Minecraft Xbox 360 Updates: Patching Process and TU24 Rumors

The Minecraft development cycle is a two stage process. 4J Studios, the current development team of the game releases two kinds of patches. One is called content patch and the other one is title update. While content patches include new items, crafting recipes and other new ingame elements, title updates focus on bug fixes.

One of the more anticipated patches is Title Update 21 for Xbox 360. The patching process is usually pushed to all platforms in the same day. It seems that even if Microsoft is now the owner of the Minecraft IP they will continue to support the PlayStation version of the game. This patching process allows players to enjoy a less buggy game without feeling that some consoles are prioritized by the developers.

Title Update 21 Changes

Prior to patch day there were a lot of rumors regarding the contents of the update. The community did expect fixes to be deployed but some of them were actually quite uncommon bugs that were rather unknown. TU21 was finally deployed on February 11th 2015 to all platforms following an official tweet announcing the start of the patching process.

Here are the bugs that were fixed with Title Update 21:

• Additional fixes to Redstones
• Increased minecart limit
• Fixed a bug that caused horses to despawn in a fenced-off area
• Corrected a bug that caused game crashes when using a Noteblock
• Map Crafting now awards an Empty Map
• Village generation bug fixed
• Corrected a bug that caused minecarts to crash the game when passing through a Nether Portal
• Fixed a bug that caused mobs to spawn inside Witch Huts when performing a reload

Most of these bugs managed to get by unnoticed but the most notorious one is the bug that caused horses to despawn. The community requested this bug to be fixed for quite some time. The rest of the bugs that were fixed were not really game breaking or common.

The patch notes include an additional fix that only applied to PS Vita. A bug that caused clouds to appear 2D was fixed in Title Update 21.

Since the patch was applied in February, two more title updates were released across all platforms. Title update 22 and 23 were deployed on February 27th and respectively March 25th 2015. Both of them included multiple fixes but the latter one only had four. As with all the other patches they were pushed to all platforms at the same time.

As of now the community shifted its attention away from TU21, 22 and 23 as there are rumors already about Title Update 24. Several media outlets and podcasts already started discussing the next patch. 4J studio will most likely continue with its predictable schedule of releasing a patch every month or so and push it to all platforms at once. One of the things they like to do is to publish the patch notes one day before the title update will be pushed to consoles and computer around the world. Until then the community can only speculate what could come next or if existing bugs will be fixed in the next patch or sometime in the future.