Pocket Edition is 5 years old!

What a long way we’ve come! At its inception, Pocket Edition was little more than an experiment by mega-brained Mojang coder, Aron Nieminen. It was pretty bare bones - just the most minimal Minecrafty features in mobile form, hammered together in a mere three months.

As Aron says: “It wasn’t even supposed to have multiplayer at first, and the first internal version only had an ASCII renderer!”

It’s since grown into one of our most popular versions of Minecraft, with over 40 million players, who are now able to enjoy the rich features of redstone, join each other on Realms, and across platforms, race each other on pigback, wail on witches and - with the upcoming Ender Update - battle the ultimate boss: The Ender Dragon.

The Ender Update will bring the game version up to the big 1.0, in honour of introducing Minecraft’s complete ‘gameplay loop’, as the devs like to say. But even though we’ve brought you The End, we’re a long way from finished with Pocket Edition. We have all kinds of interesting and exciting things planned - you’ll see!

In the meantime, prepare yourself for the showdown with the Ender Dragon by watching the trailer above, and get psyched about these other 1.0 features:

• World Seed Library! We’re making it even easier for you to locate weird and wonderful worlds with this curated catalogue of superior seeds.
• Polar bears! Snowy biomes will now be prowled by these majestic beasts - but take care around cubs. The parents are very protective.
• Music! The original soundtrack finally arrives on mobile versions of the game, having already graced Windows 10. We don’t want our jams to jam up your internet pipes though, so it’s available to download separately from the main game.
• Oculus Touch support! Windows 10 players now have the option to use special VR waggle sticks to control the game! It’s well sci-fi!

Anyway, happy birthday, Pocket Edition! See you all in another five years!

Cheerio!