I cheated and hacked my level.dat file to have

SnowCovered:1

I'm kinda getting tired of constantly starting new worlds to get all the new content>:(

You can take an empty bucket with you under water ... fill it when you are running out of air/health which will make temporarily make one block void of water just long enough to refill your air meter. Supposedly (according to the forum post I got that from) you can then dump the bucket and refill when you are running low again...

It used to have online saving, from what I understand. I think it got to be too much, what with thousands of people making multiple maps each. So now it's saved locally.

Yes. There's an in-browser version and a downloadable client. You can use either on any computer. If you want to play on your saved maps, though, you'll need to carry them in a flash drive. And currently the infinite map saves have a huge number of files, so that's kind of unwieldy.

Pigs spawn like crazy inside my mine. I have so much ham I'm having to make extra chest just for holding it.

At least I'll never have to worry about food.

You're playing a public alpha of a game. Choose your battles man.

You can now throw snowballs, and craft snow into blocks and build with it!

Also, Notch is apparently making good progress on survival multiplayer.

In the root of the world save, there's a file called level.dat

Use NBTEdit to change it.

You want me to download and execute a binary-only program? Somebody binary-diff it to get the offset and number.

Yeah, but Minecraft is different. It's a successful video game project that is paid for. There's no reason to be malicious with it. There's also decent reason to not open source it (at least, not right away). However, a tool that merely opens the level file and modifies its values is of little use in binary-only form and is a very good candidate for malicious code (the developer could be unknown to the community, etc.). It turns out that the library apparently is open source, which makes it even more baffling (and perhaps alarming) that the program isn't. I ran it anyway though (after being sufficiently confident that it's probably maybe safe).

@bamccaig: You could've just used Sandboxie if you were concerned about malicious code.

EDIT: nevermind, you're probably not running it under Windows.

I tolerate binaries if they're coming from a trusted source. Bonus points if the author is willing to take accountability to any damages that may result from the execution of the binary. Funny though that even Microsoft with its billions requires you to agree to relieve them of any accountability for what the software may do to your system or data.

A random screen name on the Internet isn't trusted in my book. Especially on a platform famous for vulnerabilities and security holes. If you're not trying to sell it then there's little value in withholding the source code. Unless of course you're a horrible programmer afraid of getting torn to pieces by the Internet for your horrible code. Or I guess if it is malicious and you hope to sniff personal information, like passwords or credit card numbers.

I am in Windows right now actually. I've been running Seven at home pretty exclusively since I got it. Mostly because of games though. I never know when I want to jump into Counter-Strike or other Steam games and it's a pain to have to reboot for it.

I do non-graphical programming on my VPS (Debian-based) and Cygwin allows me to pretend I'm using a decent OS most of the time. There are still the occasional hiccups, etc., which still make it annoying.

That's a cool concept, but it still requires trusting a third party that has nothing to gain by being honest with me.

I'm still waiting to see if TNT ever becomes really feasible as a mining technique. The most I've ever had at a time is one block, IIRC. It's hard collecting the powder.

Agreed. Not only that, but even when you do have TNT it isn't that much faster than using a diamond pic-axe. You have to dig in a few blocks, place, activate, and run away. Then you have to go back, cleanup, place new torches, and repeat. You can't blow up a whole bunch at one time because a lot of the material gets lost. So, end result is that it's useless.

It'd be cool to build some sort of mining machine that used TNT automatically But I can't think of any way to do it with the current mechanics.