This snapshot brings us another new Biome to the Nether.  Stepping out of my Nether Portal I was greeted by the new music and eerie atmosphere that is the new Basalt Deltas.  The Biome looks amazing and new blocks are always welcomed when it comes to building later projects.  What do you plan to do first when you load up this snapshot?

• Accessibility improvements
• Added a Piglin banner pattern
• Added Basalt Deltas biome to the Nether
• Added soul campfires. Warm your buns with the heat of one thousand souls!
• Added three new tracks of Nether music
• Added chiseled nether bricks, cracked nether bricks, and quartz bricks!
• Added a new set of stone blocks called Blackstone with regular, polished, and polished brick variants!
• Added Gilded Blackstone – Blackstone which has been imbued with gold and has a chance of dropping gold nuggets when broken
• Blackstone can be used to craft furnaces and stone tools

ACCESSIBILITY

• Added “Line Spacing” chat and accessibility option
• Added “Chat Delay” accessibility option

BASALT DELTAS

Basalt Deltas can now be found in the Nether!

• Remnants of volcanic eruptions, this biome sports a high concentration of basalt columns and lava deltas
• Walking through, you will be surrounded by flakes of flowing white ash
• Magma Cubes finally have a place to call home, spawning very frequently
• A new block, Blackstone, can be found in large patches here

NETHER MUSIC

We’re happy to announce that we’ve added three new tracks for the upcoming Nether Update, all composed by the very talented Lena Raine.

• Rubedo will be played in the Nether Wastes
• Chrysopoeia will be played in Crimson Forests
• So Below will be played in Soulsand Valleys and in Basalt Deltas

Two lines from Lena about the music. More to come in a separate blog post.

• “One of the primary instruments in Minecraft is the piano, and so one of my challenges to myself was to see how far I could push the sound of the piano until it resembled other things entirely–again, that alchemical process.”
• “I wanted each piece to feel like a progression of emotions, or a journey from place to place within this other world. There’s a degree of beauty to the Nether, but it is also terrifying in both its details and scale.”

Take a portal to the Nether, and stay awhile and listen…

• Dispenser changes
• Soul sand can now be used to craft soul torches
• Nether vegetation blocks (sprouts, roots, vines, fungus, wart and wart blocks) are now compostable
• Walls will now connect to more things! (like iron bars, panes and even pickles!)
• Hoes are now the appropriate tool for breaking leaves
• Mobs avoid walking on magma blocks and lit campfires

DISPENSER CHANGES

• Dispensers can now saddle pigs and horses
• Dispensers can now put horse armor on horses
• Dispensers can now put carpets on llamas
• Dispensers can now put chests on llamas, donkeys and mules
• Dispensers can now shear a Mooshroom
• Dispensers can shear snow golems

• Tab completion for resource location will match any part after a _
• Mob and pathfinding-related optimizations

• MC-171463 – Iron Bars don’t fully connect to walls
• MC-172120 – Hoglins don’t try to avoid fire
• MC-172209 – Non-fire resistant mobs don’t try to avoid walking into fire
• MC-172226 – Baby animals, villagers, and zombie villagers spawned with a spawn egg on an adult entity always are of the same variant
• MC-172268 – Bartering with a piglin by right-clicking does not display hand animation
• MC-174542 – Killing baby hoglins drops leather and porkchop
• MC-174559 – Baby hoglins/zoglins uses the same attack damage as an adult when spawned in some cases
• MC-175030 – Curse of Binding doesn’t affect Piglins
• MC-175169 – Respawn Anchor can create ghost blocks when it explodes
• MC-175176 – Using return portal in The End softlocks the game if /spawnpoint was used in The End
• MC-175256 – Screen is overlayed with a grey opaque texture when inside of a transparent block
• MC-175274 – “Quartz pillar” is translated as “White wool” (“Lana blanca” instead of “Pilar de cuarzo”) in Spanish (Spain)
• MC-175356 – Piglins and hoglins do not avoid magma blocks
• MC-175538 – Fish/Swimming sounds are louder than they should be
• MC-175566 – Piglins with full inventories drop the items they received
• MC-176095 – Striders have an unused fin in the strider.png texture file
• MC-176384 – CompassItem checks twice if LodestonePos tag exists
• MC-176517 – striders spawn in underground lava pockets
• MC-176633 – Lime carpets are named “acacia slab” in Spanish (Spain)
• MC-177069 – Dispenser will not drop glowstone as item when not connected to a respawn anchor
• MC-177085 – Missing UUID field in attributes crash the game
• MC-177102 – Zoglins aren’t considered an undead mob
• MC-177225 – Tag minecraft:water used before it was bound

