‘Minecraft’ Battle Mini Game coming for free to consoles, new snapshot 16W21B released

Mojang and Microsoft have been hard at work in creating some new content for the console editions, “Minecraft Xbox One Edition,” “Minecraft PS4 Edition,” “Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition” and “Minecraft PS3 Edition.” Now the developers are introducing mini games.

“With our new mini games, we’ll be helping you quickly and easily jump into competitions with tailor-made rulesets, so you can have fun straight away without having to fuss around with manual count-downs, laboriously prep loot chests or keep score,” said the developers over at Xbox Wire.

The main aim here is to provide players with the instant satisfaction of playing in “Minecraft.” It’s just another way to play, since creation is still the main meat in playing the game.

The mini game, dubbed Battle, will let players get into competitive multiplayer fights using survival, speed and strategy. Using the resources found in randomly-generated chests place in the PVP maps, players will combat each other in a death match until the victor remains standing.

Battle lets players spectate when they are out of the game. They do so by becoming bats that fly around the arena to watch. Battle will allow four players to go in split-screen, while online play allows up to eight players via the Xbox Live. Matchmaking to find other community members is also available as an option.

Battle will debut in “Minecraft” consoles this June for free. It will be available as a game update, and will feature three more maps for players to explore. There will be additional map packs, though these will already be paid content at US$2.99 (approx. AU$4.15).

Mojang has also released the latest snapshot, 16W21B. Following an earlier snapshot, this one has fixed a few more bugs. Specifically, there are no longer any block breaking/falling dust particles that have the wrong colour, lava textures that do not display correctly and lighting bugs in inventory.

The new snapshot is already available for “Minecraft” players to download. As usual, there are risks to testing snapshots, so it’s best to back up worlds in cases of corrupted world from the snapshot.