changes to “missingno” – as in, the famous glitch species of Pokemon that can be found in the first generation of the JRPG. Yo, we heard you like easter eggs..

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MOJANGLED BANNER You might have already twigged that you can make a rather fetching pair of creeper curtains out of banners and some of those disembodied heads you’ve got lying around the place. But did you know that your interior could be repping the mighty Mojang? This secret crafting recipe will have you tearing down those ugly drapes and plastering the indie developer’s logo all over the show. Rustle up your standard banner out of six blocks of wool and a stick. Next, it’s time to procure an enchanted golden apple. Well, nobody said a complete style overhaul was going to be easy. Mashing the two together in a crafting grid will create a snazzy Mojang banner: you can even include dye to match your potted plants! Yes, those Notch apples will cost you a pretty penny in gold – but you can’t put a price on good taste, darling.

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12 FAR, FAR AWAY Minecraft and ill-advised exploration go hand in hand, so it wasn’t long before the most intrepid players pushed the limits of their infinitely-generated environments. They packed their inventories to the brim with pork chops and pickaxes, venturing an epic 12.5 million blocks away from spawn point and to the end of the world. Not The End – the real end of the Minecraft world, known as the Far Lands, where horrors far greater than angsty dragons rear their glitchy heads. Layers of ground and sky stack and float in between each other, and the secret borderlands are so broken that it’s not actually your character who’s moving around – the ground is moving underneath you while you remain perfectly still (Ugh. Pass us that iron bucket, would you?) Presumably, it’s been patched out as of version 1.8, but incoming reports suggest that the accidental anti-biome is still wreaking physics-based havoc even further afield..

UNKNOWN

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LEAP INTO SPRING!

These Easter-themed craft projects are blooming marvellous

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inter, thank goodness, is coming to an end. The days are getting longer, the daffodils are peeping through the ground and Easter is just around the corner. And what better way to celebrate than with a trio of spring-themed Minecraft projects? With its sunshine, farmyard animals and flowery glades, many of Minecraft’s biomes are perfect for embracing the joys of the new season – so we’re capitalising on that to bring you these crafty endeavours.

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Over the next few pages, we’ll be taking you step-bystep through how to make your own real-life grass block, how to string together some bunny-shaped bunting, and how to create some brightly coloured spawn egg Easter decorations. They’re all fairly simple to carry out, so while you’re sat at home on your school holidays, surrounded by empty Easter egg wrappers and fending off a sugar crash, why not try one of these? If you give them a go, why not try sending us your pictures, too? Easter eggs and giant boxes of surplus chocolate are entirely optional.

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GROWYOUR-OWN GRASS BLOCK

2 BUNNY BUNTING

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Make your own version of the iconic Minecraft block and watch it grow! Once harvested it won’t grow back quite as quickly as the in-game equivalent, but it certainly looks the part. Also, it’s far easier and safer to make than a block of real obsidian, which requires quickly cooled lava. Please don’t try that at home.

MATERIALS Materials: square flower pot; grass/cress/chive seeds, or a small plant (we used a chive plant); green and brown foam; felt-tip pens; scissors; doublesided sticky tape; ruler and pen

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STEP 1

Use a ruler to measure the width of your flowerpot’s sides. Add about half a centimetre to the measurement, to give space for the corners. Using a ruler, carefully measure out four panes of this width on the brown foam - it’s also a good idea to leave a flap of a centimetre or two at one end. Make the panes almost the same height as your flowerpot.

SPRING CHICKEN Make yourself a cuddly Minecraft chicken by cutting out two cardboard rings, holding them together, and winding white yarn round and round them until the hole is filled. Carefully cut around the outside, separate the two rings, and tie a piece of white yarn around the bundle of threads before removing the rings - this will make a pom-pom. Make a second, smaller pom-pom by using a smaller ring. Glue or sew the pom-poms together to form a body and head, then glue on felt decorations to give your chick a face and legs. Clucky you!

STEP 2

Carefully cut out your sheet of brown foam, keeping the edges as straight as possible. Line up the ruler along each fold line, and use your scissors to score it - this will help you to make each fold as sharp as possible.

STEP 3

Turn the foam over, and use a brown felt-tip pen to decorate the ‘earth’ section of your block. Don’t worry about making it too neat: it’ll look better if it’s slightly haphazard like real dirt!

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STEP 4

Turn the foam back over so that it’s sat decorationside down, and fold along your scored lines. Make sure you’re folding them so that the decoration sits on the outside!

STEP 5

Attach pieces of double-sided sticky tape to the reverse side of each pane, and then carefully stick it to your flowerpot, lining it up with the pot’s bottom edge. Start off with the small flap, so that it can be covered by the final pane. Press the foam firmly into place.

STEP 6

Repeat steps 1-4 using green foam, but this time make the panes just a few centimetres tall. As well as decorating the outside with green felt-tip pens, you can also cut small notches along the bottom to make it look more authentic. Attach the green foam along the top edge of your pot, again using double-sided tape.

STEP 7

If you’re using seeds, it’s time to fill your pot with earth and then plant and water your seeds - in a week or two, it’ll be full of the joys of spring! If, like us, you’re a bit more impatient, pop your plant back into the pot, and trim its stalks so that they’re just peeping over the top. Hey, presto: instant grass!

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MATERIALS

Brown, black and white foam or card (we used foam); felttip pens and gel pens; ribbon; scissors; hole punch; pen; scrap paper

BUNNY BUNTING Celebrate Easter in the style of Minecraft Update 0.13.0! Honestly, it’s more exciting than we’ve made that sound. These cheery rabbits are perfect for hanging up to celebrate spring, even if stringing the poor blighters up does seem rather cruel. Just promise us you won’t do it with real rabbits, okay? It’s a bright, simple project that makes the most of those crisp Minecraft designs. Just look at their little faces!

STEP 1

Using a piece of scrap paper, sketch out a template for your bunny heads. Don’t worry if it takes you a few goes - just get something you’re happy with. Once you’ve got it how you want it, cut it out. Mind those ears! Your bunny is just a square without them...

STEP 2

Lay your template on top of each piece of foam/card in turn, and carefully draw around it. Try to stick to the lines as best as possible! You’ll need to draw around and then cut out two rabbit heads from each colour foam/card.

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STEP 3

Once you’ve cut out your six rabbit pieces, use your felt-tips and gel pens to colour in their features. You’ll probably need to use the gel pens on the black, as the felt-tip ink likely won’t show up on such a dark colour. There are tons of different rabbit designs in Minecraft, so how you decorate these is entirely up to you!

STEP 4

When each rabbit has an adorable/terrifyingly feral little face, make a hole at the top of each one’s ears (don’t worry; they won’t feel a thing). You can use a hole punch for this if you’ve made them out of card, but if you’re using foam then the pieces might not fit into your hole punch. If that’s the case, just (carefully!) use the point of your scissors to make the holes.

STEP 5

Thread your ribbon through each hole. If your ribbon is only patterned or textured on one side, make sure you keep the ribbon from twisting, so that the pattern stays facing forward. Space your rabbits out evenly along the ribbon, and your bunting is ready to hang!

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3

MATERIALS

Eggs; large saucepan; poster paints; brushes; plate; cling film. That’s it!

SPAWN EGGS In the game, spawn eggs let you make any mob magically appear in creative mode. We can’t promise the same thing will happen here although that’s probably for the best if you don’t want an enderman to scamper off with your precious Easter haul - but they still provide the perfect, Minecraft-themed way to make your home feel fabulously springtastic. There’s also 27 types of spawn egg, so you can go completely mad with it. Have fun!

STEP 1

Put your eggs in a large saucepan, cover them with hot water from the kettle and boil them on the stove for around 12 minutes. If necessary, ask an adult for help! After 12 minutes, (very!) carefully fish your now hard-boiled eggs out of the saucepan and let them cool completely. You can speed this up a bit by popping them in a bowl of cold water.

NESTING INSTINCT You can make edible nests of spawn eggs by slowly melting 225g milk chocolate over a bowl of hot water, then mixing in 50g unsalted butter and two tablespoons of golden syrup until the mixture is smooth and runny. Stir in Rice Krispies or Cornflakes until they’re covered in chocolate and the mixture sticks together. Spoon your cake mixture evenly into 12 cake cases, and then press a few Mini Eggs into the top of each. Who’d have thought that the origins of Minecraft’s creepiest crawlies could be so incredibly delicious?

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STEP 2

When your eggs have cooled completely, it’s time to start painting them. If you don’t have a paint palette, you can make your own by covering a plate with a couple of layers of cling film, to give you a nice, smooth (and wipe-clean) surface on which to mix up your colours.

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STEP 3

You’ll need to do your painting in several stages, so start off with your base colour. To make sure that the paint doesn’t smudge, you’ll have to paint each egg a half at a time - that way, you can sit them on the unpainted side to try dry. Leave at least half an hour between each side, and don’t pick up your eggs unless the paint is totally dry!

STEP 5

STEP 4

Once you’ve got your base colours on each egg, and they’re completely dry, you can start to add in your detailing - again painting half of each egg at a time. If you’re painting on top of a dark colour, you might need to go over these a couple of times, so don’t worry if it isn’t as bright as you’d like to begin with.

Leave your eggs for a few hours (or, even better, overnight) to completely dry, and then they’re ready to use as Easter decorations! They’ll look good piled into a bowl, or scattered on a table - just make sure nobody tries to eat them! One more tip: throw the eggs out when you’re done with them... nobody wants the smell of rotten egg if you accidentally crack the shell!

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Having a hard time seeing anything in the murky depths? You are not alone. Sort yourself out with the Clearwater mod to increase the general brightness.

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KNOW YOUR BIOMES

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DEEP OCEAN

t might initially appear similar to the regular ocean biome, but delve down into the depths and you’ll find potentially epic secrets within. In deep oceans, the sea bed can be upwards of 30 blocks deep, making navigation a real pain as light generally won’t travel down that far. We recommend a combo of a cracking quality helmet with the respiration enchantment, and the tactical use of air pocket creation for optimal exploratory options.

Deep ocean is the only biome where you’ll find ocean monuments. Be extra careful when exploring these as we’re talking endgame difficulty guardians to fight against here.

Carry an empty bucket and you’ll be able to scoop a block’s worth of water out from in front of you, giving you a quick hit of oxygen.

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FULL OF THE MODS OF SPRING Add a springtime bloom to your Minecraft game with these uplifting mods

inter has finished its chilly vigil! Spring is in the air! The first few brave sunbeams are beginning to pierce the clouds. But how to celebrate this momentous occasion? You could go out and take a brisk walk to see the daffodils. You could springclean your room within an inch of its life until every surface gleams. . Or, you could just stay indoors with Minecraft, and spruce up your game to match the changing seasons. (Spoiler: we only care about the last one.) Over the next

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few pages we’ll be taking you through 13 mods that add a touch of springtime to your game – whether it’s to flora, fauna or just overall. These add-ons might take the tiresome toil out of farming, introduce a wealth of new critters to your biomes (we’re so over spring lamb) or even add some new biomes to your, erm, biomes. We’ve added in a little holiday for you under the canvas, too. Whatever mods you go for, and in whichever combination, we hope these give your game a whole new lease of life to match the rising temperatures. After all, nobody wants an excuse to go out in the April showers, do they?

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BOTANIA Some people (wizards, mostly) say that nature is magic. If you showed these people Botania, it would probably blow their minds - the mod’s very concept revolves around the idea of natural magic. While this mod does fill your game world up with flowers of darn near every colour imaginable, it’s not just about making things look all prettied up - these new plants also have a range of characteristics and abilities, which are powered by mana. You can generate mana through various means, such as sunlight or leaves, adding a small element of resource management. Oh, and you’re also equipped with a bunch of wonderfully named fancy gadgets, like a mana blaster and a terra shatterer. You’re a botanist, Harry! READ MORE http://bit.ly/1HNFfky

BIOMES O’PLENTY What, the existing 16 biomes aren’t enough for you? You greedy thing. Still, we can hardly blame you for having a healthy appetite for adventure. Biomes O’Plenty does precisely what its name suggests: it adds more than 70 new biomes into your game, including the snowy peaks of the Alps, the exotic underwater spectacle of the Coral Reef and the grotesque Nether locale known as Bloody Heap. We

wouldn’t want to spend much time in that last one, we have to say - but we won’t judge you for doing what suits you. Our top tip for springtime shenanigans is the Cherry Blossom Grove, which features beautiful pink and white cherry trees (which yield pink planks of wood), flowery meadows and clear blue skies. It’s all very zen.. READ MORE http://bit.ly/1KiZAzs

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NATURA Rather than reinventing the world block by block, Natura just aims to make your game a little bit more exciting. We can’t say we have any complaints about the fun levels of Minecraft in general, but we’d never say no to cranking it up a notch. The mod adds in ten or so new types of tree from willow through to bloodwood, via eucalyptus and the dangerous-sounding tigerwood. You can now grow extra crops such as aloe vera - mmm, soothing - and raspberries, and craft new types of bow for shooting nasties. Oh, and we’d definitely like some of those maloberries on our next bowl of cereal, please. They are edible, right?. READ MORE http://bit.ly/1Qfuq83

FORESTRY In case you’ve not been listening to what scientists have been saying lately, bees are really important for keeping the whole system of plants and trees and animals ticking over nicely. But Minecraft never really seemed to get that memo, did it? Perhaps it’s not been reading the newspapers. So if you fancy yourself as a friendly neighborhood beekeeper, add Forestry to your game - not only does

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it add automated tree-farming (making gathering wood easier than ever before), new machinery and the chance to send letters using those mulched-up trees, it also gives you the chance to become an apiarist. That’s the fancy word for beekeeper, you know. Save us some honey, yeah?. READ MORE http://bit.ly/1c20mRo

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PAM’S HARVESTCRAFT Farmers? They’re ten a penny in Minecraft! So why not set yourself apart and grow something a little different to the usual wheat, sugar cane and carrots? Pam’s HarvestCraft bulks out even the most well-stocked of farms, with a whopping 60 extra crops - including curry leaf, okra and water chestnut. A veritable supermarket’s worth of greenery! What’s more, you can also fish for scallops, anchovies, catfish and many more; cook food twice as fast as in the base game; and source tofu for those non meat-eating types. If you’re hoping to create a romantic in-game meal for that special someone on your friends list, look no further than this add-on. Is anyone else suddenly hungry? READ MORE http://bit.ly/1wfR5tR

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PROGRESSIVE AUTOMATION Hate doing those minor, menial tasks for yourself? We can give you two options for that: a) join the club, or b) download the Progressive Automation mod. It adds basic tools that let you automate your farm with minimal effort and very little technological whizz-kiddery. Planting or chopping down trees? We wouldn’t waste our

time on that, quite frankly. Shearing sheep? Just listen to the imaginary buzz of those automated clippers as you sit back and relax with a cool glass of milk. Killing hostile mobs before they can harm you? Yep, this mod has even got that covered. Sadly, the developer has yet to add in an option for the mod to tidy your bedroom for you in real life. Sad face.

