Well, this is a very pleasant surprise. Minecraft: Pocket Edition ($6.99) has just released its big 0.15 update (aka the Friendly Update) adding Realms, City and Plastic Texture Packs to change the look of your worlds, Xbox Live Support and Xbox Live Cross Platform play that will let you play with friends on iOS, Android, Windows PC, and Gear VR, Pistons, Jungle Temples and Zombie villages, Horses, Pig Riding, Carrot on a Stick, new mobs – Husk and Stray – new in-game store UI to make finding skins and texture packs easier, and more. As you can tell, this is a very substantial update that really changes the look of the game. Once you start the game up, you’ll see that the home page looks very different now as it displays your current skin and allowing you to change it from the home page.

While pistons are pretty huge for anyone who likes redstone, the most important update for me is Realms, Mojang’s own multiplayer servers that allow you to play with friends for a low monthly fee. From the looks of it, you’ll have to sign in to Xbox Live to try. I can’t wait to start a server and start building my survival builds with others. Mojang is offering one month of free Realms, so try it out and see if you like it. At the same time, Texture Packs are a very welcome addition, and I hope to see many of them in the future. And we got an announcement that ad ons are coming this Fall, so great news for those who love mods. The update is live now (probably because of Microsoft’s E3 presentation going on at the moment), so go check it out.