If the promise of 24/7 board gaming extravaganzas and endless 3DS StreetPass swapping aren't enough to get PAX Prime attendees excited about the event, perhaps this will: Notch has announced that Minecraft's Adventure Update will be playable on the show floor. The expansion, which is still largely under wraps, will tack over 40 new features onto the game, including NPC villages, additional farming opportunities and randomly-generated dungeons.

For those who didn't snag tickets to the sold-out, late-August convention, don't fret too much -- we can only assume the line for Mojang's booth is going to wrap around the expo hall like an anaconda. Your time would be better spent actually playing regular Minecraft and building a complex machine to do all that Adventuring for you.

Minecraft fans are eagerly awaiting the upcoming Adventure Update and its promise of a more traditional game structure. We’ve known that the update will include some sort of XP system, but a recent interview with the game’s creator reveals some surprising information on how it will function.

Speaking with PC Gamer, Markus “Notch” Persson reveals that when a player dies in Minecraft, all of their XP and levels will reset to zero.

“I’m a big roguelike fan,” Notch told PC Gamer. “It’s really fun. The idea is that you level up really, really fast. You can grind away and level up fast if you want to, or you can just play as normal and level up that way. The longer you play, the bigger the risk of dying becomes. It’s the part that really works. If it feels like it’s too harsh, we might make it half or something like that. But the fact that you lose everything – you lose all your inventory anyways.”

Notch also admitted that he’s not sure how leveling up will work yet, but that the company is looking at an automated XP system. I’m looking forward to trying out the new mode as much as the next guy, though the added penalty to dying isn’t exactly going to help me overcome my fear of creepers anytime soon.

You know those blocky zombies that attack at night in Minecraft? Markus “Notch” Persson wants to make the nocturnal attacks more unnerving, and has released a screenshot of what to expect: creatures with long, narrow limbs that are very slow and actually pick blocks up and move them around.

According to Persson himself: "I made it passive until you looked straight at it. (…) You could walk up to these beasts (they’re three meters tall) and watch them as they moved their blocks around, but as soon as you happened to look straight at them, they’d attack. And by “straight at them”, I mean putting the reticle on top of them. You can keep them visible on screen and actually look straight at them in real life, but as soon as your in game character looks straight at them, boom."

The "Endermen", as Notch calls them, will attack you when you look away: "To really drive home the point of looking at them being bad, I made the Endermen freeze and turn towards you when you look at them. As long as you look straight at them, they stand perfectly still and look straight at you. As soon as you look away, they will run (very fast) towards you.

We have a name: the Endermen. I can only image the feeling of dread players will have once they lock eyes with this mob, knowing that once they look away, their end is nigh.

And they teleport. If they’re too far away to reach you in a short period of time, they will teleport about once per second."

Think of Samara from The Ring with living Wicker Men, and there you have it.

Rather than setting its convention in the icy grip of its home country's chilly November, Sweden-based Minecraft studio Mojang Specifications is holding what it dubs "MineCon" in Las Vegas. "For me, MineCon is about celebrating the full release of Minecraft," Mojang head Markus "Notch" Persson told PC Gamer this week. Apparently the delayed title will see its full launch in grand style, with Notch "getting up on stage and pushing the button to upload the final build."

When he first spitballed the idea back in May, voters overwhelmingly responded, "No, definitely not" when asked whether they'd attend such an event. That said, the minority's 42,000 votes were assuredly enough to convince him of demand for such an event.

Speaking of, Las Vegas' Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino will host MineCon on November 18 and 19, and the ticket registration site is set to go live next week -- apparently Notch will announce as much on his Twitter account, so keep an eye out. That is, if you can tear yourself away from building that to-scale replica of Hogwarts.

Update: This year marks the second MineCon.

In January, Minecraft passed its first major sales milestone: 1 million downloads. Three months later, in April, it clocked another cool million. And today, just five days into August, the game has surpassed its 3 millionth paid user -- every four months, eh? Smells like a trend!

Those 3,000,961 folks (as of this writing) make up over a full quarter of all accounts at 26.24 percent. At around $22 per purchase, that's quite a bit of dough -- and with no publisher to pay. We imagine Mojang Specifications head Markus "Notch" Persson will be investing a good chunk of that dough in the upcoming MineCon, which kicks off the official launch of Minecraft on November 18.

[Thanks, Matias.]

Markus “Notch” Persson recently let the world know that he was being sued by Bethsoft. The creator of Minecraft doesn't seem that broken up about the situation, and detailed it in his blog.

“First of all, I love Bethesda. I assume this nonsense is partly just their lawyers being lawyers, and a result of trademark law being the way it is,” said Persson. “About half a year ago, our lawyers recommended us to register 'Minecraft' as a trademark, so we did. I had voted against it initially, but we did it anyway. Better safe than sorry, and all that. At the same time, we also applied for 'Scrolls', the new game we’re working on. We knew of no similarly named games, and we had even googled it to make sure. I’m not even sure if you CAN trademark individual words, like 'Scrolls', but we sent in the application anyway.”

“A while later, out of the blue, we got contacted by Bethesda’s lawyers,” added Persson. “They wanted to know more about the 'Scrolls' trademark we were applying for, and claimed it conflicted with their existing trademark 'The Elder Scrolls'. I agree that the word 'Scrolls' is part of that trademark, but as a gamer, I have never ever considered that series of (very good) role playing games to be about scrolls in any way, nor was that ever the focal point of neither their marketing nor the public image.”

He noted that saying you can own the rights to the individual words within a trademark is “scary.” He didn't think they had much of a case, but still offered to never put words in front of 'Scrolls' and suggested expansions like 'Scrolls - The Banana Expansion' though he isn't sure Bethsoft ever got back to him on this.

“Today, I got a 15-page letter from some Swedish lawyer firm, saying they demand us to stop using the name Scrolls, that they will sue us (and have already paid the fee to the Swedish court), and that they demand a pile of money up front before the legal process has even started,” said Persson. “I assume this is all some more or less automated response to us applying for the trademark. I sincerely hope Bethesda isn’t pulling a Tim Langdell.”

Bethsoft has also had a long legal battle with Interplay over various MMO rights associated with the Fallout brand and has not been very successful in wresting the rights away from Interplay.

Wedding Weekend!

Hi everyone! I’m getting married to ez tomorrow, and I thought we’d celebrate by giving one free copy of Minecraft to everyone who buys the game!

How does it work, you ask?

Well, if you buy a copy of the game (not a gift code), you get a free gift code added to your account. You can see the gift codes you have by going to http://www.minecraft.net/profile/
Tell your spouse/lover/friend/acquaintance/stranger go to http://www.minecraft.net/redeem.jsp and enter the code, and within minutes you’ll both be punching trees and installing texture packs together.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

(ps, we are aware of the typo in the graphics, but it’s too expensive to fix now)

Not yet.. From what i heard, if we buy during beta stage we still have to pay half price for updates. I will still consider

minecraft is alrdy in Beta mode now. U only have to pay once, notch stressed this out many times. They will launch the official minecraft next month. So its better to buy while its 'buy1free1'.

What do you to pay once? The game or the updates later? Updates are in terms of DLC/Expansion which require us to pay. I will make my mind few hours later