Minecraft Horse Photo

Are you one of the millions of digital blocky miners and crafters? Because there are millions. Mojang's Minecraft stat tracker revealed just days ago that the PC version of the indie super success story had crossed the 10 million games sold mark while 4J studios, developers of the Xbox 360 version of the game, happily announced that their version of the game crossed the 6 million units sold mark. The latter is still the second most played game on Xbox Live and has been since launch. Impressive for a game that first released publicly in 2009.

What does all of this success mean? Business as usual as the dev teams for both versions continue to work on bug fixes and new features for upcoming updates. And maybe, just maybe, after being in the works for several years now, Minecraft may add a mount other than the pig. We're talking equine.

In our video game news wrap up this morning we covered the latest sales milestones Minecraft and there's really no end in site as more and more players continue to jump into the world, making executives at LEGO facepalm, and more updates continue to improve the game and add more content. For Xbox 360 players, they're still unforuneately playing in a very limited version of the game with borders around its relatively small world, and pay walls blocking player customization. Not to mention the lack of mod support which has helped the PC version of Minecraft expand with near limitless potential.

What's next for both versions of Minecraft? On the Minecraft forums, 4J Studios outlined the fixes coming with Update 10 (the last update (9) added The End):

  • Fix for Silver LIVE profiles getting an error message on loading a save.
  • Fix for lighting bug causing unlit areas even when light sources were placed in the these areas.
  • Fixed slowdown caused by explosions (TNT and Creepers).
  • Fixed frame rate slowdown in The End being experienced by some players until the Endercrystals were destroyed.
  • Fixed crash when placing lots of Item Frames with Maps inside.
  • Fixed collision box issue at the top of Ladders.
  • Fixed issues with animals taking damage randomly, or falling through the wooden planks floors.
  • Made Dispenser suck water/lava back into an empty bucket.
  • Fix for Potion Bottles being launched from a Dispenser.
  • Enabled placing Pressure Plates on Nether Fence.
  • Fixed an issue with Fire Charges sticking at the edge of the world.
  • Change to not be able to place more than the maximum amount of Paintings/Item Frames, rather than removing previously placed ones.
  • Stop players from interacting with Item Frames and Paintings when ‘Can Build and Mine’ is disabled.
  • Fixed the Custom Skin Animation setting not working.
  • Play the correct sound on hitting the Enderdragon.

The update is done and just waiting on the Microsoft certification process.

As for the flagship version of the game, the header image up top was tweeted out by Minecraft lead developer Jens Bergensten when he shared the 10 million sales news. Sounds like horse mounts are coming with the 1.6 update! What about horse combat?

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The best part of the tweet are the responses joking about the lack of female characters in Minecraft (Notch says its genderless) while other tweets refer to the horse as a giant hairy pig because of the nature of the simplified 3D models of the game. We can't wait for the Riders of Rohan Lord of the Rings mod!

For more, read about the upcoming Minecraft 'Realms' subscription service.

Let me know on Twitter @rob_keyes what one thing you'd like added to Minecraft the most!

Sources: 4J Studios