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

 * For a complete list of known changes, see Beta 1.8 and 1.0.0.

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
The Adventure Update was widely criticized due to many changes that were perceived as nonsensical, unnecessary, severe, or otherwise deleterious. One of the most criticized changes was the new "biome" system for terrain generation. The previous terrain-generation system was loved for its ability to create unique and amazing features, which in turn was the primary reason why players pushed for the ability to specify and share map seeds. The "biome" system, however, created maps that all looked the same. Ocean biomes in particular were also criticized for being useless and occupying far too much area; future patches significantly reduced the amount of area dedicated to oceans in an attempt to address this issue.

The biggest controversial change to gameplay was the hunger system, which made health-management more complicated without adding any gameplay value. It also sparked debate over whether it had increased or decreased the overall difficulty of the game.

Another controversial and radical alteration of gameplay was related to the spawning of passive mobs. Previously, passive mobs and hostile mobs played by the same set of rules: they would spawn randomly on appropriate terrain under appropriate lighting conditions, and would despawn when the player got far enough away from them. The Adventure Update kept the rules for hostile mobs intact but implemented a separate set of rules for passive mobs: new ones would only ever spawn on newly generated chunks as they were generated, and would never despawn. "Farming" passive mobs required the player to already have 2 or more of the animal that they were trying to farm, as well as food and a lot of time. As a direct result, passive mobs rapidly became hunted to extinction on multiplayer servers, and the items that they dropped became almost impossible to acquire. A common complaint was that it was easier to craft a full set of diamond armor than a full set of leather armor.

The experience system was useless in Beta 1.8; when a use was created for it in the following patch, this use was seen by many players as being too out-of-the-way, too random, and requiring too much new knowledge to be worth the hassle.

Other changes were universally seen as improvements, such as the long awaited Creative mode and passive mobs running away when hit.