Minecraft 1.8 Prerelease

Since Minecraft 1.8 was officially leaked (and branded as a prerelease), I totally downloaded it (from here).  So far, it has not disappointed.  Take note, Terraria.

Now, rather than food replenishing your health directly, your health regenerates.  You have a hunger meter.  When it's full, you're well fed, and as it goes down, you get hungrier.  The speed at which it goes down seems to be reasonable.  Food items now replenish your hunger meter rather than directly replenishing your health.  When you are well fed, your health will regenerate.  To eat food, you must now hold down the right click button while it's selected in your hotbar.

Also, when you kill things (even animals) you now get experience orbs, which fill the bar above your hotbar.  I've filled mine once and nothing happened other than that it emptied and started filling again.

Animals will now run away from you if you attack them.  This is quite fun, as nothing is quite like hunting down and slaying your prey so you can reap the rewards.  Notch has also noted that as an unforseen side effect of this, when wolves attack sheep in the wild, the sheep will run away from the wolves, which is also pretty cool.

I disagree with using the term "mob" to refer to a single enemy.  Look up the word "mob" in the dictionary, you'll see that it refers to a large group.  Stop using it incorrectly, internet.

Endemen appear to burn up when the sun comes out.  I went out exploring again after the first night, and found two Ender Pearls and a tree missing some blocks.  Creepy~~~~  I have no idea what the Ender Pearls are used for.  Killing an Enderman yielded an Ender Pearl as well, and they drop at a fairly high rate, but only one per drop.  I don't know if this is just because of the pre-release nature of the update, but Endermen seem to make zombie sounds.  Hopefully they don't pick up player-placed blocks.  Also, they don't drop the block they're holding when you kill them.

Chickens and Cows now drop food (Raw Chicken and Raw Beef, respectively) when killed, in addition to their old drops (feathers and leather, respectively).  These can be cooked like any previous food.  Food now stacks, by the way.  Cookies now stack past 8 (presumably to 64, I only currently have 32, having found two skeleton dungeons each with one Cocoa Bean).  I have yet to see how this affects Mushroom Soup, which needs to return a bowl when used.

Incomplete food reference:

• Raw Fish restores one hunger.
• Bread and Cooked Fish restore two hunger.
• Cooked Chicken restores three hunger.
• Steak restores four hunger.

Killing a zombie now nets you Rotten Flesh, instead of feathers.  It can't be cooked in a furnace, but if eaten, it replenishes a bit of your hunger bar, and it turns green (indicating you're poisoned).  I used one to return to a well-fed state and saw my health go up rather than down.  This gives a reason to hunt and kill zombies, and build drowning traps on zombie dungeons.  I have yet to find a spider dungeon in the world I generated for the test.

The spot I chose for a house happened to be next to a pile of gravel that when mined through led to one of the brand new terrain features: a ravine.  I haven't explored this ravine much, but it looks cool.  I seem to be sufficing on an endless supply of charcoal (smelt one wood using two sticks to make one, and you can continually turn one charcoal into eight after that by smelting more wood, which of course is a renewable resource).

Bows have been reworked slightly.  If you just right click and release immediately to fire, you're not going to get a lot of range.  Hold right click down for a while to charge the shot.  Not only will it go farther, I believe it will also deal more damage.

The new dynamic lighting is very well done.  Torches give off an orange-ish glow (with a slight flicker), and the night sky has a blue-ish white glow.  It definitely looks better than before, and adds a lot more to the atmosphere.  I have yet to find anything that gives a different-colored glow, but I haven't explored much.

Running around the world I generated, I found two skeleton dungeons in relatively short order.  One was connected to the ravine right behind my house, and the other far underground, but I tunneled diagonally down to it from my house.  Sadly, you don't get any experience for breaking a monster spawner.

Options-wise, you can now change the FOV, up to a maximum of 110, which it calls "Quake Pro".  The brightness is also adjustable, and defaults to "Moody".  In the controls section, the Attack and Use item commands (left and right click) can now be changed, and there's finally a configurable control for listing players on a multiplayer server.

When making the world to test out this update, I ran across the new world generation options: You can now choose whether or not your world is Survival or Creative.  Creative enables flying, instant mining, and infinite blocks, and Survival is what you're used to if you've never played on Peaceful prior to this update.  The world seed option is still present, but slightly buried.  Also, there was a greyed out button for "World Type", which I guess means there will be more terrain generators to generate different types of worlds in the future.

There is also one new achievement, which requires Monster Hunter.  To get it, you must kill a skeleton from more than 50 meters away with an arrow.  Fairly doable if you have the high ground and some terrain separation (so it can't run for you).  Also more easily doable in multiplayer, just get a friend to shoot one four times, then lure it suitably far away and you fire the killing shot.

Also, now pressing F3 will reveal your world seed, which is handy in case you get an awesome world and want to let others experience it first-hand.  I didn't enter a specific seed for the world I generated, so it ended up being -4562346595972390193

I've spent several hours now playing the pre-release update, and I totally like it.