The Steam team over at Valve has poked at the platform’s earnings data to paint a picture of how earnings trends on the digital storefront have shifted over the years, ultimately noting that successful launches are up 18 percent year-over-year.

That’s by Valve’s definition of success of course, which is described in the full breakdown as a game earning over $10,000 on Steam within two weeks of its launch.

By that same data, Valve says games in this pool typically go on to reap earnings of between $20,000 and $60,000 in their first 12 months, but it’s not stated if these figures mean total sales before Valve’s 30 percent cut or the actual takehome devs see from their game’s earnings.

In 2019, nearly 1,200 games cleared $10,000 earned, up from just under 1,000 the year before. The exact figures themselves are a little approximate thanks to the fact that the data is presented in a series of charts, but even with that vagueness there’s enough info offered to see the trend.

In a similar vein, Valve’s research notes report similar increases in games seeing $5,000, $50,000, $100,000, and $250,000 in their first two weeks from year to year, though the number of games hitting each milestone naturally wanes as earnings go up. Just under 300 games, for instance, earned $250,000 in their first two weeks on Steam, up from just over 225 in 2018 and 2017.

Valve notes as well that the year-over-year rise isn’t solely due to more games releasing on the platform with each passing year: the proportion of games meeting that $10k-in-two-weeks success is also up 11 percent from 2018. Looking at median game earnings, Valve also says the median game on Steam in 2019 earned 24 percent more than the median game in 2018.

Earnings aren’t up for every game on Steam however. As Valve notes in the full blog, those below the 35th percentile actually earned less than comparable launches in 2018.

“We opened the platform because we believed that ‘hand curating’ the titles released on Steam had led to some great titles being missed,” Valve writes, referencing below the graph projecting earnings if it had continued heavy curation. “While we can’t say for sure, we think the green portions of the bars above the dashed line are, largely, games that would never have previously found success on Steam… because they never would have been released on the platform at all.”

There’s more data for devs to chew through in the full report, including deeper dives into those games falling below the 35th percentile and graphs to go with many of the figures only mentioned here.

Google’s cloud-based game platform Stadia is finally within reach of the general public, potentially widening the platform’s audience through the launch of a two-month free Stadia Pro trial open to Google account holders in 14 countries.

This wider launch stands to give Stadia the accessible reach Google pushed for since the get-go, as anyone in participating countries with a Gmail account can now use their Chromecast, PC, or mobile device to stream gameplay from Stadia’s remote datacenters directly to their screens, even if they lack a powerful console or PC at home.

Opening Stadia up as a free-to-use platform has always been part of Google’s plan, but the exact timeline on which it would do so remained murky since it first launched for a select crew of premium Stadia purchasers last November. This larger roll out begins as a free trial for Stadia’s paid Pro tier, though those that choose not to pay for the subscription after the two month trial ends are able to continue to use Stadia and purchase games as free users on the Stadia Base tier.

Merging today’s launch with a free, two-month Stadia Pro trail lets new Stadia users stream at the higher quality reserved for paying Pro players and play the nine games currently offered for free in the Pro library. While they’ll lose access to both those higher settings and library of Pro titles should they chose not to pay Pro’s $9.99 per month free after the trial, users on the free tier are still able to buy games at retail price and build up a playable library of games as they would on any other platform.

