Minecraft finally arrives on the Oculus Rift this week. Sadly, that means it’s time to wave goodbye to one of the headset’s most popular mods.
The developers behind the unofficial Minecrift mod, which brought VR support to the incredibly popular videogame long before it was announced as a full release for Rift, have confirmed that it will be going offline this week. That’s due to a request from Mojang, the developers behind the full game. Developer and Reddit user mabrowning thanked those that played the game over the course of the past few years, but admitted that both he and co-developer StellaArtois had “burned ourselves out” of developing the mod anyway.
If you want to grab it before it’s gone, then it’s still available on GitHub but we can’t say for how long it’ll be there.
It’s a pretty understandable position on Mojang’s support; the developer has allowed Minecrift to continue right up until release of the official Rift support which deserves some applause. Mojang will also soon be taking control of the minecraft-vr.com domain, which the Minecrift developers previously owned.
As the mod’s developers have pointed out, though, this isn’t the end of unofficial VR support for Minecraft. An official HTC Vive version of the game hasn’t released yet, thus JrBudda’s Vivecraft remains very much alive. In fact, that mod was only just updated itself, bringing in new features like roomscale swimming and new movement mechanics like running on the spot. The mod also supports the Oculus Rift, which can be paired with Razer Hydra controllers to provide a Vive-like experience.
If you’re desperate to play some official Minecraft now you can still get it on Gear VR, though we’re willing to bet it will be worth waiting just a few more days for the Rift version. Either that or you can hold out for that HoloLens version, though we couldn’t tell you how far away that is.
