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As game surpasses 300m copies sold.
Minecraft Live, developer Mojang’s annual livestream celebration of Minecraft, has now been and gone for another year, revealing the winner of 2023’s mob vote, new content coming in its 1.21 update, new Star Wars DLC, and more. All of which comes as Mojang announces an absolutely monster milestone: Minecraft has now sold over 300m copies, meaning it’s still the best-selling game to date, but is now well over 100m sales ahead of its nearest rival, GTA 5.
Back to Minecraft Live, though, and Mojang’s celebrations began with the reveal of Minecraft’s Star Wars: Path of the Jedi DLC, which comes to the in-game Marketplace on 7th November. It’ll give players the chance to rise through the ranks from padawan to Jedi Knight – meaning, yes, there’s lightsaber combat and Force powers – on a journey featuring familiar Star Wars characters and locations to explore.
There’s more Minecraft DLC on the way in the form of a tie-in with the BBC’s upcoming Planet Earth 3, promising to “immerse players in the wonders of the natural world”. It’ll be available via Minecraft Education and the Minecraft Marketplace when it arrives in 2024.
Also due next year, specifically in “mid-2024”, is a major new Minecraft Vanilla update, known as 1.21. Mojang outlined a number of the features it’ll bring during Minecraft Live, including the Crafter – marking the debut of automated crafting in-game – alongside Trial Chambers. These procedurally generated underground structures provide a “unique challenge…for players to overcome”, and include a new mob known as The Breeze. This jumping foe is able to shoots projectiles of wind energy that explode on impact, causing a small amount of damage within a radius of a few blocks and causing knock-back to everyone in the affected area.
Update 1.21 also adds the Trial Spawner, enabling players to spawn a specified target count of mobs (dynamically adjusted based on the number of nearby players) according to a timer. It also rewards players by ejecting its loot. And finally for 1.21, there’s the new Copper Bulb, which emits light depending on its oxidation stage, with more oxidation meaning less light.
Rounding out today’s Minecraft-specific news, Mojang shared the results of what’s proven to be a controversial mob vote this year. Three possible mobs have been revealed in the run-up to Minecraft Live – the crab, penguin, and armadillo – and, with voting now ended, the community has collectively chosen the armadillo as the next mob addition to the game, and it’ll arrive as part of 1.21 in the middle of next year. 2024, incidentally, also marks Minecraft’s 15th anniversary, and Mojang says it has “exciting plans” to celebrate.
That wasn’t quite everything shown during Minecraft Live, however; Mojang also unveiled a number of new additions for this year’s real-time strategy spin-off, Minecraft Legends. There’s a new Lost Legends challenge event, titled Creeper Clash, which arrives on 19th October, just in time for Halloween, with Snow vs Snout to follow. The latter will arrive alongside new features including frogs, a new piglin unit and structure, and new potion-throwing witch allies, all coming in Minecraft Legends’ December update.
