A long time ago, MineZ was the coolest, most awesome Minecraft experience. (Apart from vanilla survival, of course). It had a compelling goal – survive against the zombies. It was simple. You could get together with friends and explore the world. Yes, it was a clone of DayZ, but in Minecraft. Yes, you died a lot. But it was awesome. Then, a number of minigame servers took the spotlight, and apart from a tight community, MineZ fell into the void. It was engulfed by the changing whims of Minecraft players.

Yet that’s about to change. The Shotbow network, the group behind MineZ, have spent months creating a new update that ought to bring new life to what was once my favourite thing to do in Minecraft. Currently dubbed the “secret project”, this new update adds a large amount of lore to the game, as well as a complete rework of the loot system, numerous gameplay changes and new areas. You can read the entire changelog here, but I’ve included some key points below.

~ LOOT CHANGES ~

A completely new and remade loot table. This means new loot types, new items, new rarities.

A completely new and remade loot placement. All the chests on the map were deleted and manually replaced, one by one, by yours truly.

Introduced the concept of “bad luck” for higher tier chests. This means that instead of rarely getting a good item, you will rarely get a bad one.

Reworked the concept of the “trap chest”. By default now almost all chests will have a very small chance to spawn a zombie instead which will try to use the loot to kill you – kill him and he’ll drop it. There’s a way to tell if it’s a trap, if you are paying attention…

~ GAMEPLAY CHANGES ~

Snowballs stack up to 3.

Empty bowls stack up to 3.

Giants have been reworked in damage and mechanics.

~ BUILD CHANGES ~

A million of small fixes. Not even kidding, we didn’t roll ANY change in MONTHS.

Crafting benches have been added in plenty of places.

New cities!

New dungeons!

Prettified builds!

The Ghost Ship is back!

The update is set to roll out on the 15th of August at 12:00 US Central Time. Until then, we’ll have to be content with whatever teasers Shotbow Network releases. Oh, you can also play on the offical Gearcraft server! (IP: PLAY.GEARCRAFT.US)

Hey Gearcrafters! Now It's your chance to share with us, just hashtag #YoGearcraft on your Twitter post with a link or image to your art, creations, videos, servers or whatever and it will appear right on our #YoGearcraft page for millions to see! It’s that easy! So what are you waiting for!? Give us a shout out #YoGearcraft!