The Disadvantage of Outdoor Craft in Texas Has Driven Me Indoors.

So many projects waiting to be completed, but now the Texas heat is driving me indoors.

Two sets of tongue and groove planes are going to have to be finished, and soon, they are needed.   I have the parts lined up for making several spokeshaves, and that is also a nifty project that I want to write up a detailed instructional guide as I go.    A saw till, five planes, another unique tool and a scorp all waiting to be made.

The long memorial weekend finally arrived, but the heat drove me indoors.   The drive to create was too much and programming became irresistible.

I am a very dated programmer, my favorite language is Forth, and my favorite machine is an Amiga.  So it is high time that this old man touch up his skills.

Notch, famous in game circles as the creator of MineCraft, entered the Ludam Dare competition and spent two days creating  a rather fun, retro version of MineCraft that he called MiniCraft.   Notch uses available and free as anything is these days software to work with.  Checking out and playing with the code he released seemed like an ideal opportunity to relearn coding.

So I updated my Java environment, installed the Eclipse programming environment and started to play with the code.  I also found the Minicraft Forums, and started gathering information from others doing mods on MiniCraft.

Then I went back and followed the Eclipse Tutorials and started to code again!  Then I went back and followed a few Java Tutorials and started to code again.  Third time was the charm, I followed the lessons in a few Java books.

So this weekend I got entranced and pretty much spent the whole time in front of my computer writing code.

Here is my mod, MiniCrate.  in Java jar format.  This means you can download play it, but only if your java environment is setup to play a jar.   Here is the slightly commented source if you want to play with modding it yourself.

Version 5 has a few bugs built in, but I kind of announce that when you start!

Here is a bit more on this mod, that will only make sense if you have already played a bit of MiniCraft.

The first thing that MiniCraft needs is a save function.  Sadly it is still a bit beyond my current java skills reach. Building things and modifying the world is part of the potential fun, but without a save, this aspect is more frustrating than fruitful. So for now my mod is an attempt to make things less repetitive without making it less challenging. So resources are more abundant. I tried to follow the same sort of odd logic that has apple trees grow from acorns.

Resources in this version are easy to reproduce. Trees will spread saplings into areas of dirt, sand will spread to dirt, and cactus will slowly take over deserts. Killing a Slime makes a lot of slime. Chopping a tree down will get you lots of apples and lumber. Mining will get you lots of ore and coal. Sometimes mining will get you iron, gold or even a gem. Zombies sometimes carry gold ingots or bread. Mmmmm! Who doesn’t want some delicious zombie bread?

Another frustration is finding a stair down. That has been removed entirely. When you use a pick in a hole, you make a stair/hole to the next level. Sadly this is one way, no stair up. So when you get to the bottom level you will still need to find the stairs to get back out. If you are on the bottom level, and you dig a stair to the level below, don’t go down it. You won’t die, or win, instead you go to limbo.

There are a few other odd things that I liked and did. For example, A gem tossed into a hole will make stone. Using cloth there is a way to cross water while leaving a trail of stone behind you. Cactus is often seen in a rock garden, so if there is a hole next to a cactus, it will eventually be filled with rock.

There are even more mysteries since this is now version 5!

Anyway, have fun with it!

Bob