LUCKYEGG When people talk about ‘Easter eggs’ in games, they’re not normally talking about those delicious hunks of hollow Cadbury’s chocolate presented to you by loving members of your family. No, not even the ones with the extra packets of sweets or brightly coloured mugs. Nope, they’re referring to little unexpected surprises that have been thrown into a game, just like those detailed in our feature on page 46. Based on the LuckyBlocks mod but giving it a cheerful seasonal twist, this mod combines the best of both worlds. It spawns Easter eggs that look like something you’d find in a sweetshop window, but clicking on one gives you a cheeky present in the form of a random item. What will it be? With more than 50 possible prizes, we couldn’t possibly guess... READ MORE http://bit.ly/1Wo0iMs

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SPRING SPECIAL

THE CAMPING MOD A new year is the perfect time for a change of scene as the weather is gradually getting better, so why not head off on your holidays for a relaxing getaway? Okay, so we can’t promise you’ll end up on an overbooked EasyJet flight to Majorca, or even in a cosy caravan on the Cornish coast, but you can at least appreciate the great (digital) outdoors. The Camping Mod gives you the ability to do exactly that, with tents, specially designed outfits and campfires. Heck, you can even roast yourself some thoroughly delicious marshmallows - although there’s yet to be an update that adds in s’mores, more’s the pity. READ MORE http://bit.ly/1KpoGMj

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MARICULTURE While you’re off on a camping trip, why not head to the seaside? If you’ve installed Mariculture, you can explore the underwater environs without wondering about how long you can hold your breath without turning blue. Once you’ve crafted yourself an air compressor, you can fill up scuba tanks with oxygen and use them to go diving beneath the surface, taking in realistic seascapes as you paddle about. And if descending into the deep blue isn’t your thing, the speedboat lets you jet about on the surface like you’re T-Pain. Or, if you prefer the quiet life, you can set up an automated fishery. If in doubt, pick the speedboat. It’s what James Bond would do. READ MORE http://bit.ly/1Tk03mk

QUINTESSENTIAL CREATURES If you’ve ever felt like Minecraft’s base game was lacking in the kinds of creatures that would make a zoologist coo with excitement, you can cancel that safari now. Quintessential Creatures adds in the likes of octopuses (octopi? Octopodes? Squid), which squirt ink at you should you dare to attack them; tortoises, which ask only for food in exchange for lugging one of your chests about; and

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armadillos, which supply you with armour if you kill them (not that we’re encouraging such things, you monster). Oh, and it also includes trolls, which come out at night to lob rocks at you. We’re not sure we’d describe trolls as ‘quintessential’, but there you go. READ MORE http://bit.ly/1KlRA0r

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FAIRY LIGHTS Okay, we’ll be completely honest with you: this mod will in no way give your game a grand overhaul, nor will it dramatically change the texture of the world or make Minecraft about things other than crafting and mining. Now that we’ve got that admission out of the way, we can tell you about what Fairy Lights actually does do: it lets you hang up beautiful strings of fairylights, in any one of six variants and 16 colours, whether ornate, flower-shaped or bog-standard. So while this might not add any new adventures, crops or monsters to your game, it still adds a touch of brightness and colour that staves off winter’s chill. We’ll certainly take that over the murky blackness of an early March evening. READ MORE http://bit.ly/1KlRA0r

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EXOTIC BIRDS Chickens are all well and good, but they’re hardly… exotic, are they? So, if you fancy a show-stopping five-bird roast for your Easter dinner table, how about a parrot inside an owl inside a pelican inside a flamingo inside a cassowary? A Casflapelparow! Okay, we may have lied about being able to assemble those one inside the other, and we’re not sure that pelican would taste so good, anyway. Exotic Birds gives you an extra 20+ species of bird, as well as associated items such as phoenix dust and eggshells. If you’re looking to brighten up a run-of-the-mill poultry farm - perhaps you’ve built an automated egg harvester, as shown in previous issues you’re well and truly in cluck (ha!) here. READ MORE http://bit.ly/1Wo7dFv

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SPRING SPECIAL

MO’ CHICKENS As we’ve mentioned above, chickens are perfectly serviceable birds. Whether pecking about a in a yard, laying eggs for breakfast or wrapped up in a tasty Kentucky-flavoured blanket, chickens are the sharp-beaked royalty of the farmyard. So what’s better than one chicken? Lots of chickens. Mo’ Chickens takes this idea and runs with it, giving you a huge variety of chicken breeds - from those that send you blind or slow you down dramatically if you snack on them (serves us right, eh?) to those than dole out coal to make life easier for you. There’s even ones that turn into steak once killed. And people say that genetic modification is a bad thing?! READ MORE http://bit.ly/1Wo8c8y

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14 WAYS MINECRAFT IS BETTER THAN REAL LIFE

01 PETS

02 BEING RICH

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n real life, there’s always some kind of barrier to owning your very own pony/cat/ dog - having to look after it, mostly. Minecraft has no such barriers. If you can tame it, you can keep it - but Minecraft doesn’t stop there. Why have a regular cow when you can have … a mushroom cow? Real life: 0 Minecraft: 1

But if you’re reading this, you probably already know that...

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n Minecraft, you learn important skills like creativity, spatial awareness, survival and teamwork. People have created things that would be impossible in real life - huge rollercoasters, works of art, technological wonders. Others have explored avenues that would be prohibitively expensive in real life, like building a supercomputer or a giant, golden statue of themselves. Minecraft gives you all of this and more. But there are so many other ways that Minecraft beats real life…

t’s pretty hard to get rich in Minecraft, but nowhere near as hard as real life. The only things holding you back in the blocky world are how much time and effort you’re willing to put in - and if you’re in creative mode, you don’t even have to put in as much time and effort because you already own all the diamonds you could ever want. We guess that makes them worthless, but still: diamonds!

03 ALONE

TIME

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here are many times in life where you just want to be left alone, but you have to see family and act like a functioning human being. Not so in Minecraft, where you can build yourself a giant wall or dig down into your own private bunker so you never, ever have to see another person again. The ultimate emo response.

04 DREAM HOUSE

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t’s hard to get the perfect house in real life, unless you have wheelbarrows full of money and a mind-reading architect. Not so in Minecraft, where the power is in your hands. No planning permission, no building height limits - no bureaucratic nonsense at all! Lovely.

05 LOOK GREAT

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here are no showers in Minecraft. You will never have to comb your hair. You don’t even have to change your clothes. However, at any given moment, you can decide to be a completely different person by changing your skin - a woman, a tiger, Iron Man, a shoe - and there’s almost no effort involved. Changing skins in real life is dangerous, and probably illegal.

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06 LOG OFF

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ne of the best things about video games in general is that, if you decide you’ve had enough, you can just log off, shut down and step away. Life doesn’t have that luxury. If you have a bad day, fail a test, or you’d rather just stay in bed - tough luck, you have responsibilities. Up you get. There’s no hard reset button for the tired slog we call existence.

07 SAVING

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f life had save points, nothing bad would ever happen. No one would ever lose their keys, go on bad dates, or get into fights - they’d just go back to an earlier save and do everything right. Sadly, life isn’t so kind. But Minecraft is. If something you’ve spent hours on gets set on fire or blown up or infested with zombies, you can just save, reload, and try again. Easy.

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09 MODS

I 08 OTHER PEOPLE

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aybe you’re not all that creative, and you don’t have much free time. No worries! Minecraft doesn’t require you to do all the hard work - you can just hop onto another server and check out someone else’s creations. If you still want to make something yourself, invite a friend to help you out. You never need to toil alone!

10 HELL

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ight not sound like a benefit, but in Minecraft, you can visit hell - and leave again. Real life isn’t quite as forgiving, and most people who get sent to hell tend to stay there indefinitely. Of course, this is assuming that ‘hell’ comes under the heading of ‘real life’, which it almost certainly doesn’t. Don’t be picky!

magine if we had mods in real life: we could make ourselves taller, capable of magic, or even ride into work on monster trucks. Sadly, real life is terrible. Minecraft knows you want these things, and lets you have them - there are hundreds of mods out there to make your experience just the way you want it. Think on that the next time you feel the urge to ride a dinosaur to the shops.

11 FIGHTING

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f you got into a brawl in real life, especially if it involved a diamond sword, you’d probably get into an awful lot of trouble - if not with the police, then with your parents/employers at least. Minecraft is a much safer space to practise your swordplay, and your enemies are more likely to be bad guys like zombie pigmen and skeletons.

13 REAL SCARES

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12 HEALING

hen you’re lying in bed, in the dark, thinking about monsters in the cupboard and evil in the shadows, the scariest part is that you never know if anything’s really there. Minecraft never leaves you wondering, because you’ll always be able to see the enderman’s eyes glowing just outside your window. Yay! Perhaps we haven’t thought this one through properly...

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n the real world, healing is a tricky thing: costly, time consuming, and sometimes impossible, depending on the severity of the injury. In Minecraft, you can fall off a cliff and as long as you’ve got some bread in your pockets, you’ll be just fine in a matter of minutes! Seriously, don’t try this at home. Bread cannot fix broken bones. No, neither can cake. Behave.

14 PROBLEM SOLVING

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verything’s pretty simple in Minecraft, and that extends to problem solving. You’ve got a flood? Put a block in the way. Enemies trying to kill you? Build a wall. Basically, everything can be solved with building, which is far more than you can say for the real world, where most things are solved with money. Blocks are better than money. FACT.

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WARNING: THIS WILL LIKELY BE THE MOST EPIC, HARROWING, LIFE-CHANGING THING YOU EVER READ. SERIOUSLY, YOU MIGHT AS WELL THROW THE REST OF THIS MAGAZINE AWAY

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ver since I first stepped out onto the green pastures of Minecraft I’ve always wondered, what could be at the centre of this world? Treasure? Fame? True love? A sexy combination of all three? All along I’ve known I would never feel true happiness again until I found out the truth. Associates sniggered at my dream. They said I was incapable of such an ambitious mining project, and that I, quote: “barely seemed capable of leaving the house with both shoes on.” But they were just quoting my rejection letter from Archaeology College because they were jealous. Jealous and ugly. And also stupid. But Minecraft was the first thing in years that had made me feel curious again. That need, that urge to discover the great unknown is a feeling that had steadily faded since I was a child first learning about the world. This is what Minecraft means to me – it’s a mystery worth solving. The question wasn’t what was down there – it’s how could I go on in life, knowing that I never tried to find out.

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MINING TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH

DAY 1

Total blocks mined – 1

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’d built a humble home for crafting, storage and sleep. Not much to look at, mind. No doubt the aristocracy were sitting in their diamond mansions, turning their golden noses up at me. Well let them judge! Soon I’d be living like a King, underground in my magnificent palace made of… erm, I dunno. Dirt? I’d crafted a mighty wooden shovel to take me all the way to the centre of the Earth. Satisfied, I dug up my first block. I could practically TASTE the Earth’s core! Yum! After taking a quick celebratory selfie, like you do, I started shovelling block number two. It’s hard to tell what shattered first: my shovel or my dreams. And now my one digging tool was gone. Desperate times called for desperate measures. I destroyed the only object I’ve ever loved. I needed wood for a new shovel. Sometimes you have to smash a bed to achieve your dreams – as long as they aren’t literal dreams, as now you have nowhere to sleep. Hmm yes, I didn’t really think that through…

DAY 2

A cobbling conundrum

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imply digging a vertical line to the Earth’s core would be too easy. My plan was to create a walkway that would wind down below the surface, be easy to navigate and allow me to see the sky from the core. The Sun was going to shine on the heart of the Earth. How poetic. But it turned out my heroic shovelling wasn’t going to be enough. Not even close to enough. Stone. A grey block stronger than dirt and three times as hideous. There it lay, mocking me. This was the biggest obstacle I’d faced since I got that email from Stampy saying he didn’t want to be my bro, and could I please stop bothering him or he’d apply for a restraining order… again. Screaming like a child with a burst balloon, I ran home to craft. Soon I returned, the proud owner of a wooden pickaxe. I slammed it against the stone, making short work of my new nemesis. Thought you were hard enough to defeat me, rock? Please. I’m more hardcore than the middle of a diamond apple. You may have to think about that one for a moment.

