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Hacking Minecraft with an Architect
Click. Click. Click. Click. Space. Click. Space. Click. Space... *The audibe language of someone playing Minecraft.*
A brief google perusal of the Reddit underworld reveals just one example, titled, “35 hours of placing a total of 575k blocks” gives us a glimpse of the amount of time people are willing to invest in Minecraft. How much time do we spend clicking? And... How much time could we spend clicking?
A brief survey of the Minecraft World.
Minecraft dwarfs us. A single Minecraft world is typically 60 million blocks by 60 million blocks with 256 blocks of vertical coordinates (Approximately 30-50% are filled with mineable blocks). Taking 40% of the vertical coordinates filled with non-air blocks leads us to the following quanitifcation of blocks in a world. Lets calculate the number of blocks:
60,000,000 x 60,000,000 x 256*(0.40) = 368,640,000,000,000,000 or 368.4 Quadrillion blocks in one Minecraft World!
To give you some idea of what a Minecraft World’s buildable Volume would look like as a cubic volume (60,000,000 x 60,000,000 x 256) imagine a printer paper thickness of paper spread in a square 78 feet x 78 feet (Approx. 6,000 square feet). Now that you’ve envisioned this, the thickness of that paper would be the Minecraft buildable area to scale.
each block is a meter cubed, so the surface area of a minecraft world is as follows:
60,000,000m x 60,000,000m = 3,600,000,000,000,000 or 3.6 Quadrillion square meters. Seven times the surface area of Earth!
According to Minecraft Wiki, the fastest sprint flying speed in Spectator Mode is 87.1111 m/s (each block represents 1 m^3 of virtual space). So to travel under optimal circumstances from the center of a Minecraft world (where you spawn) to the closest edge of a Minecraft world would take:
30,000,000m / 87.1111m/s = 344,388 seconds -> Almost 4 days.
Which is a long time, but It could easily take over a month of continuous play in Survival Mode. Which with an after work/school diet of 4 hours a day of play would take 9 months:
30,000,000m / 8 m/s = 3,750,000 seconds -> 1040 hours.
1040hours/ 4hr/day = 260 days or 8 1/2 months of Survival Gameplay
This would means the journey in could easily span 1% of your human life just to get to the edge of one Minecraft world (without teleporting or flying).
Minecraft is a Unique Gaming and Creating Environment.
All this to say there is something unique about Minecraft, that scratches an itch to create that extends beyond age range and fad. And for better or for worse, there are multiple members of my family, (in all reality including myself), who will climb above a 1% of our waking hours toiling in Minecraft. This “commitment” to one game and interface spans four generations, only because I don’t think the fifth or sixth is young or old enough to have the exposure needed to become hooked. This level of creativity is abstracted enough to be universally accessed, but complex enough to keep people of all ages and capabilities thoroughly addicted. The world is manipulated at a rate that is long enough to implant the perception of permanence while being maleable enough for the user to believe they can achieve their wildest building ambitions. What if we found a way to expedite the malleability of this world, and offer more control and exponentially more speed as well?
An argument for CheatsOn mode.
With so much time on the line, spent by so many people, the computational industrial revolution taking place ought to be mobilized in the name of avoiding Minecraft’s mining time delay. Sure, some people will enjoy mining their world meticulously, but as we identify largescale geometric manipulations that follow an order in the virtual world, we must employ tools with similar intelligence to avoid wasting a significant portion of our lives clicking away in Minecraft.
An argument for a Minecraft digital twin.
Cheatsmode commands can buy a player significant time, in itself, but I want to explore the possibility of creating and maintaining a digital twin where logic such as complex curvature and topography are easy to load into minecraft quickly and efficiently-agnostic to scale. Here the information stored in a topographical map or a 3d Model can be mobilized into Minecraft without counting or meticulously plotting, inside the game.
The proposed Workflow.
This has yet to be proven it can work super effectively, but being an architect, the ability to quickly plug a building or a site into a gaming platform where you, your design team, or even your clients, or young minecraft addicts constructing a possible career trajectory is tantalizing to say the least. It’s not that this doesn’t already exist in Unreal or Unity already, but nobody is addicted to a model of their building in some detached gaming environment, it has to be a Call of Duty level with you building as the level, or something with an existing gaming following where your building brings something to the table. It seems the coup de grace of this is to take the architects language for molding the architectural and urban enviroment, and figure out how to make it talk to Minecraft, the virtual 3D world building common language of the last decade and a half. So a rough workflow as an ultimate goal looks like this:
Rhino <- -> Minecraft
But rhino is terrible at exporting geometry in a format that can be translated into Mincraft, and Minecraft needs to be spoken to through commands so maybe we draw it this way:
Rhino <- -> Grasshopper <- -> Java Functions <- -> Run Commands <- -> Minecraft
See the following instructional links that will form the infrastructure of this process, and then we’ll stitch them together into a workflow:
Rhino 8 Downloads Page - Link for procuring Rhino and Grasshopper.
Tutorial for using Datapacks - Link for building the folder structure that, when coupled with grasshopper will allow for speedy updated commands.
Food for Rhino (Grasshopper Plug-Ins) can be found here:
The above workflow coupled with the grasshopper script and process discussed in the linked video above push the limits of a single function command in minecraft command window. For one, exchanging 100,000 blocks in one command-very close to simultaneously- challenges the outer limits of what Minecraft appears to be able to handle in a single world modification, but it also contains alot of information for rhino and grasshopper to retain in it’s computational process as well. And while the actual programming in Java is not my strong suit, the precision afforded by this algorithm to speak each individual block, with individual coordinate, with an individual command, means that whether the operation in Minecraft is light or not, executing hundreds of thousands of lines of code in one or a few functions appears to overwhelm what the Minecraft cheats command window input was designed to accomodate.
The proposed Improved Workflow.
To overcome this glut of information, builting a sampler that can subdivide a large build area into individual 1,000 or 10,000 sample spaces, find all the blocks being changed therein, and write each sample space set of blocks into a different function, and then generate a function that will run all the samples at a speed that won’t crash Mincraft. So far, it appears Minecraft doesn’t allocate the memory necessary for this, but I’m sure I’m missing some basic Java efficiency best practices.