Earlier this month, Twitch announced that a partnership had been struck between the popular streaming provider and Mojang, the developers of Minecraft. The announcement came during MineCon, a gathering of fans and Mojang employees to celebrate the success and creativity of the Minecraft community.

Considering Twitch is the largest video game streaming provider in the world, and the insanely popular Minecraft is already one of the top games on Twitch, the partnership is one which made sense from the beginning. Now, the public finally has a chance to test out the integrated features for themselves.

Mojang announced the release of the Minecraft 1.7.4 a few days ago with word that the Snapshot would release today, which includes full support for Twitch streaming straight from the in-game environment. This only applies to gamers on Windows or Mac versions of the game, with no word on if that feature will ever make it consoles. Although Twitch is already a part of the PS4 share functions (alongside Ustream) and is coming to Xbox One early next year after a delay.

In order to stream items to Twitch from inside the game, players must first log in to their Minecraft account on the official website and manually link their twitch account. This ensures that only verified owners of the appropriate Minecraft and Twitch accounts can post on the owner's behalf. From then on, streaming can be done instantly straight from the game itself. By default, the start and stop button for broadcasting is F6 - though this can be changed at anytime.

From the pause menu, players can now go to a Broadcast Settings tab and change the default quality of their stream, which is ultimately dependent on the strength of their internet connection and the processing power of their own computer.  Since Minecraft already has a very simplistic menu to use, any players who already linked their accounts will likely have the know-how to change their broadcast settings with ease.

According to Mojang developer Dinnerbone, the snapshot also includes the usual array of bug fixes and optimizations, though what they actually are wasn't elaborated on. Dinnerbone did confirm some rendering problems with distances set over 8 were fixed, though it should be noted even with those settings some multiplayer servers limit the rendering distance themselves, regardless of what is set on the local game.

The integrated Twitch functionality will only work on computers with either Windows Vista or higher, or Mac OS X Lion (10.7) or higher.

For those interested in playing the latest updated Minecraft snapshot, it can be activated from the launch of the game through the Profile Settings screen.

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Follow John Jacques on Twitter @Makelevi.

Source: Mojang