Minecraft 1.10 Update Could Introduce Enchanted Items and Potion Brewing, Details Revealed

Over the past few weeks, both Markus "Notch" Perrson and Jens Bergensten have slowly been revealing details and leaking screenshots about the armour system, enchantments, and potion brewing.  Today, we they released a few more details about the enchantment system and leaked a new screenshot of an enchanted piece of armour.  In addition, Bergentsten divulged a little more information about how potion brewing will work.

Last week Notch tweeted, "Working on Item Enchantments. It costs experience points. It’s totally random. It has three tiers. What does an enchantment table look like?”, which he then followed with a screenshot of what the enchantment table looks like.

Today, Notch announced that he "just enchanted my first sword! It doesn't DO anything yet, but it works. It's all glossy now." Below you can get a first look at how the enchanted armor will look in-game.

Before you judge, Notch reassured, "It looks way better ingame. In screenshots, it just looks pink!"

While the current enchantment on the weapon above doesn't currently do anything, Jens Bergentsten released a few details about how the enchantment system will work.  Remember the experience bar that was added last patch to the bottom of your screen?  Apparently, that bar will be used for enchantements.

"They will add a random upgrade to an item for an experience orb cost.  The cheapest enchantments cost 3 experience levels" confirmed Minecraft developer Jens Bergensten.

With all of the news and updages regarding the enchanting system, it's safe to say this will be one of the two new features added to Minecraft before the October 18th code freeze, where they will stop releasing new features and focus soley on bug fixes until the official launch of Minecraft.  The second new feature being added to Minecraft looks to be a 'potion brewing system'.

According to the Minecraft wiki:

"Brewing is the method by which many potions are made in Minecraft. It is a function that will first be made available in Beta 2.0.(Possible 1.9) Originally potions were to be brewed in Cauldrons but Jeb later tweeted that he and Notch had come up with a different brewing method."

According to code found in the Beta 1.9 Pre-release 2, Potions are brewed by adding water to a Cauldron, and then combining ingredients. Ingredients in the correct combination would confer beneficial potin effectswith no downside, or additional negative status effects. In 1.9, there will be a Brewing stand to brew potions in."

Jens reconfirmed via Twitter, "In the prerelease, there are 161 brewable unique potions. Unless we change it, there will be 2,653 with all ingredients added."

While the Minecraft enchantment system looks to be off to a successful start, Jens has revealed a few troubles regarding the potion brewing system.

"Not even a new GUI could save the potion brewing system. The problem was that similar-looking potions could have different "hidden" ingredients, so they couldn't stack. Very confusing!"

While the code for potions is already somewhat in place, don't expect them to be implemented until the official 1.10 release.  Hopefully they can figure it out in time for the October 18th cut-off date.

Overall, the developers of Minecraft seem to be working hard to bang out as many features as possible to upgrade the "Adventure" portion of Minecraft.  With the announcement of new mobs that will require "upgraded armour", I'm sure these potions and item enchantments will become an important aspect of the game.  And for those willing to risk their entire world in Hardcore Mode, they better make sure they have the best enchantements and potions to be able to survive, or else all of their hard work will be erased.