Microsoft megahit Minecraft to get more powerful on mobile - CNET

Part of the appeal of Minecraft, Microsoft's immensely popular video game, is its remarkable adaptability. Fans can rewrite the rules to make Minecraft's blocky virtual world behave just as they want.

Well, some fans can. People who use Minecraft on personal computers get lots of flexibility that's missing from Minecraft Pocket Edition, the $7 version for phones and tablets from Apple or powered by Google's Android software. And a new Minecraft product for Windows 10, more closely related to Pocket Edition than to the original Minecraft for PCs, is similarly restricted.

But the mobile and Windows 10 versions are escaping their shackles. Microsoft will add programmable items called command blocks to the mobile and Windows 10 versions, Jens Bergensten, lead developer on Minecraft, said in an interview with CNET. The company hopes to enable the more extensive changes called "mods" on both those versions and on the one that runs on game consoles, too.

The decision by Mojang, the Minecraft developer Microsoft acquired in 2014 for $2.5 billion, is a big deal in the gaming world. Bringing the PC version's flexibility to mobile devices means millions more people can move beyond plain old "vanilla" Minecraft and dive into its deeper levels. And with mobile devices assuming a commanding presence in our computing lives, that means Minecraft has a better chance at keeping its crown as the video game equivalent of Lego, an all-purpose foundation that kids can take in whatever direction their imaginations dream up.

Command blocks and mods are core to the remarkable success Minecraft can claim as a tool educators embraced to help kids lea about everything from architecture to programming.

Minecraft 101

Mojang has sold more than 70 million copies of Minecraft so far. For anyone still not familiar with it, the game offers a virtual world with trees, cows, pigs, chickens and lakes for your character to explore. You can tu wood and underground minerals into houses, tools, armor and other things useful to survive the nightly onslaught of dangerous "mobs" of zombies and creepers.

That's survival mode. In Minecraft's creative mode, mobs are harmless, resources are infinite and you build vast structures at your leisure. You can build interactive devices wired with circuitry using a material called redstone.

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But for the original personal computer version, you can really customize the game in two ways: programmable items called command blocks and "mods," short for modifications.

Using command blocks, you can add new Minecraft rules that do things like teleport players to a different part of the virtual world, reward them with a powerful sword, confine them to a jail, summon a flying pig into existence and obliterate all dangerous zombies. Mods enable more extensive changes by altering the programming of Minecraft itself: for more excitement, fly on Minecraft dragons, boost Minecraft's graphics or add the risk of toxic gases when you're mining.

Researching options

"Modding is a core element of the Minecraft community," Bergensten said. "In order to support mods for other platforms, we need to create a system that allows this without modifying the application itself. We are currently researching our options and hope to solve this soon."

That's good news for the enthusiasts out there who've poured thousands of hours into custom versions of Minecraft -- like the vast WesterosCraft world that reproduces much of the Game of Thrones fantasy realm in a Minecraft universe.

Bringing the mobile versions up to the same level as the PC versions will be tough, though. The processing horsepower is catching up, but command blocks, for example, require players to type long, complicated text commands -- hard even with a full-size keyboard.

"Usually what is the most time consuming is to adapt the user interface for touch and gamepad, especially considering it's a bit more cumbersome to type text," Bergensten said.

But Microsoft and Mojang are working on it. "Our ambition is to reach feature parity as soon as possible, including command blocks."