One of the things I love about Minecraft is the simple charm of it. Punch some trees, fight zombies, and enjoy your happy little low-resolution world. That being said of course one of the first things many devoted players do is go and grab their favorite of hundreds of fan-made texture packs with HD textures far outpacing the original vanilla artwork. Some focus on realism, others fantasy, or whatever else an artist can dream up.

Since Minecraft was ported to consoles though, gamers playing off the PC have been denied that level of customization. However 4J Studios, the company that ported Minecaft to the Xbox 360 announced recently that they are working on texture pack DLC for the game, but that raises even more questions then it answers.

Will the texture packs be the ones fans have come to know and love from the PC? If so, will the artists be compensated, or will 4J/Mojang be coming up with official texture packs made by their own artists? For that matter, will it cost players anything to get them off XBLA? For the moment, we don't have any solid answers.

I just hope that having any sort of officially supported or sanctioned texture packs doesn't take away from the rich modding community that Minecraft currently enjoys. We'll keep an eye on 4J Studios' Twitter feed for any additional developments.