Originally announced back in March, a substantial update to Minecraft: Pocket Edition 0.11.1 has finally landed on the App Store today bringing loads of new features such as skins, chicken jockeys, fishing and much more.
Yes, you can now stuff wolves in boats and go fishing in Minecraft, isn’t that wonderful? All joking aside, you can now customize the appearance of your Minecraft characters with skins.
Skins are sold through the In-App Purchase mechanism, and some don’t cost a dime. In addition, players can easily upload custom skins to the game and even create their own ones using the Minecraft: Skin Studio app or any image editing software for that matter.
While skins are cool, they serve purely aesthetic purposes and don’t affect how the game plays nor do they give you any special abilities.
The game offers bundles of paid skins, such as City Folk and Town Folk designed by Army of Trolls. Each contains around 20 skins and will set you back 99 cents.
“We’ll also give away a few free skins when each pack releases, just like on console,” developers noted. As mentioned before, you can simply use the Minecraft: Skin Studio tool to draw your own skins and upload them to Pocket Edition.
The new fishing feature puts the recently introduced boats to good use. Boats have space for two so you can take that wolf or another pet of yours for a pleasant ride. You can even throw things from boats, including snowballs and eggs.
There’s also a new World Edit screen where you can rename worlds, change game mode and customize Minecraft with new mobs, food options and more.
Aside from the skinning feature, support for multiple new languages and aforesaid perks, this edition of Minecraft is packed to the gills with a slew of other improvements, as detailed right below.
Minecraft: Pocket Edition 0.11.1 changelog:
Custom skins:
- Skins: change your in-game look by uploading your own skin or choosing one from our downloadable packs
- Just so you know, the skins update is compatible with Minecraft: Skin Studio, available from the App Store
- One more thing about the skins: you need to pay to unlock some, but loads of them are free, so don’t stress about it too much
Other stuff:
- Multiple language support
- Boats with space for two! Take your pet for a pleasant ride
- You can also throw stuff from the boats, like snowballs and eggs
- Fishing: Now you can fish for fishies
- Squids
- Spider jockeys
- Cave Spiders
- Bats
- Adorable baby zombies
- Weird chicken jockeys
- Clownfishes are now edible
- A fancy new World Edit screen so you can rename worlds, change game mode and do other things
- Creative players can no longer be set on fire phew
- We’ve stopped cheeky chickens from walking on water
- Animals can no longer breed without touching each other ooh err
- Drinking milk now removes mob effects
- Ridiculous amounts of bug fixes
- Loads more cool things that you should discover for yourself
According to Tommaso Checchi, a member of the Minecraft development team, support for ‘Made for iPhone’ game controllers will be added to Minecraft soon.
Having been downloaded more than thirty million times across platforms as of January 2015, Minecraft is one of the most popular games in the App Store. If you’re a fan of open world games and like building stuff out of blocks, you should probably take Minecraft: Pocket Edition for a spin.
Last September, Windows giant Microsoft acquired Minecraft maker Mojang in a transaction valued at a whopping $2.5 billion. Development of mobile editions of Minecraft for iOS, Android and Windows Phone will continue unabated, Microsoft has confirmed.
The full Minecraft experience is available on PC and the Xbox console. On iOS, the 14.6-megabyte app requires an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad with iOS 5.1.1 or later.