Over the weekend, Raspberry Pi community manager Liz Upton announced on the Raspberry Pi website that Mojang is currently working on a version of Minecraft for the popular Linux-powered computing platform. This will actually be a port of Minecraft: Pocket Edition for Android, and will reportedly cost absolutely nothing to download, install and play.
"The possibilities are massive," Mojang said. "You could organize the cheapest LAN party of all time, or use the Pi to learn the fundamentals of programming on a minuscule budget. It’s like hacking your way into Minecraft and modifying the game world with code, a bit like being Notch, Jeb, or Nathan, but arguably more fun and less stressful."
Called Minecraft: Pi Edition, the sandbox block-building game was officially revealed at Minecon in Paris. Upton said that Daniel Bates from the Foundation has been shipped off to Minecon for taking pictures and to chat with the Mojang guys... additional information and screenshots will be available soon.
"It’ll carry a revised feature set and support for several programming languages, so you can code direct into Minecraft before you start playing (or you can just – you know – play.)," Upton said.
The current version of Minecraft: Pocket Edition, v0.5.0, adds zombie pigmen, the Nether Reactor, mushroom farming and paintings to hang on the wall. Version 0.4.0 was probably the game's biggest release to date, adding chests to store items, beds for creating a spawn point, creepers, TNT, a new Peaceful mode option for Survival mode and lots more.
The first build of Minecraft: Pocket Edition arrived on August 16, 2011, after making its debut on the Xperia PLAY smartphone during E3 2011 last June. Since then, the app has become more like its PC counterpart although there are still limitations due to the hardware constraints of smartphones and tablets. The same constraints may apply to the Raspberry Pi version thanks to the platform's limited on-board memory, storage and SoC clock speed.
