It's a big week for Minecraft fans. Both the original game and the 2020 dungeon crawler spin-off Minecraft Dungeons have exciting news to share. Let's start with the original Minecraft. Leaving the beta behind and launching in full on Windows PC thanks to Nvidia is Minecraft with RTX, or ray tracing for the uninitiated. The update is free for all players and includes new features such as emissive pixels, water reflections, accurately cast shadows and rich global illumination.
Since the start of the beta, more than one million sessions were made using ray tracing around the world. To use the new feature, you'll first need to have the compatible hardware, which Mojang says includes GeForce RTX 2060 GPU or better. Players who install Minecraft with ray tracing will by default see everything enhanced with a special physically based rendering texture pack, which interplays with the ray-traced effects to further enhance the experience. Nvidia has also made a starter pack for players looking to create their own ray-traced worlds. You can find that here. Because it's a visual enhancement only, you can still play in worlds with those using Minecraft's Bedrock Edition. You'll see the effects and they won't but the compatibility remains intact.
As for Minecraft Dungeons, the family-friendly Diablo-like is getting four new DLC chapters beginning with the newly released Howling Peaks DLC. It's the first of four story add-ons that will bring the game's total post-launch content offerings to six levels including the Hero Pass which was revealed at launch. Those two chapters, Jungle Awakens and Creeping Winter, are already available, and now Howling Peaks joins them. Alongside that comes six new enchantments free for all players, whether they have the DLC or not.
The remaining episodes of the Season Pass will launch over the months ahead, which should bring the game up to or perhaps beyond a full year of post-launch content between free and paid updates.
Lastly, the Minecraft Community Celebration has kicked off, celebrating the game's 132 million global players. "All month there will be free content released for Bedrock and Java players," said the team behind the game, "including new character creator items every day." In total, it's quite a month for Minecraft's biggest fans. All of this new content is available today. Don't forget your pickaxe.
