Minecraft heads to consoles —

271kochu created a "fountain of cats" in Minecraft by building a structure that extended to the top of the world, then exploiting the game's simple flocking rules for virtual cats to entice the sprites to form a never-ending fountain that is a joy to behold.

Catsplosion (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

This summer, Lego will ship an official Minecraft "Micro World" set, with blocks designed to look like the primitives used for construction in the popular game/virtual playset.

Help Steve survive his first night in a strange new world. Avoid the creeper and start mining for resources that will help you survive and thrive. Configure your four micro-scale LEGO Minecraft modules any way you like. Build your own mines and hills, and expand your world with multiple sets. Includes four LEGO Minecraft modules, hidden resources, extra pieces for wood, dirt, and stone, two "Micro Mobs;" Steve and a creeper.

J!NX : Minecraft LEGO Exclusive

Minecraft's defiantly unrealistic style notwithstanding, players appreciate the game's internal consistency and get frustrated at certain failures of verisimilitude. Chunk errors, for example, are squared-off seams in the world caused by glitches in the landscape-generation algorithm. Right out of the annals of reality is unrealistic comes Roraima Mountain, a pleasing reminder that you are living in a simulation and Notch is God. [Speculative Nonfiction. Thanks, Michael!]

Here's a MMO-Champion thread in which Ramsesakama sets out to recreate the World of Warcraft realm of Kalimdor in the maker-friendly game/environment Minecraft, in faithful 1:1 scale. Using procedural tools and a lot of skull-sweat, the task is undertaken, with awfully fabulous results.

I'm trying to create a replica of Kalimdor in Minecraft, and I want it to be the correct scale. I'd like to create the terrain first, so I need to compute the relative distances (in Minecraft blocks) between the different locations in Kalimdor.

If a Minecraft character is approximately two blocks tall, and if we assume the male Orc model is equal in size, then how many blocks is "one yard" in WoW?

Thread: WoW to Minecraft coordinate space conversion (via Wonderland)

Mineways is a tool that converts your Minecraft creations into 3D files that can be sent to the 3D printing bureau Shapeways, who will print them out in color plastic and send them to you. The tool itself is free/open and there's C/C++ source for you to download.

There are already over 1900 Minecraft tagged items on show, for sale or download in the Shapeways gallery and we are expecting to see many, many more as the game engine, makes 3D modelling fun and accessible to thousands of people. Minecraft and Mineways may end up being a great stepping stone to 3DTin which has a comparable base architecture or Tinkercad which may also be intuitive to those who enter 3D modelling via Minecraft.

Mineways : 3D Print Your Minecraft Model

(Image: Designing Christmas Decoration in Minecraft, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from postapocalyptic's photostream)

Minecraft developer Markus "Notch" Persson entered rapid game-dev competition Ludum Dare, which provides just 48 hours to see a project from inception to completion. One must start from scratch, but Notch went even further, livecasting every second of the process and blogging the milestones. The result was Minicraft, a stripped-down 2D version of the megahit.

It has crafting, exploring and fighting, all built around familiar toolsets, ores and beasties. The third dimension is replaced by levels, in the manner of a traditional roguelike, and the player has an objective: to find the Air Wizard and kill him, thereby letting the game meet the competition theme of "Alone." Minicraft is hardcore, too, with no save feature and a good hour or two of play ahead of you to get there.

A spectacular achievement in just a few hours of coding, Minicraft casts the same spell as the real thing. It does, however, suffer from shallowness and grind. There's not much to do except plow through the process of emptying each level in search of better ores. And if there's a way to place blocks (i.e. build things) I couldn't find it. But it's free and the source is right there, so who's complaining?

Play Minicraft

A trio of Ur-nerds have recreated the Game Boy's Super Mario Land using Minecraft. They laid 18 million blocks to accomplish the feat. It took 500 hours.

Each image is a masterpiece in block placement, dropping dyed wool blocks in the game's creative mode within the frame of a massive Game Boy created in the virtual world. The Game Boy's screen is 160 blocks across and 144 blocks tall. That means it takes 23,040 blocks to fill the screen, each representing a single pixel in the game.

James Wright, a 21-year-old British carpenter who lives in England, and Joe Ciappa, an unemployed 29-year-old living in the U.S...

About that time another player, 29-year-old Tempusmori, who lives in the Netherlands, had the idea to make a full-sized, 1:1 Game Boy in Minecraft.

"The Game Boy allowed us to pretty much recreate any original Game Boy game," he said...

"What you see is 100 percent Minecraft," Wright said. "Every pixel on the screen is one wool block. The screen itself is on a giant Game Boy. We build each screen take a screenshot from above. After the picture we move everything that needs moving for the next screen and repeat."

Three Guys, 18 Million Blocks, One Unbelievable Minecraft Video

James Smith's entry to the Stockholm Green Hackathon was a Minecraft mod that adds carbon emissions to the game, which revolves around resource extraction and use:

When you burn some wood in a furnace, the mod calls out to AMEEconnect to do a calculation, and adds the result to a tracker in-game. As the carbon ticks up, the environment gets more and more polluted as the skies go dark and the clouds come down. OK, not entirely accurate, but an effective visual indicator!

Of course, it’s not just wood. Loads of things burn, and not just in furnaces. The hack supports combustion of almost anything in minecraft; wood, planks, coal, tree saplings, and so on. I even put in some calculations for setting fire to cows (as any Minecraft player knows, an effective way to quickly get cooked beef). Even the hostile mobs like creepers have their emissions mapped (mostly to generic biomass calculations). I also added redstone (like electricity) emissions using AMEE’s realtime UK national grid data.

Of course, there are also ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Plant a tree, and AMEEconnect will work out how much carbon was taken up by the tree growing and reduce the tracker by that amount. After a long day of mining and smelting, you’ll have to go plant a few trees to keep the weather nice.

Hacking Carbon Emissions into Minecraft (via Waxy)

More landmarks in Minecraft —