Tag: Minecraft

Manufactured Landscapes Part 1 – Firewatch

Where we as individuals and we as members of communities fit into environments and ecologies is crucial to what we’re exploring with this project. In fact, we’ve gone through quite a few different titles for our modpack, many of them touching on the relationship between the player and the trees or the forests that we hope will return to the landscape- “Forest Keepers”, “Forest Wardens”, etc. What kind of relationship to the forest does the tower represent? Is the tower occupant a sentry or a witness? Is it a position of authority or a position of supplication? How does that relationship change once the forest is gone? If the tower were a monument, what would it be for?

Planting the Seeds of Our New SMP

In For The Trees, real-time energy data from our solar server appears on a HUD in-game, and players have access to a variety of solar powered tools and items to play in a bleak empty world devastated by ecocatastrophe. Using a variety of popular mods with our own custom progression, structures and quests, players will help regenerate the land with the goal of restoring the world’s biomes and regenerating the vast forests on the seemingly lifeless earth.

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.

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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‘Atlantis Transcends’, My Educational Minecraft Experience – by Laura Stusel

Originally published April 20, 2014 The summer is coming and I am drinking in the sweet success of having finished my undergraduate. After four years of attending lecture after lecture, it was a refreshing change to attend ENGL 398E: Video Games and/as Theory in my last semester and do something a bit different. Our Professor…
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Smithed Summit 2024 (by Quinn Saggio)

What is the Smithed Summit? Last week from November 2nd to November 9th, I attended the Smithed Summit with very little knowledge of what it was about, and I was blown away by what I saw. Imagine Comiccon, the gathering for all things superhero: comics, movies, books, art, games, cosplay, etc…but for Minecraft Datapacking and…
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Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Our Introduction to Minecraft Modding

Our journey into modding begins. Angelica and Andrew set out to make the dream come true, independently at first, before combining forces and strengths.