Minecraft’s reign as the blocky king of the sandbox genre has lasted for well over a decade, but the crafty survival game is still as popular as ever. This year’s Minecraft Live event revealed the game’s getting its first new dimension in nearly 15 years, after selling a whopping 425 million copies altogether. Lots to mine.
That new dimension is called the Sift, a vibrant and otherworldly plane – and you’ll be able to check it out in next week’s ARPG, Minecraft Dungeons 2, before it eventually comes to Minecraft’s Bedrock and Java editions next year. It’s the game’s fourth dimension, joining the Overworld, the Nether and the End.
“The Sift is beautiful, vibrant, and teeming with souls,” an official blog post reads.” It’s also the first dimension to be added in over fourteen years. No wonder it looks so good! And it features areas like the Meadow and the Carapace.” The Sift exists within Minecraft Dungeons 2’s newly-interconnected world, and you’ll be able to get there by jumping or otherwise stumbling into rifts that occasionally pop up.
Elsewhere during the show, we learned base Minecraft’s next drop goes into icy, underground territory and brings ice caves, a whole new ice biome, calcite blocks, ice crystals and icicles. That’s a lot of ice. “Icicles grow naturally on the ceiling, and the ice crystals grow on the ground and emit a soft light,” the studio explains.
And, finally, Minecraft’s also coming to Nintendo Switch 2 next month, on October 27.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma also revealed some eye-opening stats about the seemingly immortal block-buster. “More than 300,000 people play Minecraft for the first time on an average day,” she recently tweeted. “After 17+ years and 425M+ copies sold, I love that Minecraft is still finding new players and giving longtime ones new things to discover.”