Adventures in Minecraft

David Whale, Martin O'Hanlon

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781119439585
• eBook ISBN: 9781119439554
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Hardware
• Index: Computer Science

Learn valuable programming skills while building your own Minecraft adventure!

If you love playing Minecraft and want to learn how to code and create your own mods, this book was designed just for you. Working within the game itself, you'll learn to set up and run your own local Minecraft server, interact with the game on PC, Mac and Raspberry Pi, and develop Python programming skills that apply way beyond Minecraft. You'll learn how to use coordinates, how to change the player's position, how to create and delete blocks and how to check when a block has been hit.

The adventures aren't limited to the virtual – you'll also learn how to connect Minecraft to a BBC micro: bit so your Minecraft world can sense and control objects in the real world! The companion website gives you access to tutorial videos to make sure you understand the book, starter kits to make setup simple, completed code files, and badges to collect for your accomplishments. Written specifically for young people by professional Minecraft geeks, this fun, easy-to-follow guide helps you expand Minecraft for more exciting adventures, and put your personal stamp on the world you create. Your own Minecraft world will be unlike anyone else's on the planet, and you'll pick up programming skills that will serve you for years to come on other devices and projects. Among other things, you will:

• Write Minecraft programs in Python® on your Mac®, PC or Raspberry Pi®
• Build houses, structures, and make a 3D duplicating machine
• Build intelligent objects and program an alien invasion
• Build huge 2D and 3D structures like spheres and pyramids
• Build a custom game controller using a BBC micro: bit™
• Plan and write a complete interactive arena game

Adventures in Minecraft teaches you how to make your favourite game even better, while you learn to program by customizing your Minecraft journey.

THIS BOOK IS going to help you learn how to write programs or mods that interact with your Minecraft world, allowing you to do some very exciting things. You use a programming language called Python to do it. This way of controlling the Minecraft world from a Python program was first created for Minecraft: Pi Edition on the Raspberry Pi. If you don’t have a Raspberry Pi but have Minecraft for Windows or Apple Mac instead, that’s okay; you just need to do some extra work on the setup before you get started, which this adventure shows you how to do.

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Python is the programming language used in this book.

This book is full of adventures that teach you how to write programs for the Minecraft game. It’s packed with all sorts of things you can do with Minecraft to entertain your friends and make the game even more fun to play. You will discover some pretty flashy ways to move your player around, and before long you’ll be finding it easy to build whole cities and Minecraft creations that have never been seen before.

The Python programming language comes with a code editor called IDLE, which you will use to create, edit and run the programs you create in these adventures.

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The Python programming language is used throughout the world in business and education. It is extremely powerful but also easy to learn. You can find out more about Python at www.python.org/.

When computer programmers learn a new programming language or a new way of doing something, they always start by writing a “hello world” program. This is a really simple program that displays “hello world” on the screen, to make sure everything is installed and working properly.

In this first adventure, you set up your computer to allow you to write a program that displays the text “Hello Minecraft World” on the Minecraft chat (see Figure 1-1).

FIGURE 1-1 Hello Minecraft World

To do the Minecraft programming in this book, you need one of these three types of computer: a PC running Microsoft Windows; an Apple Mac running macOS X; or a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian with Pixel. The way you set up your computer depends on which sort of computer you have but, once you have set it up, you program Minecraft in exactly the same way on all of them. To make it easier for you to set up your computer, you can download a starter kit from https://adventuresinminecraft.github.io. The starter kits have been tested to make sure all the adventures in this book work properly.

You’ll see that your starter kit contains a README file, which you should have a look at. It describes what the kit contains and how it was created; you could use this information to set up your own computer from scratch, although this is not recommended. You’ll get a lot more out of it by following the instructions in this book.

Make sure you follow the instructions for your type of computer, either “Setting Up Your Raspberry Pi for Programming Minecraft” or “Setting Up Your PC or Apple Mac for Programming Minecraft”.

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It’s essential that you to set up your computer correctly; otherwise you could get yourself into quite a muddle. So please make sure that you follow the instructions very carefully!

Setting Up Your Raspberry Pi to Program Minecraft

If you are using a Raspberry Pi, Minecraft is installed already; you just need to download the Raspberry Pi starter kit. Everything you need to complete Adventures in Minecraft is in a folder called MyAdventures. You also will save your Minecraft programs in this folder.

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To see a video of how to set up your Raspberry Pi, visit the companion website at http://www.wiley.com/go/adventuresinminecraft2e.

The Raspberry Pi’s graphical user interface (GUI), known as Pixel, is used throughout Adventures in Minecraft. The GUI is installed on Raspbian, but depending on how you have set up your Raspberry Pi, it may not load the GUI when it boots up. You may instead start with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Adventure 1: Hello Minecraft World
• Adventure 2: Tracking Your Players as They Move
• Adventure 3: Building Anything Automatically
• Adventure 4: Interacting with Blocks
• Adventure 5: Using Data Files
• Adventure 6: Building 2D and 3D Structures
• Adventure 7: Giving Blocks a Mind of Their Own
• Adventure 8: Building a Game Controller with a BBC micro:bit
• Adventure 9: The Big Adventure: Crafty Crossing
• Appendix A: Where to Go from Here
• Appendix B: Quick Reference
• Glossary
• End User License Agreement