Month: April 2025

Making an Agential World in the Gaia’s Riddle Modpack

It is important to remember that Minecraft worldgen is not natural it is procedural. The natural world is a fiction of computation, and the real agency of the world is the agency of computation. This is why we prefer to work with Minecraft as a platform – one cannot mistake computer generated nature for real nature no matter how photorealistic the textures and shaders might be. I love modded Minecraft for this reason… especially for worldgen.  Its sublime and imperfect at the same time.

The Origins of SunBlock One

What if Minecraft could be played for less energy cost than it is today?  Could we imagine net-zero Minecraft?  And even if we could, why should we care? We don’t NEED to play Minecraft. Will this project be a kind of green-washing distracting us from more pressing concerns in the climate crisis?

Thinking through energy transition with Mekanism

A major theme of the Gaia’s Riddle SMP is energy transition and sustainability.  We are running the SMP on our custom solar powered server after all.  Vanilla Minecraft has no energy system as such. Yes, redstone has always figured as a kind of energy source… perhaps like electricity or magnetism. In vanilla we use redstone…
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