Minecraft Pocket Edition 0.8.0 submitted, will be available in a few days

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Pocket Edition players, today is the day. Minecraft Pocket Edition 0.8.0 has been submitted to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Today on Twitter, Pocket Edition developer Tom said "XCode didn’t really want to cooperate, but we have submitted 0.8 to Apple! Android final will be out together with iOS." If you haven't had the chance to join the 0.8.0 beta, the release will be available to you soon.

Typically after the app is submitted to the Apple App Store, it can take anywhere from 1 day to a week for it to be available for download. Mojang usually waits until Apple approves the update to release it on Android, so players get the update at the same time. We have updated our Updates box on the right of the page to reflect the updated release dates for both 0.8.0 and 0.9.0. Hang in there Pocket Edition fans, the update is coming! Here's the full changelog, and the tweet is in the source link at the bottom.

Additions:


Tweaks:

  • Blocks/Items:

    • Bone Meal

      • Nerfed like in the PC edition

      • Can grow Ferns and Tall Grass in survival and creative

      • Now grows Sugar Cane to maximum height (exclusive to MCPE)

      • Pumpkin and melon stems only grow by one when bone meal is used



    • Flowers now spawn other flowers when Bone Meal is used

    • Fire and lava now ignite TNT.

    • Redstone Ore now drops Redstone when mined[4]

    • Sideways pointing wood blocks

    • New bow rendering & animated items

    • New fire effect

    • Remade painting rendering

    • Thrown eggs now spawn baby chickens

    • Wooden tools can now burn

    • Improved Signs and Chests synchronization lag in multiplayer

    • Sand and Gravel now spawn resources when falling on torches, etc

    • Flowers

      • Position is now randomized





  • Graphics:

    • 3D Clouds with new tessellation algorithm

    • Held items are now rendered in 3D, and bob up and down slightly

    • Lighter colored Water, Sky, and Grass

      • Water fades to non-transparent in the distance (iOS only)



    • Mipmaps (iOS only)

    • Refactored most of the rendering to use indexed VBOs

      • Remade arrow model

      • Inventory is now rendered using cached VBOs

      • New sky rendering using a triangle fan



    • Separated far and near chunks in two queues for performance reasons

      • Fog only on far chunks

      • Transparency only on near chunks

      • Alpha-test-only layers are hidden in far chunks



    • Lighting

      • Stencil Shadows

      • Dynamic PC-like lighting on entities

      • Ambient light tinting

      • Light direction depends on sunlight direction - affects shadows (exclusive to MCPE)



    • In Creative, players stop being on fire as soon as they exit fire/lava



  • Inventory/GUI:

    • Creative Inventory Additions:


    • New Creative Inventory, with four item categories

    • Transparent hotbar

    • Tapping the [...] will close the inventory while open.

    • Craftable recipes are shown first in the crafting screen

    • When selecting an item in the inventory it replaces the one in the selected slot

    • Changed the flow of Inventory for the Armor/Crafting screens so that the back button goes back to Inventory

    • Moved Grey Wool in the right inventory slot

    • Ice is not transparent anymore in the toolbar



  • Mobs:

    • Breeding

    • Improved Mob AI System (Mobs will swim over deep water, and hostile mobs will be more intelligent)

    • Animals follow you when holding wheat (potato, carrot or beetroot for pigs)



  • New defaults and changed options:

    • Added far (256) and farthest (400) rendering distances

    • Removed smooth lighting (now always on)

    • Fancy is now default on

    • Default rendering distance is now far




Source: Twitter