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DAY 3 Fun with gravity. Oh. And pain.

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n easy mistake the naïve archaeologist makes is to dig their own grave. So I was careful to ensure that I was keeping an exit strategy in mind. My plan was to build a grand stone staircase, one that let me proudly march into the depths. Taking advantage of Minecraft’s loose understanding of how gravity works, I removed all the dirt and cobblestone from beneath the stairs. I wanted my tomb to be roomy, not full of lame staircases hogging all the space and screwing up the feng shui of my underground lair. Naturally, with so much cobblestone at my disposal, I’d upgraded to a stone pickaxe. My quest was going better than ever. I even learnt a fascinating new Minecraft fact. Did you know that gravel is actually affected by gravity, and that if you mine from underneath it, it’ll happily fall on you? The scars on my head were very educational.

DAY 4

I’m not a little baby. I’m a little man!

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kept finding blocks with black lumps in them. Reminded me of the time I ordered porridge at a restaurant, and my bowl was full of dead flies. “Waiter! Waiter!” I remember yelling. “There’s a fly in my porridge!” The waiter had laughed, assuming I was setting up a hilarious joke. He wasn’t laughing when I got that restaurant shut down for health and safety violations. He cursed me, promising I was doomed to perish lost and alone in a tomb of my own making. No idea what he was on about. That’s waiters for you. Always full of mystic symbolism, them. Anyway, a quick check with the Minecraft wiki/ common sense told me the black lumps in the rock were coal, which I could use to build torches. But I’m no baby. I’m not scared of no dark. That’s when I realised it had gotten dark. Whimpering, I ran home on my little (grown man) legs, and got to work on some torches.

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DAY 5

I MAKE A NEW FRIEND

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’d assumed that growling sound I kept hearing down here was my stomach. Hey, if you’d been eating nothing but dirt for five days your insides would make noises like a disgruntled buffalo, too. Try it and see. But as I mined deeper, I was stunned to unearth an old mine shaft! Complete with rails for mine carts and wooden support beams. Would you believe it! I eagerly ran inside, turned a few corners, then saw there was someone else down here with me. Poor guy must’ve been trapped. Now that I’d heroically rescued him, he was running towards me, arms outstretched for a hug. “Come here big guy!” I said, welcoming him with open arms. I don’t know if you’ve even been bitten by a zombie, but it isn’t much fun. Screaming in agony, I desperately swung my pickaxe at its pallid, undead face. I only just defeated the brain-munching beast, and barely escaped with my life. Relieved, I ran to leave. Wait, which way did I come in again?

DAY 6 TOTAL BLOCKS MINED – 86

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y uncle’s lifelong dream was to get lost in an abandoned mine shaft. Sorry to disappoint you, Uncle Paul, but as an adventure it’s not all that. Endlessly walking around in circles, wondering if you’ve already been down this way and if you’ll ever see the sun again? It gets old fast, tbh. On the plus-side, killing that zombie had given me some rotten flesh to enjoy. Back in my above-ground days, I always thought eating human flesh was disgusting. But it’s actually pretty tasty, and really moreish. Once I’d gotten a taste for it, I wondered how I’d gone so many years without eating people. Ah well. I guess we all have regrets. The tunnels all looked the same, and it would be easy to start looping on myself. So I wisely decided to leave a trail of breadcrumbs. Except I didn’t have any breadcrumbs, so I used cobblestone instead. Now I’m starting to wonder if I’ve been sealing myself in.

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IF I EVER MEET THE MAN WHO INVENTED SPIDERS…

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scaping an abandoned mine shaft is all about confidence. You’ve just got to focus on the positive thoughts, and ignore all those negative ‘my pickaxe is broken, it’s cold and dark, and I’m definitely going to die down here’ thoughts. I have a phobia of spiders, which is a tad unfortunate because some giant eight-legged monster beasts were now stalking me through the tunnels. I needed somewhere safe and quiet to rest up and think of a plan. Thinking quickly, I dived into a pile of cobwebs to hide. Cobwebs are a lot stickier in person. After wriggling/ shrieking myself free, I started snatching torches off the walls – after all, if the spiders couldn’t see me, I was safe, right? R-right? Of course, removing all the torches also made it hard for me to see, making the exit even harder to find. If only there was some sort of glowing substance that could give me light, and also hurt the spiders?

DAY 8

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

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once saw a movie where the bad guy lived in a volcano. I’m starting to think that movie wasn’t based on a true story. There’s lava everywhere down here. It’s hot, flowing and I hate it. It drips from the ceiling, and forms angry orange pools that block my bath. I mean, path. Don’t take a bath in lava. I’m serious guys. Every time you touch it, you lose health. When I tried licking it out of my clothes, that didn’t go so great for me either. It’s so unfair. I couldn’t take it any more. I smashed the support beams for wood, crafted a new pickaxe and began digging up. I know this was the exact opposite of my dream, but I couldn’t spend another lava soaked minute down here. I miss the stars. I miss the great outdoors. I miss my bed. I miss lying in my bed eating biscuits instead of going out in the lame outdoors. Ooh, biscuits. Lovely biscuits.

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EXPAND YOUR GAME

DAY 7

DAY 9

I’M PRETTY SURE THAT VOTE WAS RIGGED

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’d found a chest with some iron bars inside, so my new pickaxe was making swift work on an escape route. But even I wasn’t prepared for the stroke of good fortune that happened next. I struck gold! I struck it right in its glorious, shining face! Well, technically gold ore. But you have to understand, this was the closest I’d come to gold since that trophy I got in school after being voted ‘most likely to die alone in a tomb’. Escape had never been more crucial now I was a man of money. Rich people don’t die in tombs. They die in hot tubs, limousines or heaven. I chipped above at the rock, which eventually became dirt, which eventually became – freedom! Sweet beautiful freedom! Gasping in the fresh air, I felt the sweet sting of victory. I’d done it! I was back at square one!

DAY 10 THE SNOOTIEST BACK IN TOWN

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t turns out a pickaxe made of gold is about as useful as a parachute made of concrete. Wish I’d realised that before crafting 47 of them. Oh well. Least now I have 47 fancy backscratchers. I continued my descent, being a fair bit more cautious to keep an eye on my return route this time. It wasn’t long before I unearthed another mine shaft below. But I was all ready and emotionally equipped for it now. Never let it be said that I don’t learn from my mistakes. Fool me 47 times, shame on me, but I didn’t craft a 48th golden pickaxe and I wasn’t going to get lost again either. No siree Bob. I dug a wide cavern with a clear exit and view of the sky. My new motto was, “if you can’t see the stars, you’re basically dead.” Somewhat negative words to live by, I concede, and it only really made any kind of sense at night, but after the last time I was taking no chances.

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DAY 11

THEY CALL ME THE WARRIOR OF THE MINES (WELL, THEY SHOULD DO)

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onsters. I could see them waiting for me in the huge cavern I’d unearthed. I needed to traverse carefully if I was to win here. I gave my back 46 scratches for luck (golden pickaxe 47 broke – typical) and got to work. My staircase in place, my escape route prepared, I let out a deafening war cry and leapt down to defeat the slavering hordes of zombies and skeletons below. Was I scared? On the contrary, I’d never felt stronger, braver or better looking. Sure, I took a few hits, but nothing scoffing a few strips of rotten flesh couldn’t fix. A doctor later claimed this was a bad idea, and if anything that rotten flesh was having serious negative consequences on my health. But that medical moron (ha!) just doesn’t understand how an archaeologist’s body works. Boy, I could really go for some brains right now.

DAY 12 HALLELUJAH!

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great man once called me a brave little boy. Turns out they were talking to someone else, but today I felt like I’d truly earned that title. I had successfully vanquished the zombies, the skeleton warriors and even the flying vampires (or ‘bats’ as dorky science types insist on calling them). The cavern was mine, and a new tunnel stretched out before me. I was a cautious cat. That tunnel had the kind of twists and turns that had almost doomed me once before. Sure, I could take the straight ahead route, but that led to my old nemesis lady lava. I had no choice. Slowly, I walked down the tunnel, trying to ignore the unseen terror of the growling monsters in the darkness. To calm my nerves I gently hummed the melody to that popular chart hit of the past It’s Raining Men by The Weathergirls. For some reason that song always makes me feel brave and ready to take on the world. I don’t know why. Some mysteries are best left unsolved.

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DAY 14 DAY 13

BURN KNOWLEDGE TO MAKE KNOWLEDGE

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he scholar sits at home and reads the Minecraft FAQ until he’s ready to begin his quest. A true adventurer like myself prefers to make mistakes then learn from them. Lots of mistakes. Probably too many. As I dipped my toes in more lava (research), I discovered that laying down cobblestone was an effective way of pushing back the flow. I wish I’d learnt this trick back when I still had my hair, clothes and non-burnt skin, but I guess that’s all part of growing up. No one stays young and third-degree burnless forever. I didn’t cover all the lava. I left a square exposed, offering me a free light source that was easy to avoid and wouldn’t require crafting like the torches. This was literally the smartest idea I’d ever had. Apart from maybe that time I realised I could save time on washing up by eating meals in the shower.

BABY YOU’RE A RICH MINE NOW

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aybe it was the isolation and lack of oxygen down here, but I was starting to get philosophical as I neared the Earth’s core. What is treasure, truly? I think it’s the memories we make. The more I’d explored down here, the more I’d learnt about myself and the man I was. There is no treasure more valuable than self-discovery. At least that’s what I thought, until I found the DIAMONDS!!! Five dazzling, delicious, destiny-defining diamonds! I dashed back to the surface, sat in my home and stared at their beauty. I was rich. High on wealth, I used three to craft a diamond pickaxe worthy of this newly minted man. Then I phoned up everyone who’s ever been mean to me and bragged about how rich I am. If you ever get rich, I highly recommend doing this. In fact, just lie and do it anyway. It’s ace.

DAY 15 TOTAL BLOCKS MINED – 0

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ou know what’s great about being rich? You stop having ambitions. Why go to the trouble of doing something with your life when you can just pay some schlub to do it for you? Leave the exploring to the poor, that’s what I say. I’d rather sit in my mansion, petting my golden goose and smoking banknotes. And occasionally wondering why I felt quite so empty inside. Oh God, what had I become? Now there was an itch in my soul that not even 46 golden pickaxes could scratch. I was so close to being the first ever person to reach the centre of the Earth in Minecraft (probably). I’d thrown that all away for something as pathetic and worthless as eternal financial security. In disgust, I threw the last diamond in the ocean. My pickaxe and willpower never stronger, I ran down and started digging. I wasn’t going to stop until I saw the centre of the Earth. I’m on my way, Jules Verne.

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SO CLOSE… SO VERY, VERY CLOSE…

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he diamond pickaxe made mining a joy. The only thing to be careful about is that it mines blocks so fast, it’s easy to overdo it. Next thing you know, you’ve accidentally destroyed the blocks below your feet and have fallen painfully into a mine shaft, shattering your kneecaps and splintering your shins. No biggy. Legs probably grow back. I’m pretty sure I read that in a book somewhere or saw it on a cartoon once. I was deeper now than I’d ever been before. It felt like I was on the verge of a breakthrough. And when I unearthed a new type of block, I knew I was right. Grinning, I started mining it… But nothing happened. It didn’t make any sense. Why did the blocks below my feet refuse to break? I tried my diamond pickaxe, to no avail. I lured a creeper down the stairs, then watched it blow up. Not even a dent. I had reached the centre of the Earth, and it was a dead end.

DAY 17 HAD IT ALL BEEN FOR NOUGHT?

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nable to accept it, I dug horizontally, hoping I’d find a weak spot. All I found were waves of lava, forcing me to turn back. I sat and let my head fall into my hands. Disappointment took over. I’d wasted a huge chunk of my life. This had all been for nothing. Or had it? Looking back, had I not done exactly what I’d promised I would accomplish? I was standing atop the centre of the Earth, and I could see the sky above! The stars looked beautiful from down here. And my journey wasn’t over. I’d gotten as far as I could through official channels, but I’d heard legends of mods that would let me dig deeper. Ones that would give me unrestricted access to the core of Minecraft’s Earth. I ran up the stairs, sharpened my pickaxe and prepared for my next adventure. Maybe digging this tunnel and briefly becoming a wealth addicted zombie in Minecraft was a waste of life. But I can think of few better ways to waste it than the fun I’d had down here.

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DAY 16

UNDER WORLDS

FIVE MINECRAFT MODS PERFECT FOR INTREPID ADVENTURERS WHO WANT TO DELVE DEEPER AND EXPLORE DARK PLACES.

RUINS OF THE DEAD bit.ly/1Xi8izx

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uins of the Dead is something of a misnomer. Not the dead part. That’s true. Sorry. But ‘ruins’ shouldn’t look this incredible. The underground temple is a magnificent sight, full of treasures just waiting to be found. You’re hopelessly lost? Well we’ve got good news – the inhabitants aren’t dead! Hurrah! They’re actually undead, very keen to meet you and give you a lovely hug and nibble. Good luck!

