Minecraft Survival Mode Preview

By: Derek Yu

On: August 25th, 2009

Here’s a preview of Minecraft‘s Survival Mode, which paid customers will get to try out in a week’s time (September 1st). A lot has been added since we first posted about the game, like swimming cave pigs. That’s right, swimming cave pigs. And they have a taste for flesh, but only if it comes in a Hot Pocket.

Anyway, read more about the upcoming release here.

Posted in Multiplayer, Previews, Sim, Videos, Voxels | Tags: Notch

jwill

Great! I can’t wait to play.
Anyway, Is this a game? I think this is a toy.
Quetz

Oh boy oh boy oh boy.
citricsquid

minecraft gets better everyday, I never imagined it becoming this awesome. It’s beautiful :3
sqrrl

YES
Behemoth

Holy crap. This just made me realize how small I am on this earth, for this proves Notch is a GOD. He created Minecraft, and on the seventh day he apparently will rest in what? Indonesia?
wiivn

Yeah better, but I don’t like the idea of slower destroyed bricks + limitations for construction and healthbar… It’s starting to look like a standard mmo game.
MasterShake

How can it be a Survival Mode if it doesn’t even have a healthbar, Wiivn?
Scott

wiivn is pretty retarded
wiivn

Scott not as retarded as your mother.
http://0xdeadc0de.org Eclipse

calm down kids…

would be better to have a build mode and a survival mode where you can dig only few stuff and you need to crawl in dungeons made by others, in this way the game looks like an editor with a game in the middle, or a game that runs in a fancy “debug mode”… it just doesn’t look nor a game neither a world builder
ngajoe

Man…I got excited. When it said “survival mode,” I was thinking along the lines of Stranded 2. Now that was a great survival mode!
Nicholas Lee

I guess it’s just me, but I still don’t “get” this game.
Eagle

Guys, Notch is still leaving the sandbox mode. If any of you actually read his website, you’ll see he is making survival mode, zombie siege mode, etc. and keeping the sandbox mode. The game is in alpha right now, only a few months old. It’s not a game yet it’s just a toy, Notch is still developing the game and it’s many modes it will have in the future. :P
Malasdair

I’m pretty sure Minecraft will be awesome in like a year. Is he using a pay-now-to-help-me-develop format?
citricsquid

@malasdair, basically. People pre-ordering has allowed him to switch to working on minecraft 60% of the time – the other 40% for his IRL “outside of his house” job, because he’d go mad working alone 100% of the time – so yes, we’re paying for him to dev it more :D
Gutter

@ Nicholas Lee : Me neither, but it’s not a game… yet. So we aren’t that crazy.
FISH

i wish the art wasnt so muddy and heavily pixelated.

it would be so nice of it had a cleaner style, something like a megaman legends.

can the game support custom texture sets?
that would be great.
id make one.
Tim L.

I have a patent on the words ‘Mine’, ‘Craft’ and ‘Scott’s Mother’, so you’re all getting sued.
nobody

I’ve never been a fan of the super pixelated art style fad in indie games. Unless it serves a real purpose in the game, then all it’s doing is fatiguing the eyes.

OK, you don’t look like a mainstream game, I get it; but now you look like every other badly rendered indie game out there.
sinoth

I find the pixelized textures extremely delicious.
ngajoe

Concur w/sinoth. Hurrah for teh pixels!
Schwerpunk

I never really thought about the graphical style. It just seems to fit.

And Notch has said he will release a DRM-free downloadable version, so I imagine you could just swap out the texture files in that.

I mean, the game itself kind of shows how important players being able to do what they want is to Notch.
anon

Announcing the Dungeons and Levers Expansion Pack

+ Dungeon Mode. Like Survival, except you canâ€™t destroy walls or craft items.
+ Programmable Tiles. Pressure plates, levers, doors.
+ More mobs.
+ More usable items. (Potions? Teleporter stones? Keys?)
+ Official public level file format
+ Play on either player generated levels or randomly generated levels
+ 100% free for anyone who has bought the game!
contra

Looks great. While I didnt really have the patience to enjoy building stuff in the beta sandbox it’s still fascinating to look at. Also I hope the music in the video is in the game cause it fit perfectly and I’m getting really sick of chiptunes.
Sparky

Every time I see this game it convinces me that there are a million really amazing ideas that have yet to be explored.

(P.S.- I’m kind of with Fish on the deliberately low resolution textures, but that’s totally a subjective call.)

This build really looks a lot more polished than the last one I played. Keep up the good work!
FISH

what im saying is the textures should stay the same resolution, but just get cleaned up, use less colors.

low-res is great, but there’s more to it than just a low resolution. every pixel counts. every pixel has weight.
right now they dont.
Sparky

Yeah, I get where you’re coming from regarding the textures and I agree. Sorry if I worded myself imprecisely. Megaman Legends is a good example of a game which uses low resolution, low color depth textures but isn’t deliberately imprecise or blocky looking. It has a lot of clean solid color regions and some nice hand-pixelled details.
Tet

Looking good, but it seems to lack to presence/style of Infiniminer, maybe because of the graphics or the notfullscreenness.
ngajoe

From #23: “100% free for anyone who bought the game!”

That’s certainly a nice feature, although a bit ‘old hat’…all the games I’ve bought have already done this before. Yawn.
Aaa

FUCK you
RobertMod

Yeah.