Via IGN:

Japanese schools have been closed for over two weeks due to COVID-19 and, with the Japanese school year ending in March, it's meant many students won't have their graduation ceremonies, according to SoraNews24.

However, graduates from one elementary school found they could use Minecraft to create their own ceremony. Without any school or parental oversight, kids designed their own assembly hall, and gathered on a server to play out their graduation online.

一日中オンラインで集まってゲームをやって笑い転げている。楽しそうで良いねぇ。 pic.twitter.com/sYqoJ1zYaj

— 柏原周平 (@backyennew) March 14, 2020

Read the rest of the piece here.

[H/t Ted Tagami]

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It costs $1 in bitcoin to receive an in-game life on the SatoshiQuest Minecraft server. From there, you can start looking for bitcoin treasure (equal to 90% of the money collected from all the players) hidden within the blocky simulated world.

From Coindesk:

The first round of SatoshiQuest began on Jan. 26 and the game resets once treasure has been found. The server checks the bitcoin spot price every 15 minutes, automatically updating the participation fee to keep it at $1.

The project is open source, with the code available on GitHub.

Ninety percent of total game fees go towards the treasury address, with the remaining 10 percent going towards developer costs. After finding the treasure, winners receive 85 percent of the balance, while the remaining 5 percent is kept the wallet until the next round. The reward is only paid out if the treasury wallet balance exceeds the transaction fee.

[via Super Punch]

Image by allinonemovie from Pixabay Read the rest

My "bee"-obsessed young son will not be delighted to see the addition of bees to Minecraft, as he is still too young to have played Minecraft or, indeed, to have become cognizant of the difference between bees and other winged insects.

We’re buzzing with excitement!

• Bees are cute, fuzzy, neutral mobs • Don’t hurt them, they don’t want to hurt you • If a bee does sting you, it will leave its stinger in you and eventually die, dropping nothing :( • Bees love pretty flowers and spend their lives gathering pollen from them • After gathering pollen, bees fly back to their home nest • Bees help you by growing crops while carrying pollen back to the nest • Bees can be bred using flowers • Bees like sharing the location of their favorite flowers with other bees • If a bee can't find nectar, after a while it will return home for a bit • If a bee doesn’t have a home nest, it will wander around until it finds one it can use • Bees don’t like the rain and they sleep at night. They will go back to the nest in these cases

In keeping with Minecraft's rougueish leanings, there's an entire ecology of honey production to go with it. Can't wait! Read the rest

My name is Herobine. I am twenty-six years old. I live in a data entity resembling an ultramodernist residence at x: 68;y: 73; z: 636 in the seed -98734659879863346. I believe in taking care of myself, in a balanced diet of fish, bread and cake, and a rigorous exercise routine of jumping up voxel hills.

In the morning, if my face is a little pixelated, I'll put on a diamond helmet while farming my generators. I can get 100 levels a day now. After I remove the diamond helmet, I eat four apples. In the cave below my house, I clear out any mobs, then collect and throw all the rotten meat into the small lava pond beside it.

Then I apply a potion of regeneration which I leave on for ten minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use antidote potions with little or no alcohol because alcohol dries your textures out and makes you look older. Then elixir, then eye drops, followed by a final moisturizing tonic potion...

There is an idea of a Herobrine, some kind of abstraction lost in the thousands of hours you have abandoned to this game, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can see me fleetingly from a distance and feel fear gripping you and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.

PREVIOUSLY

Already regretting assigning J.G. Read the rest

Microsoft celebrates 10 years of Minecraft by making one of the earliest functional versions available to play online in the form of classic.minecraft.net.

Ten years of creating, exploring and surviving. Ten years of mobs, mods and magnificent creations. Ten years of being consistently amazed by what you’ve built with our game. Ten years of you digging straight down despite our warnings. Ten years of being endlessly excited to see what you come up with next.

In effect, it's a simple but functional version of creative mode, and you can't save your creations. Read the rest

It's been a while since I returned to the blocky, charming world of Minecraft, but this video from 2010 is going viral and satisfies the urge. The fireplace tutorial begins about a minute in. Read the rest

After architect Andrew McClure received a lesson from his cousin on how to use Minecraft, he went to work making a slick looking house in the sandbox game in just two hours.

[via Core77] Read the rest

Chances are you've heard C418's music, even if you've never heard of him: he scored Minecraft. Now the Berlin-based producer and composer, aka Daniel Rosenfeld, has his first solo album on the way. Here's a single from it, titled Beton. [via Variety]

“All the big loud housey songs came from the idea of ‘I want to create the same song over and over again’,” Rosenfeld said, “Except that I’ve created each one in a different location, or a different mindset. And just purely based on that, they all turned out unique in their own way.”

