Minecraft Beta Update 1.2: Here’s What’s New

Minecraft Minecraft beta Minecraft updates Notch

by James Plafke and Max Eddy | 2:03 pm, January 13th, 2011

On the heels of Minecraft hitting the one million sales mark, Notch released an update for Minecraft’s beta, bringing the version number to a pretty-looking 1.2, and unleashing a bunch of neat new additions to the game, including a water mob, new blocks, and bug fixes.

From the Minecraft Wiki, with screenshots of various items from the update below the list:

Additions:

• Music blocks (right click to tune, trigger to play)
• 15 wool dyes
• A new water mob (squid, and here’s a video of a trapped squid)
• Squids drop an ink sack item, which can be combined with wool to make black wool
• New tree type (birch and pine, which look different, but seemingly craft into the same things)
• Reeds are now sugarcanes and can make both paper and sugar
• Sugar, which is now an ingredient in making cake
• Cake
• A bunch of new crafting recipes
• One secret useful block (Dispenser)
• One secret pretty block (Lapis Lazuli Ore and Block)
• Default furnaces have a new look
• Bones added as a drop (possibly only from skeletons) and can be crafted into Bonemeal
• New grey, light grey, and black sheep, which all drop correspondingly colored wool
• Tools now provide more uses before they break
• Sand can now make a block that looks like sand, but acts like stone, appropriately called Sandstone

Bugfixes:

• Paintings work in multiplayer
• Disconnecting while riding no longer keeps the player in the world
• More state is properly synced in multiplayer
• Fixed colors going weird on PowerPC
• Fixed a chunk reload loop in singleplayer
• Fixed most lighting bugs in newly-generated survival multiplayer maps
• Fixed a few crashes on load level bugs
• Falling sand behaves better in survival multiplayer
• Jack-O-Lantern has correct tooltip

Things that may or may not be legitimate and need further confirmation:

• Players can not only dye wool, but dye actual sheep
• The deeper underground the player is, the shorter distance light travels
• Players can now make charcoal, which acts as regular coal and lasts equally as long, by cooking wood in a furnace
• Bonemeal can be used as fertilizer by right-clicking the bonemeal onto, for example, planted wheat or saplings, and it causes instant growth of said crops. Larger items, like trees, require more bonemeal than smaller items
• Spiders can now climb up walls

The following screenshots and videos were taken from Minecraft Wiki Minecraftforums.net, so there’s always a possibility that some of these items are mods instead of the actual in-game items.

Squid:

Cake and its crafting recipe. Cake is supposedly placed on the ground, and multiple people can take bites out of it, which replenishes health, and it also acts as a halfblock, which technically means you can make a cake staircase:

Black sheep:

Dyed sheep:

Sandstone:

Birch tree:

New wood types (birch and pine) mixed with regular wood:

Music blocks, which seem to be hooked up to redstone:

Dye crafting recipes:

The Dispenser can shoot items out of it that are put inside of it, which also works with arrows. If multiple item types are put into the Dispenser, it shoots one out at random. Here is the recipe for the Dispenser:

And here is a shot of the Dispenser in action, shooting arrows:

We’ll make sure to update this post as more things are discovered. In the meantime, have fun murdering squid and terrorizing sheep with dye.

Update, 1/14, 8:45am: Notch has posted the following set of bug fixes in Minecraft Beta 1.2_01:

Fixed various blocks acting really weird when placed (rails, torches, and more)
Optimized performance
Added a new painting that we forgot to include yesterday
Reduced spawn rates a bit
Fixed a whole pile of lighting bugs
No more ghosts at night
Added a temporary fix to get rid of chunk visibility errors

(via The Word of Notch and Minecraft Wiki)