'Minecraft' 1.12 Release Date Set For Friday; New Pre-Release Build Out Now

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2011-11-18
Minecraft
Minecraft Mojang

The next big Minecraft patch should be ready before week’s end, Mojang announced on Wednesday, and the World of Color update will include all manner of changes for the popular sandbox game. But Minecraft fans don’t have to wait another minute to see the latest build.

Mojang has been working on Minecraft’s World of Color update for months. The game’s next patch was announced back in February, when the studio published Minecraft snapshot 17w06a, but it’s probably safe to assume Mojang has been working on Update 1.12 for most of 2017 (if not longer). Features from this month’s update run the gamut. World of Color adds Parrots -- which led to a minor controversy earlier this month -- along with more than a dozen color variants for existing blocks like wool and clay. It also introduces a new block, concrete, along with colorful concrete powder that has properties similar to sand blocks.

There are plenty of changes that don’t fit the World of Color theme too. Minecraft 1.12 introduces a narrator, new books and custom recipes, all of which should be especially popular with aspiring and veteran map makers. You don’t have to settle for red sheets on your bed anymore and stairs have been tweaked to make building off of them a bit easier going forward. And there are dozens (maybe hundreds) of bug fixes packed into the next major Minecraft patch. And it’s all expected to hit the game’s stable development branch on Friday, June 2.

Fans don’t have to wait until Friday for their latest taste of the patch though. Mojang also published a new pre-release build of Minecraft 1.12 on Wednesday, featuring a handful of bug fixes and other tweaks missing from previous iterations of the patch. Mojang expects this to be the last pre-release build of Minecraft 1.12 before Friday’s debut. But if another emerges, either on Wednesday afternoon or sometime on Thursday, it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen the studio publish an unscheduled build to address a major bug.

Here are the patch notes for Minecraft 1.12 pre-release 7, via Mojang:

  • Gave all challenges experience rewards
  • Fixed bug MC-59535 - Server log outputs TextComponent object rather than its Text property for player lost connection/Disconnecting message
  • Fixed bug MC-117764 - No error is logged when using knowledge book with invalid recipes
  • Fixed bug MC-118002 - Pausing game while moving causes screen shaking
  • Fixed bug MC-118021 - Parrot spawn egg appears after rabbit spawn egg in English (US)
  • Fixed bug MC-118038 - Crafting items with no recipe file shows empty toast
  • Fixed bug MC-118057 - Unexpectedly high CPU usage in menus
  • Fixed bug MC-118067 - Pressing t in Spectator mode allows you to use recipe book search
  • Fixed bug MC-118068 - Recipe book uses always t for focusing search instead of chat keybinding
  • Added some new covfefe!

Minecraft is currently available on pretty much everything from consoles to smart devices.

Be sure to check back with iDigitalTimes and follow Scott on Twitter for more Minecraft news in 2017 and however long Mojang supports Minecraft in the years ahead.

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