Java Edition 14w30a

14w30a is the thirty-eighth snapshot for 1.8.

Additions

 * Banners
 * Can be worn as head gear - but only using commands
 * Over 16*4006 possible combinations = 6.5536x1016
 * Crafted like a sign, just with one color of wool instead of planks
 * Can be stacked to 16
 * Most patterns are created by arranging dyes in certain ways around a banner on a crafting table
 * Additional patterns: creeper, skull & crossbones, brick, and flower - making these without dyes will result in a black pattern, use dyes to get different colors (items: creeper skull, wither skeleton skull, brick block, oxeye daisy)
 * 33 crafting recipes which produce different patterns
 * Up to 6 layers of patterns possible
 * Can be placed on walls or on the ground (16 rotations possible)
 * Sway with the wind
 * Can be cloned by crafting them together with a blank banner
 * Top-most layer can be removed using cauldrons
 * NBT tags
 * New  tag for entities
 * Setting to 1 disables sound produced by that entity, such as idle and hurt sounds.
 * Statistics
 * Detects how many times the player has talked to villagers (opened the trading GUI)
 * Detects how many times the player has traded with villagers
 * Detects how many times the player has traded with villagers
 * Detects how many times the player has traded with villagers

Changes

 * Commands
 * command can now summon lightning using
 * Mob Heads
 * Made creeper, skeleton and zombie heads available in survival
 * Creepers, skeletons, wither skeletons, and zombies drop their heads when killed by charged creepers. Wither skeletons continue to have heads as rare drops.
 * Skulls worn on heads are now bigger so the 2nd skin layer no longer peeks through
 * Player and mob heads in inventories and held by mobs/players now display the actual head
 * Video Settings
 * Render distance slider now goes up to 32 when using 64-bit Java
 * Requires 2 GB of allocated RAM
 * Removed Advanced OpenGL
 * Performance improvements
 * Rewrote chunk sorting
 * Ported over the visibility culling code from MCPE to avoid rendering invisible stuff
 * Threaded chunk rebuilds
 * Lighting
 * Completely fixed black spots
 * You will need to re-load old worlds for them to be fixed
 * F3 debug screen
 * Now displays how many chunk sections are being rendered currently and how many chunk sections are out of view in percent, the OpenGL version, display size, vendor and GPU
 * "Vanilla" added to the version number. e.g., "Minecraft 14w30b (14w30b/Vanilla)"
 * Presumably this will say something different if modded. Very few mods (or even APIs) currently exist for versions this recent.
 * F3+H tooltips now show how many NBT tags an item has
 * Block names no longer contain blockstate data in brackets next to their name (in the view of a block's name and data along the right side of the screen)
 * Data is still shown in separate rows beneath the name
 * Data is still shown in separate rows beneath the name

Fixes
33 bugs fixed

From released versions before 1.8
 * – Flight can be faster than chunk load
 * – Lighting error due to  ignoring block at the top level of an   instance (off by 1 error)
 * – command can't summon lightning
 * – The well in a desert village is made out of the wrong material / cobblestone
 * –  has   also for graphic cards without Advanced OpenGL in video settings

From the 1.8 snapshots
 * – Falling sand can replace pistons, destroying them
 * – Chunks don't render
 * – Stairs are backwards in the creative inventory and hotbar
 * – Sign with /  doesn't update player inventory
 * – Breaking block below tall plants causes them to drop two items
 * – Bug in the menu
 * – Broken resource packs: game crashes when I try to load 14w27a/b
 * – Flower pots with metadata placed in 1.7 will not render in 1.8 snapshots / metadata not removed
 * – Sandstone stairs bug in desert villages
 * – Turning off VSync crashes the game
 * – "#PLAYER" appears on sidebar
 * – doesn't consider x, y, z anymore
 * – "" can display invalid size using ""
 * – Cubic player selector always finds player if there are more than 31 entities around

From the previous snapshot
 * – Carpet has incorrect height
 * – Crash in Video Settings menu
 * – Command selector parameters,   and   don't work
 * – Game crashes when trying to enable VSync
 * – Slabs can not be placed in adventure mode with tag
 * – Spawners (dungeons, strongholds, etc...) can spawn mobs outside of worldborder
 * – has incorrect syntax
 * – adds 214748364 / 0xCCCCCCC to "Damage Taken" statistics
 * – Overlapping dungeons don't spawn correctly
 * – Rendering empty chunks/cubes in 14w29b (or number of rendered chunks on debug screen (C) is wrong)
 * – command not updated when the command was executed with a sign
 * – Chunks containing paintings may be wiped and regenerated upon load
 * – command not updated when the command was executed with a sign
 * – Chunks containing paintings may be wiped and regenerated upon load