Notch made a blog post this week announcing the official release date for Minecraft. The post also detailed some of the features we can expect in 1.5, not the least of which is the return of weather. Weather used to be in the game but was removed at some point for resource management concerns. It’s making a comeback, as are achievements and statistics.

I’m curious to see how achievements and stats will be tracked. I’d love to be able to log in to Minecraft.net to compare my stats and achievements to those of my friends. It will be interesting to see the types of achievements that Mojang thinks are most difficult or interesting to get.

Jens Bergensten – one of the coders at Mojang – has also been tweeting a good bit about adding the piston mod to Minecraft. It’s not definite, but if he’s spending a lot of time on it I’d be willing to bet that it will make an appearance in some way, shape, or form.