Minecraft Update 1.3 is ‘Huge’, Coming August 1

Nothing snappy here today. Mojang has announced the release date for their massive 1.3 update for Minecraft. August 1 is the day to mark on your calendars and tell your girlfriend you're too sick to go over tonight.

Mojang has stated in a large update on their official site that 1.3 will be an update that will feature a 'huge number of changes'. The contents have been categorized into The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.'

The Good: The most notable change in the update is the sudden shift of focus to the multiplayer aspects of the game. The update states that they've 'kicked out single-player, and made it a shell on top of multi-player'.

There are two major benefits to this: first, it's required for the modding api if we don't want to have multiple implementations of every mod, and second, if we fix a bug in single-player, we know the bug is fixed in multi-player, too. Previously we had to fix bugs both in relation to single-player and multi-player.

Cover that in a thick layer of new goodies such as trading with villagers, tripwire traps, new terrain features and a host of new building items and you got yourself a pretty awesome Minecraft sundae right there...sprinkle a variety of bug fixes on top and you're looking at a thing of beauty.

The Bad: Ironically, the most notable change also has it's ill effects to a degree. As a result of the whole 'single player/multiplayer' change, resource requirements will now be raised.

When playing single-player, the game needs to be able to both simulate and emulate the world, which take many more CPU cycles. We're working on optimizing rendering, but those improvements will not be included until Minecraft 1.4.

The Ugly: While Mojang really tried to pack as many fixes as they could into 1.3, some things didn't quite make it. Certain fixes and expected features had to be pushed to update 1.4 such as lighting issues with the terrain and the ability to mod API. They do explain that they're struggling to fix these issues without hurting the frame rate of the game. Being that the waiting time between update 1.2.5 and 1.3 was the longest yet, they really wanted to get the update out there before fans started sending death threats.

That's the basics of the update but, as I said, it's quite large so check it out on Mojang for the full details.