Minecraft 1.7

Minecraft 1.7 has been out for a week. Look at some of the features you get.

New biomes

Mesa (hardened clay), savanna (acacia trees), roofed forest (so dark that hostiles spawn day or night), deep ocean and more extreme hills with snowy tops. Beach is a biome of its own now.

Existing biomes

For existing biomes, oceans are smaller and with all-gravel bottoms, jungles are rarer and with melons, and plains have more kinds of flowers (see Vegetation).

Amplified world type

An Amplified world type, where mountains are taller, ravines are deeper, landforms are weirder. It uses more resources from your computer, so make sure your box can support it.

Lighting

The ambient lighting changes depending on whether you are outside, in a house, under a tree, or caught in a thunderstorm.

Vegetation

Acacia trees (crooked, burnt ochre), dark oak trees (short, squat, vertical branches), with corresponding varieties of wood. The green hue of sugar cane differs with biome. And there are now more and varied flowers: Tulips, blue orchids, alliums, oxeye daisies, and poppies, lilacs, peonies and sunflowers. Individual roses are replaced by rose bushes. All can be processed into dyes. Sunflowers face east. Grass and ferns can now be double in height.

Fishing

The water becomes visibly active while you fish, giving you some idea of where the fish are biting. Fishing rods can be enchanted to boost their lure. There are two new fish: Salmon (edible) and Pufferfish (useless unless you can brew). You can also reel in other objects.

Dyeing

You had stained wool. You had stained carpet. You had stained hardened clay. Now it is time for stained glass, in both block and pane forms.

Materials

Red sand works like regular sand. Packed ice is opaque and cannot be melted into water. Podzol is a rare, colorful soil type.

All in all, a very cool upgrade.

INVedit

INVedit, the Minecraft inventory editor, worked fine up to Minecraft 1.6.x, even though its original programmer stopped working on it after 1.4. Now, with all these fun new items in Minecraft 1.7, INVedit no longer works. It is time for someone to take up (or, more accurately, fork) INVedit and make it work for 1.7.x. And I guess that someone is me. I downloaded Visual C# Express 2010 and have been studying the code, and the Minecraft JAR files, to see where to start work on the revised program.

AMDIST

AMDIST stands for Advanced Minecraft Interface and Data/Structure Tracking: Long acronym for something that takes a world and maps out its villages, temples, strongholds, witch huts and player location. It also displays the world's biomes, even the newest ones. The program is fairly accurate, although it freaks when confronted with a superflat world.