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Although Minecraft has a very specific style and design sensibility to it, the game is also, more or less, a blank canvas. Players can jump into the game without any preconceived notions and dream up anything from a faithful recreation of the Starship Enterprise to the town of King's Landing from Game of Thrones.

However, while gamers have found clever ways to bend Minecraft to their will, creating any and everything under the sun, they have never been able to directly influence the game. That is, until now.

With the introduction of update 1.8's new World Editor, players will be able to customize their starting Minecraft world in some very specific ways. How specific, you ask? Well, check out the video above to find out.

As the footage shows, developer Mojang has outfit the World Editor with a total of 16 presets, each of which can be customized to the "T." Players can use the sliders to alter the terrain in a progressive fashion, or they can get real specific and input actual parameters of their choosing.

At the end of the day, though, Minecraft is still procedurally generating the player's terrain, only now with some influencing factors thrown into the mix. Want to create a terrain that is mostly water or lava? You can do that.

Minecraft World Editor Video

For our money, the World Editor seems like the type of complex, back-end feature that only die-hard Minecraft players will really sink their teeth into, but it's impressive nonetheless. The fact that Mojang is still able to put out compelling updates after more than a year of availability proves just how creative the base Minecraft concept is. In fact, gamers tend to agree, as Minecraft continues to hit sales milestone after sales milestone, from 1 million sold on PS3 to 21 million sold worldwide.

There's no official release date for update 1.8, but it should reportedly be available some time in May. In addition to the World Editor, the update also includes a few changes to the Survival and Adventure Modes in the game, as well as three new stone types (granite, andesite, and diorite).

What do you think of the Minecraft World Editor? Does it look like something you would play around with or is it too complicated for your tastes?

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Source: Mojang