Earlier this year, Mojang, the developer of Minecraft, donated $10k to Charity: water. To kick off their then-upcoming update, Village & Pillage, Mojang announced that, “Water wells are being redesigned and expanded in the Village & Pillage update, which is all the excuse we need to support charity: water.” After the update was deemed success, aside from the new strange behavior of the Villagers, Mojang decided that they weren’t done supporting charity.
In blog post from a few days ago, Mojang announced that they were pairing up with Jigarbov Productions to bring a new map and skin pack to the game called the Travelling Trader. The free update came with a challenge to players: reach 100,000 downloads of the pack, and Mojang would donate another $90k to Charity: water, bringing their grand total donated to $100k. It took players less than a day to rack up the downloads, and as promised, Mojang delivered on their donation promise.
Charity: water is a non-profit organization devoted to bringing clean drinking water to those in need in developing countries. According to their website, they have funded over 38,000 clean water projects, bringing clean drinking water to over 9 million people in 27 countries. According to Mojang’s blog post, “Charity: water estimates that the number of people impacted by a $100,000 donation is over 3,300.” With so many people in the world lacking access to clean, safe drinking water, it’s wonderful to see Mojang helping Charity: water’s cause.
You can still download the free map and skin pack through the Minecraft Marketplace, and find out more about the charity it benefited on the Charity: water website. You can check out the trailer for the Travelling Trader below.