Minecraft: Pocket Edition‘s ($6.99) upcoming 0.15 update is promising to be a big one, especially for those who love playing the game with friends. As we wrote a couple of weeks ago, Mojang has opened Minecraft Realms – the Mojang-run Minecraft server service – to Android users for Alpha testing, and apparently that testing has been going pretty well. Today, Mojang announced that we are very close to a Beta version, so if you want to get the Android Realms alpha, today is your last chance. If you want to join the over 700,000 other users (what a number that is), you have to go here and sign up so you can play around until the alpha is shut down on Monday. I’m very much looking forward to Realms because I’d like to build and explore with other players.

0.15 update won’t only add Realms to the game; we are also getting horses, sticky pistons, name tags, leads, a new archer mob, raw mutton, possibly biome-based villages, and more. There are also a few other features that may or may not make it into the update such as commands, plugins, resource packs, and new biomes. Development is moving quite rapidly (for Minecraft PE standards), so hopefully the update isn’t too far into the future.