The album, Excursions, is out in september; you can get the Minecraft soundtrack on vinyl for $45 at Amazon. Read the rest

Alice Maz was part of a small group of players who came to have near-total mastery over the internal economy of a popular Minecraft; Maz describes how her early fascination with the mechanics of complex multiplayer games carried over into an interest in economics and games, and that let her become a virtuoso player, and brilliant thinker, about games and economics. Read the rest

Last year, the Mirai botnet harnessed a legion of badly secured internet of things devices and turned them into a denial of service superweapon that brought down critical pieces of internet infrastructure (and even a country), and now its creators have entered guilty pleas to a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act federal case, and explained that they created the whole thing to knock down Minecraft servers that competed with their nascent Minecraft hosting business. Read the rest

Aditya Aryanto carefully photoshopped some animals to look like adorable escapees from the world of Minecraft. [via Kottke]

I tried visualising some animals in different form, which called Anicube or Animal Cube. I am interested in the cubical shape and trying to change some animal form into cubes. First, I was afraid if it would be nicer than the original shape. I was really curious about the results, so I tried to find some funny animal pictures to be changed into Anicube.

I found animal pictures from Unsplash and Pixabay. Once I collected, I started making these images in Photoshop. How to make a cube on animal body, I use the Liquify (Shift+Command+X). After it is formed and I think it is funnier than the original form, I uploaded to Instagram. I saw that many friends liked it, so I was challenged to make it more. So here is the result of my simple works. I hope you like it.

Red Lava Toys is a Detroit-based startup that make super cool, low-cost custom Minecraft figs at a local makerspace: they CNC-milled their own injection molds for the body and joints, and have precision die-cut vinyl stickers that they print to order with long-lasting ink and cover with a clear adhesive coat, then place them on the body of the toy. Read the rest

You¹ can now explore the St. Kilda archipelago, a tiny collection of islands 40 miles off the Scottish coast, in Minecraft. This is great because it rains less in Minecraft, and the wind won't shear your face off.

The BBC reports that the 1:1 scale map of the islands took 125 hours to produce.

The last islanders left the main island of Hirta in 1930 after life there became unsustainable.

People only now live on Hirta on a temporary basis to work at the military site, or on wildlife conservation projects. ...

The map is available for public download to allow gamers all over the world to explore the archipelago's history, heritage, stories, people and landscapes.

St. Kilda really is perfectly-sized to be a Minecraft map: a main island about 2km long and some smaller outlying ones. I hope they made it so the Minecraft version is fully playable, and not just a vast block of stone under the surface.

1. Can anyone actually find the download? Am I going crazy?

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It takes more than eight wooden planks to build a real-life Minecraft chest; it also takes longer than a click. But the results seem worth it, so I know what I'll be doing next weekend! [via r/DIY]

Redditor dan2907 explains:

I made this minecraft chest as a gift for my neice, and since I probably wouldn't have attempted this if it wasn't for the other examples I'd seen when searching google images, I wanted to post it here in the hopes that if anyone else ever wants to give it a try, they might learn something from my attempt, or at least see it's possible even if you're not experienced.

SethBling says: "I built an Atari 2600 Emulator in vanilla Minecraft using a couple thousand command blocks." Download the world and watch the technical video here. Read the rest

Seth Bling built a functioning Atari 2600 emulator in Minecraft. Not just the processor, or the box, but the whole thing, complete with cartridges and a television. The white flashing line you see in it is the television's scanning electron beam being emulated. You can watch dirt blocks turn to stone and back: that's the ones and zeroes in the Atari's memory. You can edit the memory, bit by bit, by punching it!

It takes Minecraft about three minutes to draw each frame, but Bling recorded a timelapse of it in action. Click through to the YouTube for a download of the Minecraft world housing the emulator. Here's a technical explanatory video:

I made an Atari 2600 emulator in vanilla Minecraft. It plays real Atari ROMs. Very. Very. Slowly. https://t.co/yDu9q8PVfb

— SethBling (@SethBling) December 6, 2016

Previously: Extremely Mundane Places In Minecraft Read the rest

An educational edition of hit game/toy/epic/religion Minecraft is in beta testing, reports The Verge, and teachers are invited to get their hands on it early.

Minecraft: Education Edition is almost identical to standard Minecraft, but it includes a handful of features designed for the classroom. A couple smaller features were announced in January — like an in-game camera for taking screenshots — and some more substantial ones are being announced today. That includes adding in-game chalkboards that can display large blocks of text and letting teachers place characters that'll say things when a student walks up to them.

The biggest new feature won't come until September, when the game launches. It's called Classroom Mode, and it's essentially a control panel for teachers. Teachers will be able to use the interface to grant resources to students, view where everyone is on a map, send chat messages, and teleport people to specific places, which will be useful should students run off or get lost.

Classroom mode alone looks great for improving multiplayer in general:

Read the rest