Xbox 360 Minecraft 1.8 Update: Pre-Release Stage Begins, Release Date September 2, 2014

By Max Bonto, Christian Post Contributor Sunday, August 31, 2014

Mojang is now entering their pre-release phase for Minecraft's 1.8 update, otherwise known as "The Bountiful Update."

The pre-release updates will serve to push Minecraft to version 1.8 in preparation for the official release of the update on Sept. 2.

The pre-release updates were split into three versions, the Pre-release 1.8-pre1, 1.8-pre2, and 1.8-pre3.

1.8-pre 2 fixes the following bugs: Crashes when populating a chunk with empty (void) columns, Thrown splash potions have the color of water, Inverted Daylight Sensor doesn't drop anything when mined, Item frames do not work outside 524289 x -524288 coordinates, Placing Redstone dust on certain other objects destroy the object, Skin is using the wrong model, Cannot Summon Fireball/Witherskull With/Without Direction (Unable to Summon Object), Crash: Command "Summon SmallFireball" on Mobs!

While the 1.8-pre 3 fixes the following bugs:

Creepers target Iron Golems, causing terrain damage without interaction of a player, String duplication glitch, Creeper's new Attack Golem AI takes priority over Avoid Ocelot/Cat, Hang up when move out of 30,000,000, Combined minecart explosions duplicating destroyed armor stands' items and creating ghost items.

According to Jens Bergensten, one of Mojang's developers, the 1.8 update has taken the longest to create to date -- over 300 days went into creating it. With such a long creation time, the update is bound to have a lot of changes.

"These changes consist of both new features, and large game structure changes such as replacing the hard-coded 'block renderer' with a system that is able to read block shapes from data files, or performance enhancements such as multi-threading that client-side chunk rendering. We hope you will enjoy it!" Bergensten wrote.