Pi Edition

Minecraft: Pi Edition is a version of Minecraft developed for the Raspberry Pi. It is based on an old version Alpha 0.6.1 of Pocket Edition but is slightly cut down, containing a revised feature set and support for multiple programming languages. The Pi Edition is intended as an educational tool for novice programmers. It is available to download for free, from the official downloads page or directly from Amazon AWS and users are encouraged to interact with the game using an API.

It is being developed by Aron Nieminen - one of the developers of the Pocket Edition, as well as Daniel Frisk.

Release
Minecraft: Pi Edition was originally announced on the Mojang website on November 24, 2012.

There was a compiled build labelled 0.1 on the Mojang repository, albeit encrypted until the game's launch in February 2013, making it inaccessible. When it was first uploaded, however, it was unprotected for a short amount of time, allowing for the download of the game before its true release. On December 20, 2012, Mojang released a post on their official site announcing the release of the Pi Edition. However, it was promptly removed and no game release was made.

Minecraft: Pi Edition was publicly released on February 11, 2013, and the previous release announcement post was restored. However, the Pi Edition website still lists its post date as December 20, 2012. .

Addition To Raspbian
On September 15, 2014, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced that Minecraft: Pi Edition would be installed by default with new versions of the Raspbian operating system. And Minecraft: Pi Edition is now available as a package under the name 'minecraft-pi' and downloaded/installed with the command 'sudo apt-get install minecraft-pi'.

Gameplay
Minecraft Pi Edition is very similar to Pocket Edition in many ways. Like Pocket Edition Old Worlds, there are barrier walls, the player skin is always the default skin (but can be changed by replacing the char.png image in the game's files), and the title and the world selection screens were the same until Pocket Edition updated to 0.7.0.

The player has the ability to sneak, but not sprint. Currently, there is no mob spawning, even though the player starts with an iron sword in hand. A bow is also available, but when used, the player will hold the bow back indefinitely until the player selects another item or logs off.

Trivia

 * The Pi Edition has not received an update for over 2 years, making it the version with the longest time between releases.
 * As it still uses Pocket Edition version 0.6.1, the Camera and Cyan Flower are now exclusive to this edition.