MUSHROOM CAVERNS bit.ly/1ms8xKV

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iant red mushrooms make the familiar feel alien, and the way the light flows through the trees will make you never want to leave. When you want something slower-paced than a temple, but just as fulfilling, we highly recommend investigating Cocominula’s Mushroom Caverns. Mother Nature looks like an untalented old bat compared to this outstanding take on the natural world.

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MINES OF MORIA bit.ly/1Rp0taS

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igerballs07 and his team of 40 hard-way obsessed volunteers recreated the stupendous Mines Of Moria – a hefty 16,000 by 16,000 blocks project – without using any mods. Insane. They’re based on the mines from the movie, not JRR Tolkien’s books, so purists might scoff. But catch anyone scoffing at Tigerballs07’s masterpiece and you have our permission to kick them off the bridge where Gandalf fought the Balrog. Admire this, you fools!

CHAMBER OF SECRETS bit.ly/1PNoNlN

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o enter the Chamber of Secrets in Harry Potter, usually you need a scholarship to Hogwarts, be fluent in Parseltongue and have no shame about going in the woman’s bathroom if you’re a dude. Luckily this Minecraft version is way easier to explore, although hopefully the basilisk that turns people to stone is gone. Hmm, is it disrespectful to use stone people for our building projects?

TEMPLE OF DOOM bit.ly/1V3gSkc

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hat starts out as a fun jungle jaunt soon takes an epic turn as Indiana Cube (yep) unearths the Temple of Doom. It’s never the Temple of Warm and Comforting Hugs, is it? Anyone who plays Minecraft to go exploring underground and doesn’t think of Indiana Jones is either a liar, or someone who still hasn’t got over Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. We understand, but try this. It’s way better.

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bviously a prime source of sand, and therefore glass, Beaches also come in rarer stone or gravel forms. With sand beaches you can generally find sandstone when digging far enough down. In incredibly rare seeds you’ll find exposed dungeons here, too. Be careful when digging deeper on gravel beaches as you might fall straight down into dungeons or mineshafts hidden below.

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STONE BEACH

KNOW YOUR BIOMES

Beaches are another useful location for wannabe fishermen.

Farm cactus on sand in order to craft yourself green dye. Sand is actually an essential crafting material throughout all stages of play, whether you’re building glass or TNT.

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DIARY OF SURVIVAL ISLAND Cranking it up a Notch with one of Minecraft’s toughest challenges

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DAY 1

1. Play on at least Normal difficulty. Hardcore difficulty is a great test for Minecraft veterans: you get one life, there are no respawns, and your world save disappears if you die. Starving to death is possible, but backing out isn’t, as you can’t change the difficulty setting. 2. Start on an island seed (duh!). There are some great ones to be found on the Internet. For an authentic challenge, use an island that has only a few trees and some grass. 3. No island-hopping! You’ve got to survive on your island with what little you have, and players who gather resources from elsewhere will be fed to the Wither. You’ve been warned.

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Mood: Optimistic

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ait, where am I? Oh, not again, GamesMaster! Well, at least they left me with my shoes this time. Best get cracking. I spring into action like a cubic ninja, punching trees into splintery submission. Grass is next: yield your riches, pixelated pasture! One set of seeds?! My stomach is eating itself already. Scanning the island 1 (a process that takes half a second) reveals a handful of friendly and potentially delicious animals to get acquainted with. I make direct, purposeful eye contact with a pig as I craft a wooden sword. Dominance asserted. The setting sun saves his bacon 2, because I must dig a dirt bunker to hide in, lest any mobs decide to spawn all over my survivalist hopes and dreams. A safe sunrise and a few blocks of cobblestone later, 3 I’ve built a furnace. The pig is trying very hard to hide, but a rabbit practically leaps into my waiting oven. What a team player. You seeing this, pig? You’re first on my list, buddy. Just you wait…

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THE RULES ver wished you could just get away from it all and make a fresh start on a desert island? Well, our writer said she was alright thanks, actually, but we booted her out into the Minecraft wilderness anyway. It’s character building. Her resolve was strong, her challenge mildly unreasonable: set the game to Hardcore difficulty, start on an island seed with nothing but a few trees, grass and sugar cane, and eventually battle the Ender Dragon… without a single death. Victory would mean mad XP and a dragon egg fry-up for everyone; failure, the immediate deletion of the world save. Also, we’ll make her wear a tiny paper hat with ‘CREEPER FODDER’ written on it. But remember: bullying in the workplace is bad, kids. Our intrepid explorer still hasn’t returned to us. We can only hope she’s living it up on her island, riding about on pigs and swimming in end game loot. Fortunately, we’ve managed to get hold of her survival diary to find out exactly what happened. Will the race to The End, er, drag on? Or will it be cruelly cut short by an errant zombie? Read on, find out, and be inspired to charge into the Spring on your own survival island.

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DAY 2 Mood: Realistic

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aplings are planted and seeds are sown, but now I’m grubby, tired, and starving – and it’s raining. Perfect. Gritting my teeth, I begin the lengthy process of hollowing out my crude hole in the ground into a mine 1. The smell of smoke fills the air, and the thought of BBQ teases my mind, as the furnace burns wood into charcoal for my torches. The pig lasts five minutes before I pork chop him into bite-size pieces. RIP, Peppa. You can’t say you weren’t expecting it. A full stack of cobblestone gathered, I begin the construction of my epic fortress. There’s sand as far as the eye can see, so windows aren’t an issue 2. After a brief flirtation with the idea of a skylight (I abandon this, deciding that summoning Kevin McCloud would only mean another mouth to feed), I plump for a spiral staircase. A full moon rises as I stack up steps and lay out the second floor of my base 3. I long for bed.

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Mood: Lonely

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s if being hungry and sleep-deprived wasn’t enough, I’m desperately lonely. My companion count has recently decreased by one – burp – and even the rabbits are keeping their distance now. Fine, be that way! I’m off to the mine, losers. Almost instantly, I dig up some iron, and can’t wait to go rub it in their furry faces – but I also dig up a creeper 1. No armour, no respawns: no chance. I nopenopenope outta there, hopping all the way back up the stairs to the surface. This is when I suspect that I’m starting to go a bit wrong in the head: I see a cow. And then another cow. And two sheep. What is going on? The entire cast of Babe has turned up in my absence. Am I hallucinating? No, it would appear. The torches on my island must have helped spawn them. I totally meant to do that. Totally. I can now make a farm and breed animals for food. Every animal is precious, so obviously I immediately kill a sheep, and dye its wool to make myself a fluffy friend. Think I’ll call him Wilson.

DAY 4 Mood: Hungry

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erding the cows and sheep into a pen isn’t easy without a sheaf of tempting wheat, but I manage it with a few encouraging shoves 1. Once the harvest comes in, breeding them will be a doddle, but I can’t afford to kill any right now. I’ve got one pork chop left, and a couple of apples to wash it down with. My hunger bar is satisfied: my soul is not. I set to work crafting iron armour from my bountiful ore: in hardcore survival modes, the best offence is a good defence. Offence is a pretty good offence as well, though, so I waste no time in whipping up a lovely, sharp iron sword 2. But that mine won’t excavate itself. I fling myself back down into it, and run headlong into a skeleton 3. Okay, let’s run through my options. Number one: run. Number two: wee myself. Number three: give him a good walloping. With my trusty iron gear, I avoid a combination of one and two, winning the battle – and some bones into the bargain.

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DAY 5 Mood: $$$

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ncouraged by my skellybob success, I decide to stay another day in the mine, plowing through the cobblestone like a hungry hungry hippo. All at once, I run smack into a cluster of diamonds 1. DIAMONDS! Before I’ve even managed to make bread! Priorities, am I right? I’ve never been punched in the mouth by a precious gem before, but it feels pretty darn sweet. Time to take ’em home to my woolly orange pal. Wilson doesn’t really react when I show off my haul, and I’m a bit annoyed, until I remember he doesn’t actually have a face. Shrugging and turning away, I do some mental maths and figure out that ten diamonds is enough for a pickaxe and a sword, with plenty left over for an enchanting table. Result. The sun starts to rise over my bone-mealed farm, and I can almost taste the freshly-baked bread as I survey my empire. “Everything the light touches is ours, Wilson”, I tell him. He didn’t reply. Again.

DAY 6 Mood: Cocky

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his survival island lark is well easy, innit? Wheat and sugar farm on the go, torches keeping nasty mobs away and speeding up crop growth, enough bling to cement my status as Island Swagmaster 1 (there are no prizes for second place, Wilson)… Piece of cake. Well, I haven’t quite managed cake yet, but steak I can definitely grab me a piece of. I saunter over to my cow and sheep pen and start making it rain wheat. Breeding my two sheep will produce enough wool for me to make a bed – I haven’t slept in days, but at least it’s not affecting my mind… hatstands! Doughnuts. Crème brûlée ? Quite. Once my cows have produced offspring 2, I make one of them into mincemeat. A hiss interrupts my evening meal. I turn around, to be greeted by… well, just look at the picture. A spider is all up in my grill 3 (and my grilled meat). Fortunately, I survive, thanks to a mixture of smacking it over the head with a steak, and hysterical crying. It’s a dark reminder of the danger that lurks all around.

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SURVIVAL ISLAND TWISTS 1 The Veggie: Don’t eat any meat! 2 Big Softie: Only use wooden tools and leather armour. 3 Sleep Is For The Weak: No beds allowed! 4 Pacifist: Don’t kill any mobs except endermen and the Ender Dragon. 5 Itty-Bitty Island: Survive on a 10x10 island.

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DAY 7 Mood: Domestic

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h, the seventh day. The traditional day of rest. I decide to spend it pottering about the island and generally avoiding any bother. A few more trees have sprung up, meaning I can make signs and name some of the island landmarks. The farm is christened Slaughterhouse V-eal 1 (Wilson’s a Vonnegut fan), and the fortress Casa del GamesMaster 2, because everything sounds more impressive en Español. I lay out a gravel path between the fortress, the farm, the mine and my crops. It crunches underfoot as I carefully pluck the island’s flowers, replanting them in neat rows in front of my home sweet home. For my interior, sticks and wool create a tasteful skull painting 3, which also serves as a handy reminder of my imminent death. Yay! My day of rest is rounded out in the best possible way: I can finally make a bed. Crawling under the covers, I consider giving up the Ender Dragon pipe dream. This is heaven.

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DAY 8

Mood: Tormented

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hate Mondays, I think, as an unreasonable amount of eyes cast a red glow from a shadowy void in my mine 1. My sword makes swift work of the spider – but like his brother before him, he doesn’t even have the decency to drop string. No bow and arrow for me, then. But that’s the least of my worries: I fight off two zombies and a creeper from the same horrible hole before I retreat to the surface, heart pounding and health low. I’m not even safe in my own home. A skeleton sloshes through the water behind my fortress, and I have trouble getting up close as it peppers me with arrows. It’s soon impaled on the business end of my sword, but it’s managed to fire an arrow into the business end of me 2. Ouch. As luck would have it I’ve finally got leftover wheat to make bread, and it’s been a bad day at the office, so I do what I always do when I’m sad: go home and eat quite a lot of carbs 3.

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DAY 9

Mood: Adventurous

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obs be damned! I refuse to cower in my fortress like a big, blocky baby. Instead, I’ll speed around on the high seas in my trusty boat. Yes, I know I’m not allowed to set foot on any other land. I’m just looking. My wanderlust satisfied, my feet back on solid ground, I have an epiphany. My torches are keeping mobs at bay 1 – but I’ll need endermen to spawn. They drop ender pearls, which are key to getting to The End. The solution: create an unlit platform that will trap enemies. I surround Mobs ‘R’ Us with fences, dreaming sexy, foolish dreams of browsing its dangerous wares like my own personal supermarket, smooth jazz playing in the background. Nice. For now, I start hunting my lanky prey underground. I very quickly spot purple sparkles, and when more endermen join the party, I’m left clutching more pearls than an affronted 1940s housewife. Epiphany number two arrives: to craft the Eyes of Ender that point me to The End I must make blaze powder. Which comes from blaze rods. Which come from the Nether. Gulp.

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Mood: Betrayed

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might as well start mining the obsidian to make a Nether portal while I’m down here. Diamond pickaxe: check. Buckets of water: check. Now for some lava. There’s a sticky bubbling somewhere nearby – I grind through cobblestone and catch sight of a few orange drops plopping thickly through the block ahead. I hold my breath, carefully revealing a large pool of lava that could easily turn me into a chargrilled chump. Dumping water on it creates obsidian, and I mine ten blocks to make my personal portal to hell. I fancy that’s enough peril for one day, so it’s back up to the island for animal-breeding and a lovely meal of mutton. But it’s anarchy at Slaughterhouse V-eal: the cows rush at me when I open the gate. I dole out justice via my new diamond sword, gaining some leather in the process. Furious, I storm off and begin making books 1 – an enchanting table will be helpful once I’m up against the dragon. May this beautifully-bound tome serve as a lesson to you all, traitorous cows.

DAY 11 Mood: Reluctant

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eah, I could build the Nether today, but I’ve got no bow and, er… Mobs ‘R’ Us needs upgrading! It’s not attracted a single enderman 1 (only the married ones. Arf), so that most likely means it should be bigger and darker. Perhaps higher walls will block out more light and increase spawns. There are still more ender pearls to collect if I want a shot at finding that stronghold. Time to build the portal? Well, um… you’ve got to stop and smell the roses at some point, right? I think I’ll just dawdle about the island. Admire the scenery. My mine needs a name 2. Very important work – crucial, actually. Right, that’s done. Let me stop you there, before you ask about building that thing again, because Wilson has been woefully neglected as of late 3. We take a romantic stroll along the beach (well, he just sort of sits there and I walk around him). Alright, I’m procrastinating! Can you blame me?