Humble are running another bundle of interest to game developers, this one is the 7000 Game Dev Icon Bundle a collection of thousands of icons from inventory items, to weapons to match-3 style game icons.  Be sure to check your purchase history on Humble though, many of the icons in this bundle were in previous bundles.

As with all bundles, this one is organized into tiers:

1$ Tier

• Fantasy Weapon Icons
• Blue Loot Box
• Jewelry Icons
• Armor Icon Pack
• Flat Skills Icon

15$ Tier

• Spellbook Page 01
• Spellbook Page 02
• Spellbook Page 03
• Spellbook Page 04
• Sci-Fi Icons Pack
• Sci-Fi Skill Icons Pack
• Pirates Icons Pack
• Witch Craft Icons
• Fruit and Vegetables Icons
• Gems Icon
• Trading Icons
• RPG Armor Sets
• RPG Weapons Icons
• Loot Icons
• Herbal Icons
• Prehistoric Age Icons

20$ Tier

• Bags and Boxes Icons
• Scrolls and Books Icons
• Magic Items
• Potions Icons
• Resources and Craft Icon Pack
• Weapon and Armor Icon Pack
• Fishing Icons
• Hunting Icons
• Forest Icons
• Necromancer Icons
• Sci-Fi Armor Icons
• Mining Icons
• Trophy Icons
• Barbarian Icons
• Engineering Craft Icons
• Food Icons
• Spellbook Page 05
• Spellbook Page 06
• Spellbook Page 07
• Spellbook Page 08
• Spellbook Page 09
• Skill Icon Pack
• Sci-Fi Flat Skills
• Strategy Game Icons

As with all Humble Bundles, you decide how your money is allocated, between charity, humble the publisher and if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS if purchased using this link.  You can learn more and see inside one of the icon packs in the video below.

GameDev News Sale

By Amber Neely
Thursday, April 09, 2020, 11:40 am PT (02:40 pm ET)

Microsoft may be forced to delay the release of the Surface Neo and Windows 10X as a whole to focus on single-screen uses, according to sources within Microsoft.

In October of 2019, Microsoft revealed a future product that it didn’t plan on shipping until 2020 —the Surface Neo. It consisted of a dual-screen notebook with an extra keyboard and stylus support. The devices were set to ship with Microsoft’s new branch of Windows called Windows 10X.

On Thursday, rumors surfaced that Microsoft’s Chief Product Officer Panos Panay had said the Surface Neo dual-screen Windows 10X devices wouldn’t ship in 2020. Microsoft intends Windows 10X as a new, modern form of Windows 10 designed from the ground-up for dual-screen device. Furthermore, it guts many of the older Windows 10 features in favor of increased security and a more streamlined experience.

Dual-screen devices with Windows 10X were slated to ship around the holiday season of 2020. Likely due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft appears to have fallen behind in developing the Surface Neo and Windows 10X.

Microsoft has allegedly said they would not be allowing third-party dual-screen devices to ship with Windows 10X either, according to ZDNet.

In February, Microsoft had stated that they were hit hardest in their “More Personal Computing Segment,” a part of the company that deals with Windows licensing, accessories, all of Microsoft’s gaming initiatives, and Surface hardware.

Microsoft has not as of yet commented on the report.

Ever since Banjo and Kazooie were officially confirmed as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate fighters last summer, rumours and speculation surrounding new games and remasters for Rare’s legendary series have been doing the rounds online. One such rumour suggests that Playtonic, a studio housing plenty of ex-Rare staff, is helping Rare, Microsoft, or both to create a new title.

Today, and not for the first time, Playtonic Games has taken to social media to gently let down any fans believing such rumours to be true.

Playtonic says, “it’s never fun to come out and say these things, but we’re trying to avoid hopes being pinned on us”.

What the Yooka-Laylee developer really is currently up to is being kept under wraps for now, but it might be best to avoid dreaming about any brand new Banjo-Kazooie games guh-huh-ing onto your Switch. Is guh-huh-ing a word? It is now.