The state of Minecraft news

There are manly men with powertools in our office, punching floors and walls in an attempt to make things look better. As a result, we haven't been able to work from the office this week, and worked from home.

Jens spent most of the week working on a new mob; the wolf! You can tame it and order it to follow you around, and it’ll work as a pet. They're fairly rare, but they won't despawn once you've tamed them.

I worked on the achievement and stats system. One design issue was dealing with offline mode and syncing the achievements once you get a connection again, but that's been solved. We've got a couple of people in the office who don't like achievements in games at all, so the goal is to design something that they're fine with.

Achievements will NOT be chores like “cut down 10000 trees”, but rather challenges like “ride a pig off a cliff”. Stats, however, will be used to keep track of how many trees you have cut down. The long term plan is to show achievements and stats from the profile page on minecraft.net as well, in case you want to brag.

Just keep in mind that because you can design your own levels and run your own servers, people will be able to cheat with achievements and stats! ;)

Also a very serious issue has come up.

Some malicious client mods are stealing passwords

When you install a mod, the mods gets full access to your computer, and can do ANYTHING to it.
Make sure you absolutely trust the source before installing any such mods.This applies to both server mods and client mods. Mojang do not know which mods are the culprits.

The passwords and accounts stolen by these mods have also appeared in a list, so some accounts are open to hacking.
To check, please visit here (Confirmed as a safe site --Kizzycocoa), and check your account there. Remember to use correct capitals where appropriate.
please note, you are NOT completely safe if you are not on the lists. They are leaked. There may be more. You are however COMPLETELY safe if you have never downloaded a mod.

When the modding support is added, there will be support for sandboxing mods to give them less access to important stuff. You can chose to trust a mod if you want to, and if it needs to do fancy things, but the default will be to run the mod sandboxed.

On a much less grim note, I found my old Turbo Pascal projects! :D Here are the screenshots!

(Development blog links #1 #2 #3)