Mojang working with LEGO to officially develop Minecraft building sets

By Jeff Hughes December 5, 2011

In a move that seems perfectly sensible, Mojang is currently working with everyone’s favorite childhood building block company to bring Minecraft building officially into the physical realm. With enough support, we may soon see a LEGO Minecraft set.

As Mojang puts it: “Minecraft is about placing blocks to build anything you can imagine in the virtual world. You can build anything you imagine with LEGO bricks in the physical world. Minecraft and LEGO were meant to be together.”

The Minecraft team was apparently approached by LEGO to submit a design to the plastic building block company’s Cuusoo site. Cuusoo is a crowdsourcing site, sort of like Kickstarter, where people submit set concepts and community support decides what LEGO will put into production. Designers whose sets are chosen receive a 1% royalty.

Mojang needs 10,000 supporters to put the Minecraft set officially into production, and at the time of writing this they are almost halfway to the goal. Should the submission meet the 10,000 mark, Mojang has agreed to donate the royalty to charity. With almost 5,500 more support to go and 4 million enthusiastic Minecraft fans, it shouldn’t take too long.

It’s interesting to note that this isn’t the first Minecraft submission Cuusoo has received, and Mojang has actually decided to collaborate with past LEGO Minecraft designers suparMacho and Koalaexpert. The company said, “seeing LEGO Minecraft sets is also our dream, so we linked to one of the projects. It’s clear to us that there are many creative people with good ideas for this and we want to throw our own hat into the ring and start this project to bring the best LEGO Minecraft builders together.”

The sandbox-building indie game was launched in alpha back in 2009. Recently, creator Notch stepped down as lead developer, making way for Jens Bergensten. Along with the Lego set submission, Mojang today announced its plans for the Minecraft – Pocket Edition for iOS/Android. Kaplan confirmed that new features are on the way, including a new file system, mobs, crafting, picking up items and overall cleaning up of code.

Via Cuusoo

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