Adventures in Minecraft

Introduction 1
What Is Minecraft? 1
The Virtual World 2
How Did Minecraft Come About? 2
What Is Minecraft Programming? 2
Who Should Read This Book? 3
What You Will Learn 4
What We Assume You Already Know 5
What You Will Need for the Projects 5
A Note for Parents and Teachers 6
How This Book Is Organised 7
The Companion Website 8
Other Sources of Help 9
Conventions 9
Reaching Out 11
Adventure 1 Hello Minecraft World 13
Setting up Your Raspberry Pi to Program Minecraft 15
Installing Minecraft on Your Raspberry Pi 16
Starting Minecraft on Your Raspberry Pi 17
Setting up Your PC or Apple Mac to Program Minecraft 19
Installing the Starter Kit and Python on Your Windows PC 20
Installing the Starter Kit and Python on Your Apple Mac 22
Starting Minecraft on Your Windows PC or Apple Mac 24
Stopping Bukkit 27
Creating a Program 28
Running a Program 30
Stopping a Program 33
Adventure 2 Tracking Your Players as They Move 35
Sensing Your Player's Position 36
Getting Started 38
Showing Your Player's Position 38
Tidying Up Your Position Display 41
x ADV EN T URE S IN MINECRAF T
Using postToChat to Change Where Your Position Displays 43
Introducing a Game Loop 43
Building the Welcome Home Game 45
Using if Statements to Make a Magic Doormat 46
Checking if Your Player Is at a Particular Location 47
Building a Magic Doormat 48
Writing the Welcome Home Game 49
Using Geo-Fencing to Charge Rent 53
Working out the Corner Coordinates of the Field 54
Writing the Geo-Fence Program 56
Moving Your Player 58
Further Adventures in Tracking Your Player 61
Adventure 3 Building Anything Automatically 63
Creating Blocks 64
Building More than One Block 66
Using for Loops 67
Building Multiple Blocks with a for Loop 67
Building a Huge Tower with a for Loop 69
Clearing Some Space 71
Using setBlocks to Build Even Faster 71
Reading Input from the Keyboard 72
Building a House 74
Building More than One House 79
Using Python Functions 80
Building a Street of Houses with a for Loop 83
Adding Random Carpets 85
Generating Random Numbers 85
Laying the Carpets 86
Further Adventures in Building Anything 89
Adventure 4 Interacting with Blocks 91
Finding Out What You Are Standing On 92
Finding out if Your Feet Are on the Ground 92
Building Magic Bridges 95
Using Python Lists as Magic Memory 98
Experimenting with Lists 98
Building Vanishing Bridges with a Python List 101
TABLE OF CONTENTS xi
Sensing that a Block Has Been Hit 105
Writing a Treasure Hunt Game 108
Writing the Functions and the Main Game Loop 109
Placing Treasure in the Sky 110
Collecting Treasure when It Is Hit 111
Adding a Homing Beacon 112
Adding Your Bridge Builder 113
Further Adventures in Interacting with Blocks 115
Adventure 5 Interacting with Electronic Circuits 117
What You Will Need for this Adventure 118
Prototyping Electronics with a Breadboard 121
Building a Circuit that Lights an LED 123
Connecting Electronics to Your Computer 124
Setting Up the PC or Mac to Control Electronic Circuits 125
Configuring the Drivers 126
Finding the Serial Port Number 127
Controlling an LED 128
Lighting Up an LED from your Computer 129
Flashing the LED 132
Running a GPIO Program 134
Writing the Magic Doormat LED Program 137
Using a 7-Segment Display 138
What is a 7-Segment Display? 138
Wiring Up the 7-Segment Display 140
Writing Python to Drive the 7-Segment Display 142
Using a Python Module to Control the Display 144
Making a Detonator 145
Wiring Up a Button 146
Writing the Detonator Program 148
Further Adventures in Electronic Circuits 152
Adventure 6 Using Data Files 155
Reading Data from a File 155
Interesting Things You Can Do With Data Files 156
Making a Hint-Giver 156
xii ADV EN T URE S IN MINECRAF T
Building Mazes from a Data File 160
Understanding CSV Files 160
Building a Maze 162
Building a 3D Block Printer 168
Hand-Crafting a Small Test Object to 3D Print 169
Writing the 3D Printer 171
Building a 3D Block Scanner 174
Building a Duplicating Machine 178
Writing the Framework of the Duplicating Machine Program 178
Displaying the Menu 182
Building the Duplicator Room 183
Demolishing the Duplicator Room 185
Scanning from the Duplicator Room 186
Cleaning the Duplicator Room 187
Printing from the Duplicator Room 187
Listing Files 189
Further Adventures in Data Files 191
Adventure 7 Building 2D and 3D Structures 193
The minecraftstuff Module 194
Creating Lines, Circles and Spheres 194
Drawing Lines 196
Drawing Circles 197
Drawing Spheres 199
Creating a Minecraft Clock 200
Drawing Polygons 206
Pyramids 209
Further Adventures with 2d and 3d Shapes 213
Adventure 8 Giving Blocks a Mind of Their Own 215
Your Block Friend 215
Using Random Numbers to Make Your Block Friend More Interesting 222
Bigger Shapes 225
Alien Invasion 228
Further Adventures in Simulation 235
Adventure 9 The Big Adventure: Crafty Crossing 237
A Game within a Game 237
Part 1--Building the Arena 239
Part 2--Creating the Obstacles 243
The Wall 243
Running More Than One Obstacle 246
Building the River 249
Creating the Holes 252
Part 3--Game Play 256
Starting the Game 257
Collecting Diamonds 259
Out of Time 261
Tracking the Player 263
Setting the Level as Complete and Calculating Points 264
Adding the Game Over Message 265
Part 4--Adding a Button and Display 266
What You Will Need 266
Set Up the Hardware 267
Diamond Countdown 269
Time-Left Indicator 270
Further Adventures in Your Continuing Journey with Minecraft 271
Appendix A Where to Go from Here 273
Websites 273
Minecraft 273
Python 275
Bukkit 275
Other Ways to Make Things Happen Automatically 276
Projects and Tutorials 276
Videos 277
Books 278
Index 279