![]() Like Minecraft itself, each build plate is completely open-ended. In this little world you can build whatever you want, or dig into the ground, build an inverted palace for your cave chickens or create a paradise for your mud-loving pigs - whatever you want. Whenever you feel like it, you can bring out what the team calls a build plate, which is a special item, a flat square that you virtually put down somewhere in the real world - on a surface like the table or floor, for instance - and it transforms into a small, but totally functional, Minecraft world. They don’t - they’re just the raw materials for it. You may have been wondering how these collectibles and mini-games amount to Minecraft. Fortunately it works really well.įirst, though, let me explain the whole build plate thing. This is AR-native, and for good and ill the only way you can really play is by using your phone as a window into another world. This is not AR-optional, as with Niantic’s games. “If you want to play Minecraft Earth without AR, you have to turn it off,” said Torfi Olafsson, the game’s director. And in an AR encounter, all nearby players are brought in, and can contribute and collect the reward in shared fashion.Īnd it’s in these AR experiences and the “build plates” you’re doing it all for that the game really shines. If I see a chest, you see a chest - and the chest will have the same items. Importantly, all these things - chests, mobs and encounters - are shared between friends. The team said they’re designing a huge number of these encounters. For example you might find a crack in the ground that, when mined, vomits forth a volume of lava you’ll have to get away from, and then inside the resulting cave are some skeletons guarding a treasure chest. Last are adventures, which are tiny AR instances that let you collect a resource, fight some monsters and so on. ![]() The team highlighted a favorite of theirs, the muddy pig, which when placed down will stop at nothing to get to mud and never wants to leave, or a cave chicken that lays mushrooms instead of eggs. You snag them like items, and they too have rarities, and not just cosmetic ones. Mobs are animals like those you might normally run across in the Minecraft wilderness: pigs, chickens, squid and so on. These can be a number of things: resources in the form of treasure chests, mobs and adventures.Ĭhests are filled with blocks, naturally, adding to your reserves of cobblestone, brick and so on, all the different varieties appearing with appropriate rarity. The fantasy map is filled with things to tap on, unsurprisingly called tappables. It uses OpenStreetMaps data, including annotated and inferred information about districts, private property, safe and unsafe places and so on - which will be important later. The look is blocky to be sure, but not so far off the normal look that you won’t recognize it. There’s a map, of courseīecause it’s Minecraft Earth, you’ll inhabit a special Minecraftified version of the real world, just as Pokémon GO and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite put a layer atop existing streets and landmarks. Let’s run down what MCE looks like - verbally, at least, as Microsoft is being exceedingly stingy with real in-game assets. That introduces some fun opportunities and a few non-trivial limitations. You collect stuff so you can build with it and share your tiny, blocky worlds with friends. Where it’s unlike other such games is that it’s built on top of Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, meaning it’s not some offshoot or mobile cash-in this is straight-up Minecraft, with all the blocks, monsters and redstone switches you desire, but in AR format. Yes, yes - but what is it? Less succinctly put, MCE is like other real-world-based AR games in that it lets you travel around a virtual version of your area, collecting items and participating in mini-games. And everywhere you go, you can play Minecraft.” ![]() So what is it? As executive producer Jesse Merriam put it succinctly: “Everywhere you go, you see Minecraft. And now it is making its biggest leap yet - to a real-world augmented reality game in the vein of Pokémon GO, called Minecraft Earth.Īnnounced today but not playable until summer (on iOS and Android) or later, MCE (as I’ll call it) is full-on Minecraft, reimagined to be mobile and AR-first. That’s the case with the creators, or rather stewards, of Minecraft at Microsoft, where the game has become a product category unto itself. When your game tops 100 million players, your thoughts naturally turn to doubling that number.
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