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DAY 10

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DAY 12 Mood: Brave

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know, I know. I’ve got to do it. Putting together a Nether portal is dismally simple: a vague rectangle of obsidian and death. With my flint and steel, I light that sucker up, and all manner of unsettling noises emanate from the infernal dimension beyond. A shudder runs through me. There’s no reason to panic. Sure, I’ve only got one life, and there’s a chance I could spawn right into lava… I shake that thought off, thinking of those much-needed blaze rods, and decide to get practical. Iron armour on, diamond gear ready, plenty of food, buckets of water, torches: I kit out my hotbar with all the essentials. Obviously, Wilson gets a spot – if we go down, we go down together. Hopefully it’ll be a largely uneventful trip. I step into the portal. I’ve got a solid set of armour, a diamond sword 1, and the most powerful weapon of all: friendship. What could go wrong?

DAY 13 Mood: Unlucky

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PDATE: EVERYTHING GOING WRONG, EVERYTHING ON FIRE. Whilst I haven’t spawned into lava, it’s all over the place 1: flowing in waterfalls from the ceiling; gurgling ominously below my narrow pathways in vast lakes; setting fire to the Netherrack underneath my feet. Each step could be my last. I grip Wilson tightly. In my head he let out a reassuring sigh. Only in my head, mind. Focusing on my goal of finding a Nether fortress, and therefore blazes, I sneak past many a zombie pigman. The search is fruitless. I lose track of time, and, convinced I hear the creepy wheezing of blazes, dash off into the distance. Nothing – and now I’m totally lost. Just when I conclude that it might be a good time to build a base somewhere, a massive black blob comes hurtling at me at speed 2. A giant magma cube?! Really, Nether? Wait… Does this mean that there might be a fortress around here? 3

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DAY ??? Mood: Help me

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hat happened? What day is it? Ugh, I must have been knocked out by that magma cube. The fortress! I was close! I spin around, but everything feels unfamiliar. For instance, there certainly wasn’t a gang of zombie pigmen surrounding me before. As I search for a way out of the ambush zone, a friendly-looking light flickers in the distance 1. I squint at it. Next thing I know, it smacks me square in my flammable face. UNFRIENDLY LIGHT. GHAST FIREBALL. It’s too dark to make out the weird floating mob, but I can hear its harrowing demon-baby cooing as it rapid-fires at me. I’ve got no bow to shoot it with, and my health is dipping fast, so I swing my sword wildly in an effort to deflect its projectiles back at it. The zombie pigmen find this to be highly impolite 2, and decide that my immediate evisceration is fair punishment. The ghast finishes me off with a fireball. I’m dead. Cooked like a well done steak 3. Slaughterhouse V-eal will love the irony.

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PRESENTS MINECRAFT 99

Need torches early in the game? Taking a couple from the buildings can help until you have the materials to make your own.

Villages usually have ready-made wheat farms ripe for harvesting. You’ll be able to make bread in no time.

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KNOW YOUR BIOMES

VILLAGE Check the blacksmithing house and you’ll often find a chest filled with goodies (usually rare metals) for you to steal.

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ith randomly created, fullyformed structures, villages are often the most exciting of the biomes to stumble into. They’re inhabited by large-nosed villagers who happily go about their own business during the day. You can even trade

with them in the PC and console versions, should you so desire. However, zombies will frequently invade during the night and knock down doors to infect the natives, so you’ll have to fight to protect them or destroy the zombie spawn point. Not quite Resi 4’s village scene, but close enough…

PRESENTS MINECRAFT 101

MAPS ENTERTAIN

H ey, you! Yes, you with the excellent bookazine and the weary expression. Bored of wandering aimlessly through adventure landscapes? Tired of taking tours of other people’s huge, empty castles? Then do we have an opportunity for you. Two words: Extreme. Custom. Maps. Okay, that was three words – but these downloadand-play maps aren’t about tedious stuff like counting and safety. They’re about ACTION. That’s ACTION. Yeah. And we’ve packed more action into these eight pages than Arnold Schwarzenegger riding a space rocket into the sun with a rucksackful of kung-fu penguins and fireworks strapped to his back. Oh, and he’s got roller skates on. Hold onto your diamond helmets, because these custom maps don’t let up. Whether it’s hardcore parkour in dangerous locations, crazy brainteasers that test everything you thought you knew about your grey matter, or survival situations that’d make even Bear Grylls beg to be airlifted home to his mummy, 15 of the very best are right here. Newbie or not, there’s something for every kind of player – we’ve even divided them up into three useful categories for you. How terribly nice of us. Kick off 2016 with a bang by putting yourself on the map. You’re gonna be a star, kid.

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NMENT

Lights! Camera! Creepers! Be the star of the show in 15 thrilling challenge maps

PARKOUR Free-running wild in some of Minecraft’s coolest courses

HOW TO…

First, you’ll need to locate your Minecraft save game directory. If you have Windows, type %appdata% into the search bar in the start menu. If you have Mac iOS, go to ~/Library/Application Support. Look for the ‘minecraft’ folder, and there will be a ‘saves’ folder inside. Now for the fun bit: download your chosen map, unzip the file by double-clicking it, then drag it into the ‘saves’ folder. Start playing your custom map by loading it like a normal world save!

http://bit.ly/1XQs3x4

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http://bit.ly/1LKM7Av

s Minecraft players are individuals. You can’t define us, we won’t fit inside your reductive little boxes. A parkour map where we jump about in boxes, you say? Oh, go on then. Only because they’re so extraordinarily beautiful, each one a biome in perfect microcosm, with expertly staggered difficulty levels. There’s mushroom island, a twilight forest zone, and a cake-themed stage, too! Cakey cake! This map is ideal for parkour beginners – but even seasoned Steves will enjoy bouncing about in the floating glass rooms, grabbing books and gear along the way. And yes, there’s a water level. There’s always a water level.

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Skyscraper Parkour

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on’t look down! 255 blocks is a long way to fall, so make sure your toes are feeling extra-twinkly before you attempt this monster. Block-precise jumps are required for you to scale the dizzying heights of the skyscraper from the inside. Lifts are for quitters: you’ll have to earn your ascent, even balancing precariously on panes of glass at certain points (on PANE of death, right, guys? Wait, come back!). When you reach the ladder bits near the top, you’ll be glad of the generous checkpoints – the blue blocks of clay ensure that you won’t have to re-climb bits you’ve already conquered.

Deep Freeze http://bit.ly/1SEDoyN

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ou know that one Cornetto at the very back of the freezer that’s been there so long it’s pretty much just a chunk of ice and sadness now? That’s you in Deep Freeze. Stand still too long and you’ll be encased in falling ice. Dodge enough of it and you’ll find that all that glacial death is brill for climbing on, up to the wooden platforms and out of the chilly cylinder. When the ice runs out, you could always use your friends’ heads as handy platforms – this map can be multiplayer magic, and difficult enough to put you off ice-cream for life.

Infinity Race

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http://bit.ly/1BrxhIy

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hile you’re waiting for Sega to release a new Sonic game that isn’t utterly pants, why not load up this gorgeous Minecraft tribute to everybody’s favourite hedgehog? It’s got entertaining and accessible platforming, explosive TNT spring jumps, and a real working timer to let you know exactly how fast you gotta go. It hasn’t got Green Hill Zone background music, though, more’s the pity. The best bit of the course? It’s got to be dashing through Doctor Eggman’s giant, creepy mouth – although the secret underwater message you can see on the jump just before him comes a close second.

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peedy, striking, and simple, this twoplayer parkour race… Wait, no, hang on. It’s definitely not as simple as it looks. Challenge a friend, and the further on you hop, the more surprises you’ll find in the green-and-blue assault course. Nets made from cobwebs, pressure plates that pop out more platforms, and teeth-gnashingly tricky piston mazes throw unpredictable challenges into the mix. Tons of frantic fun comes from racing sideby-side, but if you’re thinking about sinking a few arrows into your competitor, think again. PvP is against the rules, so you’ll have to rely on pure skill to come out on top.

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Biomebox

PUZZLE

More high-stakes action? Nah, complex fractions, more like…

The Code

http://bit.ly/1PIujHu

http://bit.ly/21EJvt2

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a! What is this, 2007?” we hear you cry. No, it’s not RuneScape. It’s RoomScape, and the third iteration at that. The 1.8 build plonks you into a maze of fluffy blue rooms, which would be rather calming if it weren’t for the fact that you’re totally imprisoned in the blimmin’ thing. Only your braincase stands between you and escape: the maze boasts 20 mind-boggling rooms, which include doors barred by piston puzzles and colour-changing pressure plates. Map creator Karott2000 has truly outdone himself with this one, but don’t be put off by the title: completion is definitely possible.

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ike a glittery Rubik’s Cube on holiday in the Bermuda Triangle, this puzzle map is both aesthetically-pleasing and endlessly mysterious. What starts out as a simple-yet-exquisite quartz corridor of pressure plates and coded papers soon transforms into increasingly creative riddles and elaborate constructions. There’s even a bit of parkour in one of the later levels – and there are quite a few of those later levels, all of them more fiendishly mind-melting than the last. Here’s a hint: download a QR code reader to your smartphone before you start. You’ll need it to solve an essential puzzle later on. Thank us when you’re done.

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elcome to your first day on the Minecraft Bomb Disposal Squad! Excited? Nervous? Good. Little bit of info for you before we start: Disarm The Bomb is a teensy bit of a misleading title. It’s not just one bomb. It’s several bombs. Ten, to be precise, each with its own complicated detonation system that you’ll have to decode and disarm before the timer runs out and we all get blown to smithereens. Ready? Of course you are – that’s the quivering lip of a confident crafter. Here are your wire cutters. Off you pop!

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RoomScape 3 Impossible

f you’ve ever quantum-leapt around the physics-defying puzzle shooter Portal, you’ll know that an inanimate, faceless buddy makes the experience more fun (RIP Companion Cube). Enter this perplexing map: you’re given a robot friend to help you. He weighs down pressure plates! He opens doors and reveals hidden platforms! He can be named anything you can think of! No, not that, you maniac. Use your inexplicably magical bow and arrow to teleport back to your robot and vanquish all 11 levels with the power of friendship. And don’t worry – there’s nary an incinerator to be seen in this one. Phew.

30 Ways To Die

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orget everything you thought you knew about Minecraft success. Your objective here is to die. Over and over and over again. Sure, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the first few levels (You + lava = blocky BBQ), but as you complete more puzzles and spawn inside different floating cubes, meeting a sticky end becomes ever more baffling. If you’re a Minecraft veteran and have had plenty of experience with accidentally offing yourself, you’ll probably only get truly confuddled at about halfway through the 30 levels: the brewing stand and pig maze puzzles are particularly fiendish, be warned.

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SURVIVAL Tough it out in weird and wonderful wasteland worlds

WHY NOT TRY?

PVP: Built for 2+ players, competitive PvP arenas let you and your friends battle for the grand title of King (or Queen) of All Minecraft. ADVENTURE: Are you an RPG fan? This type of map is for you, with its breathtaking environments, awesome quests and enthralling tales. CTM: Avoid pesky mobs and hunt down specific blocks, then use them to Complete The Monument. HORROR: Get confronted by haunted houses and the spookiest ghouls.

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robably the most famous L-shaped floating island in the Minecraft world, this absolutely had to make it onto our list of must-play maps. You might feel a bit short-changed when spawning on this ragtag bunch of blocks: the estate agent said “cosy”, but what she clearly meant was “impossibly small and extremely dicey”. Even punching the island’s single tree into bits feels like taking your life in your hands. Fortunately, there’s a handy chest of limited goodies to make use of, and if you’re savvy, you can quickly build yourself a hovering haven. Check out the rules and challenges before you start, though, because that’ll help!

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Water Dome Survival

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emember the underwater city of Rapture in BioShock? Remember how nothing went wrong there and everything turned out totally fine? Exactly. There’s no need to be nervous about spawning under the sea, in a glass bubble populated by very little indeed. Work hard, dig a few mines, then snag yourself some Potions of Water Breathing and you’ll easily conquer the eight different domes down on the ocean floor. Mineshafts are common and zombies drop leather, so it isn’t a total washout. Now get crafting the kind of domed paradise that would make Sandy Cheeks jealous!

World In A Jar http://bit.ly/1aowOZU

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verything’s better in jars: marmalade, tiny wooden ships, entire universes… Yep, get ready to make your home in a giant terrarium, because this survival map bottles you like a fine malt whisky. After you’ve done some housekeeping in your jar, it’s time to figure out how you’re going to reach the precious resources in others without, y’know, falling into the abyss. There’s an NPC village to explore, a mushroom biome, and even a maze jar. Things get hysterically funny/ frustrating once you try to shepherd animals from their jars over to your base, though. Embrace the chaos for maximum jar-bound enjoyment.

Desolation http://bit.ly/1lG5u1O

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on’t you hate it when you’re whizzing around in Minespace, minding your own business, and space raiders (not the delicious bagged snack, silly) appear out of nowhere to crash your party (and your ship)? We’ve all been there. Relive the thrills and spills of surviving on an alien planet in this super-hostile map. This is your first port of call for a bona fide challenge: nothing grows without bonemeal; the days are shorter; meteor showers are a regular occurrence; wood and water supplies are sparse; ores are more uncommon than usual. Lovely. We’ll just be over here in our dirt bunker, gently rocking ourselves back and forth.

