Mojang will release Minecraft Boss Update with add-ons on October 18

Today at the Minecon conference in Anaheim, Calif., Mojang, the Microsoft-owned game developer behind Minecraft, announced that on October 18, it will release the Boss Update for Minecraft Pocket Edition on Android and iOS and Minecraft Windows 10 Edition Beta. The update is notable because it includes add-ons, a new way for players to customize the appearance of animals and mobs by tinkering with JSON.

Mojang first unveiled the Boss Update with add-ons at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in June.

“They let you remix mobs, switching out the models, textures, and behaviours. Rideable chickens! Ultra-explosive pigs! Etc.!” Mojang’s Marsh Davies wrote in a blog post.

Modifications, or mods, have been around the Minecraft community for years. But they’ve generally been limited to PCs. But that’s not all, as my colleague Jeff Grubb explained in June:

Microsoft is also promising that these add-ons will not go out of date. On PC, a lot of people run old versions of the game because certain mods wouldn’t work. Add-ons [are] built in a way to address that problem. Anything you build for the game using the add-on method should continue to work in Minecraft forever and — eventually — on all versions.

An Alien Invasion example add-on and a new Castle Siege example add-on will be available for download soon, Davies wrote.

The Boss Update also includes support for slash commands and Xbox Wireless controllers — as well as Oculus Touch controllers for the Oculus Rift, once they become available. Also, it will be possible to import and export worlds in Minecraft Realms within Pocket Edition and Windows 10 Edition Beta.

People had bought more than 106 million copies of Minecraft as of June.