Minecraft may be almost eight years old at this point, but it's thriving more than ever between new features, a bigger player base, and upcoming spin-offs.
For instance, the team at Mojang revealed the beta availability of a new Character Creator on Windows 10, Xbox One, and Android.
Using the Character Creator, you can personalise your avatar in a number of ways, including body size and shape, limb replacement and tweaking of eyes, mouth, hairstyles and colours, facial hair and skin tones. Does that mean you can create a character that looks just like you? Well, to the extent that your lovely looks translate to blocks and pixels, absolutely! What about a blue, grinning character with piercing red eyes and a bright green goatee? That sounds terrifying, but go ahead! You can even play around with animated textures in the Dressing Room, which is where you’ll get ready to hit the catwalk! Or, you know, to mine for dirt.
More than 100 features (including all hair, eyes, mouths, skin textures, facial hair, and body sizes) will be available for free. There will also be a range of custom accessories, created by the Minecraft team, available for purchase. Additionally, you will be able to take part in different Minecraft-related activities to earn free, unique accessories for your character.
With the new Character Creator available, are custom skins going away? Of course not! You still keep all the skins you’ve purchased, imported from Java (on a platform that allows for that), or otherwise collected. While you can’t bring classic skins into the Character Creator to further tweak them, there are two very notable exceptions here. You may know them, they go by the names of Steve and Alex. Feel free to start from either character, or a completely random character, to jolt your creativity.
It’s worth noting that the features of a newly created character are purely cosmetic and will not make you stronger, faster or able to smell diamonds. Speaking of something purely cosmetic (yet in very high-demand!), you may be reading all of this, hyperventilating ever so slightly, and thinking to yourself “CAPES CAPES CAPES”! And yes indeed, the Character Creator will allow us to issue capes to Bedrock players in the future! We have some fun plans for this, so stay tuned.
In other Minecraft news, Business Insider reported this week that the game's monthly player base has gone up to 112 million, jumping significantly from the latest update we got.
Helen Chiang, "Minecraft" studio head, said:
What we find is that it's a game that players keep coming back to. It may not always be the one that's in the forefront, because there are a lot of great games that continue to come out, but it's one that they love to return to.
