The creator of Minecraft has released a video showing off the future additions of quests, weather, and stats.
Minecraft update 1.5 was already known to bring weather to the game, but did you know it’ll also bring the start of the game’s achievement and statistics systems? A new video uploaded by Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson gives us a look at all of these features and shows how they’ll work.
Weather is pretty straight forward. It’ll start and stop at random intervals, with snow creating a layer of ice over water and a layer of snow over land (which can be chopped away). A good rain is also accompanied by scary flashes of lightning.
The achievement system has been talked about before but now we get to see it in action. Players will have paths that they follow to bigger and better achievements. The path demonstrated here starts with the player simply having to open his inventory, moves on to requiring him to chop down a tree and pick up a piece of wood, and ends with the player crafting a workbench. This is presumably just a short example of the longer achievement trees Minecraft will eventually feature, as it’s in a group called “Ride a pig off a cliff,” which may be where the tree ends.
The final feature shown here is the new statistics page, which records all sorts of player actions in the game. General statistics will save the number of worlds played, the distance players have walked or fallen, how much damage they’ve dealt, and more. Block statistics will record how many times players have crafted, used, or mined a particular material. Item statistics will do the same for items like the pickaxe or the apple.
Giving players goals and recording their statistics is a big step for Minecraft, which has generally been seen as mostly a creation game up to this point. Those simple weather effects are looking pretty too. I just feel bad for all the pigs that are going to be forced to take cliff dives.