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SkyGrid http://bit.ly/1R15NS3

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e decided to save something very special for our final spot. There’s honestly nothing quite like SkyGrid. No need to book an optician’s appointment – it really does look like that, with thousands of single blocks stretching as far as the eye can see in a stunning geometric grid. Map creator (and our new god) SethBling recommends gathering stuff to make a cobblestone generator and a bed ASAP. With a solid base to work from, you’ll be surprised at how quickly you can create a home within this surreal structure. And get this – even the Nether is in SkyGrid formation. Gulp.

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Skyblock

SAVANNA D

enoted by the flat topped acacia trees dotted about its flat landscape, Savannas are a one stop shop for the budding equestrian. It’s one of the only locations in the game, alongside plains, where horses will spawn naturally. It would make a fitting place to set up a home base, especially if you can find a village to trade with (or to steal harvest from, you wrong ’un).

Generally speaking savannas are flatter than your average biome, although you can get a hybrid savanna/plateau, too.

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KNOW YOUR BIOMES

Things to do in a savanna: 1) Ride horses. 2) Say “Yee-haw!” 3) Walk like you’re desperate for the toilet (ie: like a cowboy).

They might not be the tallest trees going, but the acacias you find here make for excellent treehouse building material. Gather up a load of the wood planks here, and carry them to a jungle for optimal Ewok village construction.

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10 EXCUSES TO KEEP PLAYING MINECRAFT Guaranteed to work, or your money back!* (*Not a guarantee)

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e’ve all been there. You’re just putting the finishing touches on your majestic castle when your boss/ teacher/spouse/passengers nag you to stop playing Minecraft, for trivial reasons like ‘eating’ and ‘sleeping’ and ‘keeping your eyes on the road’. Next time one of these real life creepers tries to stop your Minecraft time, slam them down with one of these.

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WE’RE NOT PLAYING MINECRAFT, MISS. WE’RE TRAINING THE SCIENTISTS OF TOMORROW Get caught playing Minecraft at school and you’ll learn lots about detention. University of Hull students found a clever workaround. They created MolCraft – a downloadable Minecraft world that teaches you all about biochemistry. Walk through recreations of molecular chains, collect all the treasure chests, and learn some chemistry along the way. You’ll never need school again! (Maybe.)

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SURE DAD, I’LL STOP PLAYING. I GUESS YOU JUST DON’T WANT YOUR FIRST BORN TO LEARN QUANTUM COMPUTER SCIENCE The brain-bending qCraft is a free mod from Google that lets you build blocks with ‘quantum properties’. So you can create blocks that change when you’re not looking at them, or technically don’t exist when you approach them from certain angles. Confused? Come on, this is basic quantum mechanics! It’s hardly rocket science. Or is it?

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IF I STOP PLAYING MINECRAFT, CAN I WATCH A MOVIE INSTEAD? Not just any movie – the original Star Wars remade in Minecraft! No sound, but you can hum the music and do your own voices. Bet you do a mean Chewbacca. Only 30 minutes have been released so far, but creator Paradise Decay promises we’ll get the whole fan film in 2016. JJ Abrams should be feeling pretty worried right now.

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GO TO THE THEATRE? BUT WITH MINECRAFT, I’M ALREADY THERE! Show anti-gaming parents this excellent recreation of the Globe Theatre – the stomping ground of that William Shakespeare dude. If you’re not familiar, W-Shak was a famous playwright who people used to find entertaining in a dark, pre-Stampy world. No parent could accuse you of mindless gaming when you’re learning more about the immortal bard. To build or not to build?

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MINECRAFT IS TEACHING ME TO COMPUTER CODE. LEAVE ME ALONE, OR I’LL BLOCK YOU FROM THE INTERNET FOREVER We all use computers constantly, but how do our favourite apps and games work? Magic? Little computer people? They don’t, and this is all a dream? Download LearnToMod and you can play Minecraft and learn to code. Anyone worried that this will suck the fun out of Minecraft clearly hasn’t learnt to code a portal gun into their game.

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GO TO AN ART GALLERY? FOOLISH PARENTS, MINECRAFT LETS ME LIVE IN ART Ever dreamed of climbing inside your favourite paintings and having a wander about? No wonder you’re banned from all galleries. Tate Worlds are a series of free Minecraft maps wherein you can explore blocky worlds based on famous pieces (and locations they were based on) like André Derain’s The Pool of London. You’ll go from uncultured swine to unbearable art snob in no time. Result!

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NO I CAN’T PLAY OUTSIDE, I’M TRAVELLING THE WORLD This is no idle get out. Take a stroll through several Minecraft mods and you could tick off the entire Seven Wonders Of The World by lunchtime. Mount Rushmore, the Eiffel Tower, all of Denmark – just a few mouse clicks away. Why go out for ‘fresh air’ (yuck) when you can explore Paris in all its blocky beauty inside? It’s a no brainer.

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I’M NOT PLAYING A GAME, I’M TRAINING TO BECOME A TOWN PLANNER A staff member of the City of Ottawa took the city’s open data and created GeoOttaWOW – giving users access to faithful recreations of roads, streets and landmarks of Canada’s capital. They hope it will inspire young people to develop an interest in city planning. That’s what our giant zombie pit is – the future of Canadian infrastructure.

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‘PLAYING’ MINECRAFT? HOW DARE YOU! I’M MAKING US RICH Brandon Relph, 15, owns a business helping clients build whatever they want created in Minecraft. He’s already made over £10,000. So get your boss off your back by explaining you’re on the verge of the next million dollar Minecraft idea. How about a service where we play Minecraft for you, so you have more time to clean your bathroom?

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I WASN’T PLAYING MINECRAFT, I WAS CRAFTING THE ULTIMATE ROMANTIC GESTURE Show your special someone that you love them nearly as much as Minecraft with this heartwarming ‘I LUV U’ message. If they ask why you sculpted it from dirt, laugh in their face (romantically) and explain that you need the diamonds for more important crafting projects. Get rejected, and you’ll get more alone time with Minecraft. That’s a win-win, Romeo!

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COULD YOU MAKE THE NEXT

BLOCKBUSTER? Creating games isn’t as hard as you think and Minecraft’s here to help

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ou might think you could never create a game as complex as Minecraft but even Notch once sat down in front of a computer, and thought “I have no idea what I’m doing.” All developers started small with simple games and ideas, working through tutorials and trying to learn more. Even Minecraft is only as complicated as it is today because it’s been updated and changed for years - all you could do in Notch’s original demo was pick up and put down one kind of block.

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The thing is, if you’ve spent any amount of time in Minecraft then you’ve already started to think like a developer. Yes, really! You’ve looked at a system, learned its rules and then used those rules to create amazing things. Even the biggest, most impressive build you’ve ever seen started with two blocks being put side by side. A functioning hard drive made from redstone uses the same basic concept as a torch wired to a switch. At Code.org (http://bit. ly/1WWVWR9) you can find series of brilliantly simple tutorials that break down and explain coding, which we’re going to take a look at now in more detail. Next stop: game development stardom and riches galore!

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It’s all just instructions

Programming might look complicated but really it’s just a bunch of instructions. ‘Go to door. If the door’s open then shut it,’ That’s basically code. A game might have thousands of lines of the stuff but the basic ideas

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are simple - check a thing, do a thing, only do a thing if this other thing is there, and so on. The tutorials at Code.org’s Minecraft page break these ideas down into some of its most powerful components: basic actions such as moving or destroying blocks

Basic actions

In the tutorials a common action is to move the player a certain number of squares, or turn them to face another direction. It does this using the ‘Move Forward’ and ‘Turn Left/Right’ commands. So if you wanted Steve or Alex to walk in a circle you could write ‘Move Forward, Turn Right, Move Forward, Turn Right, Move Forward, Turn Right.’ Simple right? Whenever you press a key or push a stick to move in Minecraft, that’s exactly what the game is telling your character to do.

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combined with ‘repeat’ and ‘if.’ All programming is basically constructed around telling a thing to do a thing, often based on the answer to a question. Have you finished reading this this bit? If ‘yes’ move on to the next section. If ‘no’ keep reading.

Repeats

Often you’ll want to do something loads of times. Notice in the previous example about walking in a circle we wrote ‘Move Forward, Turn Right’ four times? There’s an easier way. Repeats, more commonly called loops, are a way of automating things so you don’t’ have to keep writing the same thing over and over again. A far easier way of making Steve or Alex walk in a circle would be ‘Move Forward, Turn Right,’ repeat 4 times’. That takes what was originally several separate instructions and condenses it down without changing the meaning or effect. Imagine you’ve lit a torch in Minecraft. What makes more sense: telling it to burn constantly, over and over again, or saying ‘burn’ once and asking to repeat.

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The big ‘if’

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‘IF’ is possibly the most important word in game making and there’s a reason why the Minecraft Code tutorials save it to the end - it makes everything work. If you hit a block, if your inventory is full, if a creeper gets too close. You can’t change anything or act on information without asking a question first. Without the all important ‘if,’ programming would be limited to simple instructions that couldn’t change. ‘If’ is the glue that holds all these ideas together and makes games possible.

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orking through Code.org’s Minecraft tutorial will take you about an hour and is an excellent way of demystifying the process of game making and development. It’s all too easy to see a

Put it all together

You might not believe it but that’s pretty much all the core concepts of programming covered. Of course there’s a bit more to it but from this point in it’s all variations on those basic themes: do a thing, check a thing and repeat a thing. Take Minecraft’s entire world spawning. With just the ideas covered in the Code.org lessons you can now understand how that works: ‘If there’s no block here, place a block. If there is a block then move forward. Repeat’ Obviously there’s a few more ‘ifs’ to make sure there’s plenty of gravel and trees, and a few caves, but the core processes really are that simple.

finished game and be daunted by the processes involved but you shouldn’t be. No game ever started finished, much as in the same way that what you’ve been reading here didn’t arrive as a fully formed lump of text. It appeared word by word. Development is

the same - lots of small, easy to understand things, that add up to make something bigger and more complex. Next, we’ll take a look at some of the most popular tools you can use to take this further, and speak to some famous devs that use them. .

have free versions you can use to learn, and both are widely supported with tutorials and forums for help and support. As well as a selection of Wiki pages and forums, YouTube is also one of the best places to look,

as you can see the code being made rather than just reading it. There’s are a few pros and cons through, so check the box to see which one’s right for you, and stick with it!

Crafting tools There are two main options if you’re thinking of making your own game: Unity (http://bit.ly/1dMZUjB) and GameMaker (http://bit.ly/1dux1aQ). Both

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Some great tutorials: http://bit.ly/1Kj2jZ7 How to make Minecraft in GameMaker: http://bit.ly/1PISDn6

PROS Easy to grasp system and language. Can create and test ideas fast. CONS Not great for 3D

Some great tutorials to start you off: http://bit.ly/1SkpyW2 How to make Minecraft in Unity: http://bit.ly/1StS4CJ

PROS Great for full 3D. Well supported with ready to use content. CONS Uses professional grade code.

GameMaker This is the most simple of the two options here, with an easy to grasp language and an almost fully self-contained development

environment that lets you draw and animate your own sprites. While it can do full 3D it’s best suited for 2D projects though - if you fancy making a platformer, start here!

Unity This is the superior option for full 3D but comes with all the added complexity that brings. However, it does have plenty of pre-made

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‘bits’ you can import, and a marketplace you can get more (many are free). It’s possible to actually create quite a lot from these parts with only the barest grasp of code.

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Mike Bithell

Rami Ismail

Developed Volume and Thomas Was Alone in Unity

Developed Nuclear Throne, Luftrausers, Supercrate Box and more in GameMaker

1 What makes Unity a good place to start? Unity is a fun place to make games, and a great place to try making games. There are some great tutorials and introductions online, and a lot of great YouTube videos teaching the ropes. And as you get more experienced, it’s an engine you can release games for mobile and consoles with!

1 What makes Unity a good place to start? It’s a program that allows people to start at the level they’re comfortable with. Basic functionality uses a visual drag & drop interface, both for level editing, object placement and coding. As users progress, they can start attaching scripts to all of those things to unlock the full potential of code.

2 How did you start learning code? I started playing with code when I was about 12, making silly little games and trying to learn. It can be super tricky at the start, but the first time you press a button, and a character moves across the screen is exceptionally exciting.

2 How did you start learning code? I was six years old and had to load the code to the QBASIC title GORILLAS.BAS. I ended up changing the main menu text to my name, and never stopped being fascinated with words turning into games.

3 What was the first thing you made that was technically ‘a game’? I remember making some little adventure games, where you walked around a village talking to people. Not a very good game, but probably the first proper game I can think of.

3 What was the first thing you made that was technically ‘a game’? It was a tiny text adventure. It was overly simple: go east to die, go west to win. It wasn’t a very good game.

4 Any tips or advice for someone who wants to get started? Start as small as you can! Your first game won’t be a massive game like Minecraft, but if you start by trying to get a character to move left and right on a screen, or a ball to bounce, or anything really, you’ll be on course to making cool things! 5 Apart from Minecraft what games have inspired you or taught you anything? I love the LEGO games right now, and the way they put fun front and center, I love playing those with my girlfriend. Other than that, I look back to the games I loved as a kid, games like Half Life, Metal Gear Solid and Deus Ex.

