Adventure Update



The Adventure Update was a major update to Minecraft focused on fighting, exploration, and adventuring, as well as other aspects. Its content was implemented in Beta 1.8 and Minecraft 1.0. It was announced on June 10, 2011 by Notch and was initially planned to be implemented in Beta 1.7. An early version of the Adventure Update was playable by fans at Mojang's booth at PAX Prime 2011, which was held between August 26th and 28th. Because of the size of the content, the first part of the update was pushed back to Beta 1.8, which became available on the 14th of September 2011 and the rest of the update being part of Minecraft 1.0, which was released on November 18, 2011. The Pre-Releases of Minecraft Beta 1.8 and 1.9 were leaked before their official releases, and Notch approved these leaks on his twitter.

Features

 * To see complete list of known changes, see the Version history.

Trailer
Leading up to the release of the Adventure Update, a trailer documenting some of its major features was released on Mojang's official YouTube channel on the 6th of September 2011. The trailer was made by Hat Films.

Reception
Because so many things were added and changed in Beta 1.8, it was criticized by many in the community. One of the most criticized changes was the new terrain generation system. Players complained that, whereas the previous versions of the terrain generator were capable of making amazing natural sculptures, the new biomes were now boring; i.e., every swamp biome looked identical to every other swamp biome, every desert biome looked like every other desert biome, etc., and the new ocean biomes were too large and "useless". In addition the new terrain generator removed the distortion wall in the Far Lands causing some complaints. This was likely unintentional, as the distortion wall was an accident and was never intended to be in the game to begin with.

Another criticized feature was the Hunger system, which was seen as making the relationship between food and health more complicated without improving gameplay.

Numerous mobs (Endermen, Blazes) and items (Ender Pearls, blaze rods) were added that had absolutely no purpose except to get a player to a new dimension called "the end", which itself was not well-received due to being extremely small, inhabited by very few types of mobs, and composed of only two types of blocks.

The addition of experience and enchanting was seen as unnecessary and not a positive contribution to the game's "survival construction" theme, and the relationship between experience and enchanting was perceived as nonsensical.

The ocean level, which had previously been exactly halfway between the "floor" and "ceiling" of the map, was lowered by one meter for no apparent reason. This new asymmetry was extremely irritating to some people.

The manner in which passive mobs spawn was changed. Previously, they obeyed the same rules as hostile mobs: they could spawn randomly in the right conditions and would despawn if a player got too far away for too long. In the Adventure Update, new passive mobs could only be generated by either exploring new terrain and hoping for the best or capturing and feeding existing mobs to "breed" them. This eliminated "hunting" as a viable play style, made it possible for passive mobs to become permanently extinct on multiplayer servers, made leather effectively more rare than gold, and was generally perceived as making mob-farming much more complicated without improving gameplay.

Conversely, other features were praised, including the ability to "stack" food, the addition of new block types like stone bricks and iron fences, and a change in bow and arrow mechanics to encourage careful aiming instead of rapid-fire spamming. Many players approved the inclusion of a long awaited Creative mode, a game mode that removed all survival aspects of Minecraft and allowed players to focus solely on building if they wished to do so.