Block of the Week: Tinted Glass

Minecraft players often face a dilemma. Getting attacked by a skeleton, zombie, creeper or spider is a deeply unpleasant experience but it’s also often the easiest or only way to get hold of key crafting materials like gunpowder, bone, string, and rotten flesh. What can I say? No pain, no gain.

But there’s another approach that crafty players take – building a mob farm. Mob farms are structures that are intentionally unlit to allow dangerous monsters to spawn, but monsters are then funneled into a place where they can be killed quickly and safely.

In the past, it would sometimes be difficult to get a mob farm working. The need for total darkness inside made it impossible to take a peek inside to see what’s wrong. But in the most recent Minecraft update, we added a block that makes things a little easier. It’s called tinted glass, and it’s our block of the week.

Tinted glass is crafted with a block of glass and four amethyst shards. It behaves almost exactly like glass in that you can place it down and see through it, but it differs in two key ways. 

First, light can’t pass through it at all. This is what makes it very handy for mob spawners – you can see what’s going on inside without disrupting the spawning process with light. It’s also useful in mushroom farms for much the same reason 

Second, when you break a piece of tinted glass it’ll drop like most other blocks, rather than shattering into a zillion pieces like glass. That’s a little favour from us to you – we know amethyst isn’t easy to get hold of, and you won’t want to waste it.

But here’s a fun fact for you – this isn’t the first time that tinted glass has been added to Minecraft. On 1 April 2013, we announced Minecraft 2.0 – a totally new version of the game, designed to bring Minecraft to the next level. It had fat sheep, diamond-laying chickens, pink withers, burnt-out torches, happy creepers, and love golems – as well as tinted glass.

We distributed this new version to a bunch of top-tier YouTubers before realising that actually there wasn’t anything wrong with the existing version of the game, so we deleted the new version and kept selling regular ol’ Minecraft instead.

Tinted glass isn’t the only feature of Minecraft 2.0 to make it into the real game. It also included coal and redstone blocks, which are now part of the regular game too. Will we add burnt-out torches and pink withers in the next update? Who knows...