4. Any tips or advice for someone who wants to get started? A large part of it isn’t fun. It takes discipline. You’ll make broken stuff, or things unimpressive to you for a while. That’s how everybody starts, and you just need to bite through. Discipline is important there. 5 Apart from Minecraft what games have inspired you or taught you anything? Minecraft didn’t really inspire anything in me, but it is a lovely game.

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SWAMP LAND Y

ou can tell swamplands not just by the darker tone of grass and obvious watery-ness, but also by the abundance of lily pads and vines growing all over the shop. Ideal for finding sugarcanes, smaller clay deposits and mushrooms, this sea-level biome also has a chance to spawn a witch’s hut: perfect for getting your hands on witch loot, including the occasional potion. Watch out for slimes, though. They spawn like it’s out of fashion here at night, which can make a midnight stroll an experience to forget.

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If you’re setting up a farm it might be worth gathering a few lily pads first. They’re great for crossing water surfaces quickly without having to build full and complicated bridges.

KNOW YOUR BIOMES

Full moon in the sky? Not now, but beware later: slimes are even more likely to spawn and make your life a misery.

Slimes aren’t all bad. Sure they can see through blocks and split into two more mobs upon death, but grab some slimeballs from them and you can craft leads, magma creams and sticky pistons.

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Minecraft? More like MineHACKED. (Sorry).

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f you haven’t heard the good word about command blocks yet, let me break it down for you: they’re cheats-enabledonly, un-craftable, code hungry-blocks , and you can program them to do tasks for you. Wait, no, come back! It’s better than it sounds! So it might not sound like fun, but your reward for sticking with them is seriously cool. When they’re set up correctly, you can have them carry out tasks that are literally game-changers - handing out supplies, working redstone wirelessly, even building whole structures for you at the push of a button. These clever little blocks might need

a little bit of knowledge, but once you figure them out, they’re like if redstone with super powers. With command blocks on your side, you’ll be a Minecraft magician. If all that isn’t enough to get you excited, then two new kinds of command block will be available in update 1.9 as well, offering you even more creative power. They’ll work in slightly different ways to the current command blocks, but don’t worry about them for now. By then you’ll have command block basics completely under control, so you’ll be ready. So ready. One more thing before we get started: these beauties are only available for use in Creative mode. Let’s be honest though - you’d be unstoppable otherwise. Let’s build!

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CREATIVE COMMAND BLOCK CODING

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Teleporter

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e’ll start simple, to take a look at how this command block stuff works. We’re going to build a teleporter. Look, maps get too big, building rails takes too long, and sometimes you just forget where you’ve put stuff. We understand. Luckily, with the magic (well, coding) of command blocks, you can send a player who steps on the right spot anywhere in the world. I’m sure you remember that you’ll need to have cheats enabled. Some tools are just too powerful to craft! To get your command blocks, type “ /give @p minecraft:command_block ” - switch p to a player’s username if you want to give blocks to someone else, and fill in the amount you want at the end. Stock up, and let’s get started. Place your command block in a hole in the ground, and put a pressure plate on top of it. You might want to build a teleporter booth around it, just to make it easier to find. Once your block and plate are in place, right click your command block to access its console. It’s time to learn to code - we’re going in. There’s a basic set pattern to most command block code, and it goes like this: what you want to do, what you want to do it to, and the extra information you need to make it work. Here, we want to teleport (/tp) the person stood on it (@p) to another building. So input “/tp @p X Y Z” where X Y Z are the coordinates to your destination. Test your teleporter out by hopping on top. Congratulations, you’ve coded your first command block! Put some signs down at the other end to help any confused travellers figure out where they are, then sit back and relax.

“YOU CAN SEND A PLAYER ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD”

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Setblock Clocks (and XP farm)

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ow you know how to set your command block up and run it (no pun intended) on command. But what if you want it to keep running all the time? This is useful if you’re checking for a change in something, or if you have a task you want repeated a lot - because who wants to sit jamming their fist into a button for an hour? Nobody writing this feature. Don’t worry - a setblock clock is the answer. This neat little contraption powers a command block on and off by creating and replacing a redstone block. A word of warning before we get started - you might want to turn off the command block output text to your chat, because this thing is going to be chatty.

Type “/gamerule commandBlockOutput false” and we’re ready to go. Place two command blocks, with a basic block between them. You’ll replace the middle block when the code is ready. In the bottom block, enter “/ setblock ~ ~1 ~ minecraft:air 0 replace”. Let’s look at what that means! /setblock sets a block, ~ ~1 ~ tells it to place it one space up (~ means change the coordinates starting

“MAKE A ROOM THAT SHOWERS YOU IN XP!”

from where the block is placed). minecraft:air 0 means the block will be made of air, and replace means that the air block will replace anything currently in the space. This is the command to destroy our redstone block, now we need one to create it! Using the same idea as the bottom command block, right click the top command block and type the instruction “/setblock ~ ~-1 ~ minecraft:redstone_block 0 replace”. Now your redstone will get replaced every time it’s destroyed. Break the basic block in the middle and place a redstone block - it won’t look like much is happening, but if you punch out the redstone it should pop back into place. The clock is working! Any command block you place next to the redstone will now be powered on and off for eternity. A simple use of this is to create yourself a room that just showers you in XP! Type “/xp 1 @p”, stand next to your XP machine, and watch your levels soar.

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Cannon

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et’s expand a little bit - we’ve been selfish so far and only used command blocks affecting the nearest player (y’know, you). There’s more options than that though, in fact you don’t have to be targeting a player at all. Let’s look at creating some items into the world, and endless supply of whatever you need can only be a good thing! Of course, because we’re secretly evil, what we’re endlessly creating here is high speed TNT. You can choose something less explosive, if that’s how you want to live your life. First, build a platform for your cannon to stand on. Lifting the platform up gives us space to hide our command blocks underneath! Build a setblock clock underneath it as shown (go on, you’re great

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at them now), and then place your clock powered command block in front of it. This block is going to test whether the button above it has been pressed. To do this, use the command “/testforblock ~ ~3 ~ stone_button 13”. 13 is the identifier for a pressed button located on the floor. After you’ve checked for the button press, you want the fun bit - recklessly throwing TNT into the sunset/at your enemies. Set a comparator down facing towards the second command block, which needs the code “/summon PrimedTnt ~ ~1 ~ {Fuse:3

0,Motion:[0.0,-0.1,-5.0]}”. This summons your TNT one block higher than the command block, sets the fuse so it doesn’t immediately explode, and tells it to move in the right direction (forwards, please, or it could all go horribly wrong…) Fence away your command plocks from curious prying fingers, build yourself a cannon for the look of it, then climb back up the steps and punch that button! TNT will belch beautifully into the distance, and you’ll never have to fill a dispenser of it again. Why, you ask? Well, why not! BOOM.

“TNT WILL BELCH BEAUTIFULLY INTO THE DISTANCE. WHY YOU ASK? WHY NOT!”

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Item Shop

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his is a great one for multiplayer, allowing players on your server to trade their XP for items. Build your shop with an easily accessed wall of buttons, using frames and signs to display the items and their prices, then give it a big old back room for your command block trickery to fit into. It’s just like the real thing! Except magic. Put two command blocks down: one right behind the button block and another two blocks behind that. From the block underneath your button block, lay a redstone trail beneath the command blocks to ensure that both are powered by the button, not just the front one! Now we’ve got the layout ready, it’s time to block and code! The first of your command blocks is the one giving out the items to the player, assuming they can afford the fee. To do that, use the code “/give @p[dx=0,dy=0,dz=2,lm=5] minecraft:chainmail_boots 1”. This gives a player (who must be stood within two blocks of the command block’s Z position and have a minimum level five), one pair of chainmail boots. Easy! They’re not getting away without paying, though… In the second command block, type “/xp -5l @p[dx=1,dy=0,dz=4]” - this targets the player with in 4 blocks of the command block’s Y position (it’s further away, after all), and removes 5 levels of XP for them. The payment has been made! Now you just need to cover up your redstone and seal off the back room. Your dispensary is finished, and unlike the real thing, it’s never going to run out of stock. Plus, as long as your payment booths are in a straight line, you can copy this exact setup for each new booth!

“ONCE THE LAYOUT IS READY, IT’S TIME TO BLOCK AND CODE!”

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Self Building Bridge

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kay, so not exactly self-building. You’ll have to do the set-up far below, but to the untrained eye it will seem self building. Sometimes it’s worth putting on a show. We’ve dug a shallow test pit to show you the ropes, but you can build this across any towering chasm you like. First, you’ll need to lay a track across the bottom of your pit of choice - make sure you lay this exactly where you want your bridge to be. The track should be entirely activator rails, with powered rails in between to keep the carts going. At each end, tunnelled into the walls, you’ll want to build a powered rail spiral to get your carts back to the top! Once your rails are ready, you’ll need two

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launching platforms (a short section of powered rails, long enough to launch two minecarts, underneath the base the bridge will start from). Now for your secret weapon - command block minecarts. Oh yes, these things come on wheels. Use the /give command from earlier with the item “command_ block_minecart” to get yourself four of these marvellous, rolling wonders. Place two minecarts at each launching platform the side you’ll be travelling from will build the bridge, and the other side will destroy it once you’re there. The spiral railways at each side make sure the carts swap sides after use! When your carts are in place, it’s time to code. This bridge is built along the Y axis, three

blocks up, so the code here is “/setblock ~ ~3 ~-1 minecraft:stone_slab 0 replace” for the first cart and “/setblock ~ ~3 ~1 minecraft:stone_slab 0 replace” for the second. Setting the slabs behind the first cart and in front of the second means that the powered rails won’t leave gaps (not great in perilous bridges, after all). Make sure you change your code to the height and direction of your own bridge. To remove the slabs, we use the same code but replacing the stone slab with air, just like in the setblock clock earlier. Again, you’ll need two carts to make sure that the powered rails don’t leave you with missed sections. Once everything is coded up, you just flip the switch to build and destroy. You are the wizard of bridges now! Use your powers well.

Stop? No, we’re just getting started...

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kay, so you might not know everything about command blocks yet - but the more you learn about how the commands work, the more complicated (and awesome) you can make your builds. With a little bit of experimenting, you can wire up command blocks to solve any problem you can dream of - and probably some you can’t! Why not see what you can do with these builds:

* Random loot chests for dungeons * A starter kit for new players on spawning * Quest lines for your friends - leave them messages, items, traps and more! * A security scan, removing carried weapons from players entering a room * A weather machine to toggle storms off and on * Turn yourself into a superhero with speed and jump increases (plus some fancy visual effects)

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You’ll sometimes find mushrooms under certain tree canopies, which are vital for making mushroom soup.

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KNOW YOUR BIOMES

Sometimes apples will fall from cut trees. They’re great for relieving hunger if you can’t find any livestock nearby.

FOREST Forest biomes are often small, so be sure to replant a tree every time you cut one down to ensure you don’t exhaust your wood supplies.

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illed with precious wood, which is vital for making tools and the workbench early in the game, forests are the best place to start out. Be careful though as they’re often hilly and dark, with dangerous mobs spawning under the leafy branches. They’re especially difficult to navigate at night as the trees can obscure your vision, so creepers become much harder to spot and can easily sneak up on you. BOOM!

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Rabid gameplayer? You need never leave the comfort of your own blocky universe again…

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hy buy lots of different games when you can stick to Minecraft? Players have been stretching the game’s flexibility since launch, and now almost anything is possible with the right tweaks, redstone circuits and resource packs. Want to build cities, wear a hood and freerun around historical landmarks Assassin’s Creed style? No problem. How about an underwater city to rival the likes of BioShock’s Rapture? Too easy. From Mario Maker to Zelda and even Call of Duty, you’re just a few downloads

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away from morphing Minecraft into a game to rival the biggest new releases Brilliantly, you can choose how deep you want to go. We’ve included some adventure maps so that you can jump into a new game world quickly, but if you want to build your own Mario worlds, or construct a settlement in a tough Fallout wasteland, you can use the resource packs and modded items in this list to simulate each game world in greater detail. As always, check the mod descriptions on each download page for installation instructions and for Minecraft version compatibility info, and have fun!

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You could say that Super Mario Maker owes more of a debt to Minecraft than the other way around. After all, Minecraft is amazing at producing player-created worlds in its own right. There are still plenty of ways to bring that distinctive Mario flavour to your game, and turn Minecraft into a cheerful, challenging platformer while you’re at it.

Super Mario Brothers http://bit.ly/1DEwCDi

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ario’s blocky world is perfectly suited to Minecraft, as this charming Super Mario Mod demonstrates. This funtime little mod captures both the sights and the sounds of the Super Mario universe with a suite of custom blocks representing warp pipes, brick walkways and the famous floating question-mark loot blocks. It’s almost like a Nintendo-flavoured home from home. You can break these blocks by jumping and hitting them with your super hard super Mario head – just like in, erm, real life – all while clothed in Mario’s stylish red cap and blue pants combo. Treasure blocks will even make a satisfying ping when you hit them, and there are classic Mario noises for jumping and hitting a flagpole, which rewards you with that familiar Mario fanfare. The blocks and items are all craftable in survival mode, but this mod is great for making your own courses in creative mode, where you can arrange the brick blocks and warp pipes into great jumping courses in a few minutes. It’s like a dream made real, that’s what this is. The tricky thing is that this mod requires Forge to work, which you can download and install from here http://bit.ly/1IWLVHN.

