Wow… I come home from work, fire up TweetDeck, and find out that Rock Paper Shotgun has an exclusive revelation about an upcoming feature – there’s going to be beds added into the game!
Phase one (planned for Feb 22) is impressive enough: sleep the night away, hopefully regaining health (RPS doesn’t explicitly say that) and avoiding denizens outside your home.
But phase two (RPS says sometime in March) is the real shocker, to me: Whatever bed you slept in last will be your new respawn point when you inevitably die from the myriad dangers to be found in the blockiverse.
This stuns me on two fronts: for starters, I’d been hoping that Notch would allow us to set the spawn once. That, I thought, would be enough for me. I could choose a place, call it home, and set my spawn there. But having it so that wherever you last slept is your new home (try doing that in real life) opens up new possibilities. You’ve found an awesome new location to make a home? Build a bed, sleep in it for a night, and that’s your new home. Planning a major, (most likely) dangerous expedition? Set your spawn close by, so you’re not having to trudge back for hundreds of blocks, only to see your diamond tools vanish into the ether. This is excellent news.
As for the second bolt from the blue… Well, Notch seemed so dead set on not being able to change the spawn point, so his volte face had my jaw dropping. I’m going to have a bruise there, by morning. Now, please, don’t get me wrong: I don’t have this mental image of Notch as some sort of intractable gaming deity, whose word is set in stone. But there are lines drawn in the sand: if Notch were to bow to every single player request/demand and include everything, goodness knows what kind of mish-mash would result. So you’ve got to put your foot down now and again, and I really thought that Notch had done that, as far as the issue of spawn points was concerned. Hence my shock when the news came in.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to pick out some appropriately Minecraft-y bed linen.
The Minecraft Scribe 
Interesting, this bed idea works exactly as I had suggested in one of my ning posts a while back. So, this makes me really happy. I figure Notch just realized how much something like this would encourage less hardcore players to start exploring the incredibly vast world that gets generated. As it is now, most people would rather start a new world than explore far out regions of their existing one. So, to me, this feels like more than just a convenience, but rather a drive to go explore.
I hope next Notch adds redstone minecart tracks. Power to turn into booster, unpower to act like normal track.
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The exploration aspect is a good point, Thef. Walk during the day, set up a little enclosed camp with bed before nightfall, and sleep. I like it!
The redstone minecart tracks are an interesting idea… I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you!
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I’m looking forward to it. Jaco raised a good point – does the world ‘continue’ around you when you’re sleeping? If you build an open-air bunk, do you run the risk of getting blown up by a creeper? ^.^
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