Happy Holidays

From everyone at Minecraft.net! Even the Enderman!

As someone who spent the last 364 days eating pies, napping and occasionally writing a sentence or two for this website boy do I need a holiday! But first, how about we take a quick look back at 2018 in Minecraft?

It was easily one of our busiest years yet. We made a splash this summer when we released The Update Aquatic on Bedrock, Java, PS4, PS3, PS Vita, Wii U and Xbox 360. You helped us help the oceans! Then you helped us help WWF!

We teamed up with Cartoon Network on an Adventure Time Minecraft episode (such a wonderful eleven minutes of animation that it’s now scientifically the best reason to own a pair of human eyes). Cross-play came to Nintendo Switch. And we even found some time to talk to some dolphins.

I also accused anyone who doesn’t like Adventure Time of not having a soul. I stand by these comments.

As if that wasn’t enough, we also announced literally everything this year. The Village and Pillage update! Minecraft: Dungeons! A new biome! More cats! New pandas! You getting married! (Sorry if you didn’t get married this year even though we announced it — we might have got a tad carried away).

But easily the best Minecraft news this year was the constant stream of amazing builds we saw month after month from you, the Minecraft community! Here’s some of my favourite builds we covered in 2018:

This terrific trainyard by Valvy was so good, I overlooked all the horrible train puns Per included in his (otherwise excellent) article about it.

These palace builds by Zosia were so fancy, my commoner peepers were unworthy of looking at them

Not only did Megavalve build one of the best treehouses I’ve ever seen, he did it in Pocket Edition. The man could probably build a working version of Minecraft out of an actual tree

Phillip and his pal LostInSpace built a remarkable rocket that looks so impressive, 98% of Mojang employees are convinced we could actually ride it into space. Why isn’t NASA returning our calls?

When I saw Noraa Builds futuristic Hologram City, I immediately started speaking the gibberish of tomorrow – today! Glibble hibble bleep blorp! (translation: this build is amazing!)

Argghh! Wait, don’t worry, I’m fairly certain this dinosaur is no longer alive. And is made of virtual blocks. But with Jeroen’s stunning recreation of dinosaurs in Minecraft, it’s pretty hard to tell!

Some people build a house. Others build a castle. William Nelson (not that one) decided he’d rather build T-Rexes playing poker. Words cannot describe my gratitude, William.

Some of my other highlights include getting regular Minecraft.net contributor Ash Parrish to quickly write an excellent guide to the fast-paced world of speedrunning in Minecraft. Sending Jay Castello to cover a music festival in Minecraft and instead of her waking up three days later in a broken tent and with no money, she handed in a brilliant article about it. And I still think this article from Kate Gray about this charming Christmas build is so wonderful, that even though we published it in late 2017, I’m including it in this article that’s supposed to be celebrating what we did in 2018. Ha! Take that, time!

We can’t wait to see what you build in 2019. Maybe you’ll be the next builder we feature on Minecraft.net? Send your best builds to scoops@minecraft.net so I can spend my holiday admiring them instead of socialising with my family.

Just time for a quick word from Minecraft.net’s very own Per Landin! Per wrote some lovely stuff for us this year, including this fantastic article about terraforming. So, Per! What was your Minecraft highlight of 2018?

My highlight of 2018? Sea of Thieves! Arrrr, what a game! Per Landin

...great. Thanks, Per.

Happy holidays everyone! And look out for a couple of seasonally appropriate posts over the next week!

Written by
Tom Stone
Published
12/24/2018

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