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Oh my days, this is making our heads pop just thinking about it. Make and mould your own fantasy Mario worlds!

http://bit.ly/1HRC1vu

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his spectacular map captures the joyful inventiveness of the Mario Galaxy games with a series of colourful floating puzzle islands. From giant robots to lava pits and floating disc worlds, it’s impossible to predict where the map will go next. As you hop from platform to platform you traverse floating pirate ships and delve into crystal orbs and mysterious pyramids full of creepers and jumping puzzles. It’s a great testament to the classic Galaxy games, but also a remarkable Minecraft build that pushes the limits of the game with mindbending structures. The map contains 28 ‘galaxies’ with power ups and even boss fights in giant planets and, of course, Bowser’s castle. It’s challenging, but a magical way to enjoy Mario in Minecraft.

http://bit.ly/1NdDCvr

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f you’re looking for something more lightweight than the Super Mario Brothers mod that captures Mario’s colourful levels perfectly, the Medley texture pack is a great choice. The textures are created at 32x32 pixel resolution, which makes them more detailed than conventional Minecraft textures, and they’re fantastically faithful to the classic early Mario platformers. You can install the texture pack and play Minecraft normally for an odd survivalist Mario experience, but really this is perfect for making your own levels, Super Mario Maker style. Build a course three-to-five blocks wide, test all the jumps and then challenge your friends to complete it in the fastest time possible. Home made Mario – how cool is that!

Super Parkour http://bit.ly/1ghu0E9

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f you’d rather tackle some Mario-esque challenges rather than build courses, this is the map for you. It vaguely replicates the first level of the original Super Mario Brothers, but with a Minecraftian twist. A few jumps in you meet Toad, and can loot his little house for coins. Poor Toad! Otherwise you’re navigating jumping puzzles on a five-block wide course. Look out for the holes in the floor and some tricky distance leaps in a race to hit the final flagpole. There are loot blocks, of course, which grant you coins when you hit the switches on their undersides, and you can invite up to three friends to join you. Be warned: the course is quite narrow. It’s all too easy to push a friend into the abyss, intentionally or otherwise. The course is a test run, and there may be sequels in the future set in water and desert themed environments. It’s a great way to get inspiration for your own maps.

The two greatest things in all history merged into one. Look, there’s Mario’s flagpole, Minecraft style!

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Mario Galaxy-Craft

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Every year the Assassin’s Creed series gives us a new city or two to explore with magic assassin parkour skills. Anything the Assassins can do Minecraft can do too, as you’ll see from this suite of mods and maps.

Assassin Craft Ah, the famous Assassin’s Creed guard. Totally expendable in every way. Don’t any of these people have families?!

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http://bit.ly/1SQ9FmG

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he iconic garb of the Assassins can easily be yours in Minecraft thanks to the Assassin Craft mod. This adds a bunch of new recipes that bring the killer cowls and weapons of the series into your Minecraft world, from Arno’s French cutlass to Altair’s signature flowing white robes. The mod also adds Assassin’s Creed guards and villains to assassinate with a variety of crossbows and hidden blades. There’s a blacksmith to help you gear up, and the Romulus dungeon, full of enemies and secret treasure. The cutest addition is the hay bale block, which you can dive onto from any height to avoid taking falling damage. You’ll finally be able to perform the leap of faith in Minecraft!

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Roman City http://bit.ly/21RAYDb

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he great thing about Minecraft is that you can visit almost any city that has featured in an Assassin’s Creed game. Want to recreate Unity? Try the 1:1 recreation of Paris in Minecraft (http://bit.ly/1jQeeB5). Prefer Syndicate? Try the London map instead (http://bit.ly/1SQ59o3). The Roman City map is our favourite, however, brilliantly evoking the grand structures of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. The map reportedly took five months to build and features massive structures like a chariot racing track and the Colosseum in its original form, as well as luxury villas and lovely gardens. Load up the map with Assassin’s Craft and the parkour mod installed for a solid Assassin’s Creed simulation in Minecraft. Run, climb and vault to your heart’s content!

Assassin’s Creep http://bit.ly/1bkAEXB

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his adventure map harks back to the dusty streets of the first Assassin’s Creed game. It’s an open world city full of jumping challenges that will have you precariously climbing the tallest towers in town. You’re on a mission to find nine wool blocks. Once those are gathered a final door will open to a hidden dungeon. As in the source games, there are hidden feathers, diamonds and wanted posters to collect along the way. It’s almost pretty enough to be the real thing. This map works well with the brilliant Assassini-Construttori texture pack (http://bit. ly/1KTJFpV) that brings the sandy tones of Assassin’s Creed’s cities to buildings in Minecraft. There’s even an Animus edition inspired by the reality-warping effects of Animus glitches.

Parkour mod http://bit.ly/1HFQkm9

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you want to become a true assassin you must master the art of freerunning. And by ‘master’, we mean ‘install the Assassin’s Creed parkour mod’. This mod lets you freerun up walls that are three blocks high, which makes it nice and easy to climb buildings. You can also hold down a button to dangle from blocks if you need to negotiate any especially tricky overhangs. This mod works well when combined with others to create an immersive Assassin’s Creed experience. Once you’re used to the extra moves, it’s hard to go back to ordinary Minecraft jumping. If you slip and fall, the mod even lets you roll to avoid taking damage. The somersaulting camera might leave you a little woozy if you do this too often, however.

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Minecraft is already a survival game, so it only requires a marginal tone tweak and some custom items to help make it suddenly feel like Fallout. Good resource packs and the Fallout mod do the job nicely.

Mineout Resource Pack http://bit.ly/1k32oVi

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ow we need to get Minecraft looking suitably disheveled, as though a thousand nuclear payloads have wiped out the world. The Mineout Resource Pack is a standout effort that retextures the world to make it look brown and filthy and generally unpleasant, but in a good way! The desert earth looks suitably desolate, NPCs now look like hardened wastelanders straight from Mad Max, and enemies have been redone to bring them closer to Fallout’s denizens. Cave spiders have been given a tail to turn them into radscorpions, while cows have received an extra face on their texture to turn them into the two-headed brahmin pack beasts of the wasteland. Also, chickens are green for some reason. The retexture of your inventory menu is especially neat. The mod adds a skin that makes it look as though you’re equipping items using a Pip Boy. Wowsers! If it’s not to your taste, you can also have a go on the neat Industrial Wasteland Texture pack (http://bit.ly/1Nm2qPB), which looks more like the airy deserts of Fallout: New Vegas.

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You can’t find a glass of clean drinking water, but giant robt helpers are everywhere. What a world!

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ne of the most downloaded Fallout themed adventure maps on the planet, Rebuilding Humanity throws you into the wasteland in 2351. There you can survive the desert and discover a number of side quests, or head straight to the Big City where the main storyline awaits. The star of this adventure map is the wasteland itself. It’s full of ruined structures to explore, underground sewers and interesting nooks and crannies. There are even co-op only areas that you can only enter with a friend. The characters you meet are all nods to real Fallout lore, and enemies include famous Fallout villains like the Super Mutants. At the time of writing the mod is currently down in anticipation of a massively updated 1.8 release which will purportedly add new locations, NPCs, story endings and even radiation to give the map a true survivalist element. This may have changed, so check just in case. Older versions are available in an unsupported form (http://bit.ly/1OVtjhQ), though we’d recommend waiting for the next official release.

allout 4 added deadly radioactive storms to the series for the first time. Every so often, billowing green radioactive clouds roll across the wasteland, dropping radioactive rain and lightning on the wastelanders below. Perhaps that’s why our chickens are green? Anyway, there’s nothing that can quite match the luminous lime colour of those storms in Minecraft, but the Local Weather Mod adds some truly spectacular weather that will make your wasteland seem that bit more dangerous. In addition to Minecraft’s ordinary rain and snow, this mod adds lightning storms and tornados. The latter suck up mobs in spiralling patterns, and will even fling you miles into the air if you get too close. Hail storms chuck hundreds of tiny blocks of varying size down onto your poor head. A really bad one can start knocking you around, which is inconvenient when you’re engaged in a pistol duel to the death with a swarm of radscorpions.

The Fallout Mod http://bit.ly/1OT1K8Y

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efore we bring the wasteland to Minecraft we need to gear up. The Fallout Mod will let you do exactly that, adding dozens of weapons and chems from the Fallout games to give you something of a fighting chance. The guns here are the star of the update, modelled with a high-quality and relatively realistic look. You have to craft ammo to use them, but once you’re up and running you’ll be sniping mobs with revolvers, pistols and worn old automatic weapons. If you take a hit you can be thankful for the addition of stimpacks, which restore your health. A syringe of Med-X boosts resistance to all damage for a time while Psycho, true to the Fallout games, boosts your damage output. For an authentic wasteland experience, use Psycho in combination with the new melee weapons and beat off attackers with rusty old pipes.

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Fallout: Rebuilding Humanity

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No matter what the genre, hundreds of classic game worlds have been remade in Minecraft. It goes to show that you can do almost anything with the will and a lot of time in creative mode. And long may that be so…

CivilizationCraft http://bit.ly/1Y1coQX

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n interesting twist on the PC empire building strategy series, Civilization, this modded server asks players to band together to gather resources and erect buildings that boost your empire. Those of course include some of Civ’s famous wonders of the ancient world. It’s a multiplayer affair that relies on trade, deal-making and competitive expansion. The buildings also look lovely, but be warned, “this is a very long term game” according to the CivilizationCraft wiki, that may require quite a lot of dedication if you’re to get the most out of it.

Call of Duty http://bit.ly/1Qiu0Dd

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uns guns guns! This Call of Duty inspired mod adds some of the most detailed gun models you can hope to use in Minecraft. Weapons vary from pistols to light machine guns and assault rifles. You can use iron sights aiming to hit targets, and damage varies depending on the model and where your shot hits. So load this mod up, create a little arena and invite some friends in for a few rounds of deathmatch.

Mine 4 Dead http://bit.ly/1L1YkO8

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great co-op adventure map that pits you against zombie hordes in a doomed city. It honours Valve’s terrific zombie survival shooter with character textures representing every hero from the series. Safe rooms with beds offer brief respite, and there’s even a four-minute finale event to mimic the desperate last stand moments of Left 4 Dead.

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he city of Rapture is one of the most memorable game worlds ever created, and now you get to explore it in blockbased form thanks to this ambitious build. The famous introductory lighthouse has been faithfully recreated, and huge underwater buildings carry the same sense of claustrophobia that BioShock captured so well. The map is unfinished, but what’s there is still an impressive ode to Irrational’s creepy underwater hell.

CraftFighter http://bit.ly/ISc7L8

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ot a Minecraft mod, but a free game that reimagines Minecraft as a Street Fighter style beat-’em-up. Such imagination! The prototype version was developed for Minecon 2012, but now it exists as a free download that lets you pit Minecraft’s iconic characters against one another in classic 2D side-scrolling combat. Skeleton, Villager, Creeper, Steve and Pig duel for glory, and you can play against friends to discover which character is the best. Pig for the win! He is our cover star, after all...

Ocarina of Time http://bit.ly/1sci35L

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his stunning build recreates the world of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in Minecraft in gorgeous detail. The creator says that the map took six months to make, and it shows in the care and attention given to famous landmarks like the Great Deku Tree and Death Mountain, complete with ominous hovering smoke ring. If you like this, it’s also worth checking out the Twilight Princess map (http://bit.ly/1hkjF9l) from the same creator. You can invite up to three friends to join you. Well, it would be rude not to…

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BioShock

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THE END

The End is one of the most hostile places in the whole game. To avoid endermen hassle, equip a pumpkin head to cover up your crosshair, and avoid looking at them.

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he ultimate challenge for vanilla Minecraft survivalists, The End biome is as hard to reach as it is to survive… almost. To get there you’ll need to search out a stronghold in the overworld. This is best done by flinging an eye of ender into the air and following its airborne trajectory. Once you find a stronghold and the ender portal that resides within, you have to activate it with 12 more eyes of ender to reach The End. There’s no day/night cycle here, and aside from a massive increase in enderman spawns, you also have the small matter of an Ender Dragon to contend with.

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The End is a floating island made up of end stone. This durable building material can’t be pinched by endermen, making it ideal house-building material.

KNOW YOUR BIOMES

The Ender Dragon’s health bar, visible as soon as you enter The End, replenishes whenever it flies by these things. Best take them out before tackling the scaly main course.

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GamesMaster Presents The Ultimate Guide to Minecraft Volume 11 ON SALE 4 MAY 2016

SMASHING SPRING SPECIAL!

TOP SPRING MODS

HIDDEN EASTER EGGS

A TO Z OF MINECRAFT!

ASTOUNDING FACTS

CRAFT YOUR OWN EASTER DECORATIONS

EXPAND YOUR GAME!

MINECRAFT QUIZ

YOUR COMPLETE MINECRAFT ALPHABET

FEATURES GALORE!

MINECRAFT ON WII U

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SURVIVAL DIARIES

COMMAND BLOCKS

HOW MINECRAFT CAN TEACH YOU TO CODE

TOP REASONS TO PLAY

EXPLORE MOJANG’S OTHER MASTERPIECE

KNOW YOUR BIOMES! Essential Minecraft environments explored!

PLUS: STAR WARS MADE IN MINECRAFT, LATEST NEWS AND MORE!