Good news for XBOX360 Minecraft players – the latest patch/bug fix (1.7.3) has been released and addresses a number of minor annoyances and graphical disturbances found in gameplay. This update solves several piston-related issues — eliminating piston crashing at the edge of the 2D world, piston operating issues on chunk boundaries, flickering active pistons, and crashes caused by performance (thread safety) restrictions due to piston activity.

Some of the graphical/operational corrections made include the elimination of reduced performance caused by lighting issues, and the removal of the “raining indoors” graphical glitch. Also, fire can now be displayed in the third-person view, making this gameplay angle much more relevant.

In addition, the developers corrected several sound and menu related issues, most notably, removing the annoying button-pressing sounds that rapidly sound off when a character is rotated in the “Skin Select” menu. Likewise, the incessant sound effect that plays during the entry of sign text is no longer an issue, and thunder is now audible. The leaderboard scoring display has been corrected to align player scores in proper order. Finally, a consequence of one bug fix that some players may not like is that it is no longer possible to select a locked skin if it is located next to a free skin.