Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Adventure
3
Building Anything
Automatically
BUILDING THINGS IN
Minecraft is great fun. You can build almost anything you
can dream up, limited only by the size of the Minecraft world and your imagination.
You can build houses, castles, underground waterways, multi storey hotels with swim-
ming pools, and even whole towns and cities! But it can take a lot of time and hard
work to build complex objects with many different types of blocks, especially if there is
a lot of repetition. What if you could automate some of your building tasks? Wouldn't
that look like magic to your friends?
A programming language like Python is ideal for automating complex tasks. In this
adventure, you will learn some magic that allows you to automatically build large num-
bers of blocks inside the Minecraft world, and then loop through those instructions to
build huge repeating structures, such as a whole street of houses (see Figure 3-1). Your
friends will be amazed at your huge creations as they walk through rows and rows of
houses and wonder how you built such complex structures! You will also learn how to
read numbers from the keyboard when your program first runs, and this will enable
you to write programs that your users can vary without changing your program code!
