Every chapter of the book is a separate adventure, teaching you new skills and concepts
as you program and test the projects. The book is organised so that each adventure
is a standalone project, but you might find it easier to work through them in order,
as we build up your understanding of the programming concepts gradually throughout
the book.
It is vital that you do Adventure 1 before doing anything else. This is because it shows
you how to download and install everything you need, and to check that it all works
properly. We introduce some basic steps in this adventure that you need to know how
to do in all the other adventures, but will give you some reminders in the earlier adventures
as you get started.
knowledge, and we explain all the jargon and concepts as you work through them. In
Adventures 2, 3 and 4, you cover the key parts of any good Minecraft game. These
include sensing things that happen in the Minecraft world, doing some calculations with
some simple maths, and making your programs behave differently, for example by displaying
a message on the chat or automatically creating blocks in the world. You will
use these three concepts of sensing, calculating and behaving throughout the book to
build bigger and more exciting Minecraft programs!
Adventures 5 and 6 build on what you learned in the earlier adventures and explore some
exciting ways of linking the Minecraft virtual world to the real world. You will experiment
with the exciting topic of physical computing by building some small electronic
circuits that cause things to happen inside Minecraft and respond to things that happen
in Minecraft. There is an abundance of exciting ideas and games you could create using
this as a basis! Adventure 6 looks at ways you can bring in large amounts of data from
data files to save and duplicate large structures with a 3D “duplicating machine”.
Adventures 7 and 8 introduce the free MinecraftStuff module, which makes it possible
to use blocks to build lines, circles and other 2D shapes, and also some fantastic 3D
spheres and pyramids. These can form the beginnings of huge structures that would
be very hard to build by hand. Adventure 8 shows how you can add personalities to
moving objects to give them their own intelligence. With these techniques, you can
write some exciting “games inside a game” that will amaze your friends.
to create one final big project—an awesome game with scoring, and moving
objects that you have to avoid or carry around with you. In this adventure, you also
have the option to experiment with physical computing by using electronic components,
allowing you to do things in the game by pressing buttons in the real world.
Appendix A (“Where Next”) suggests a whole range of resources that you can use to
extend and enhance your adventures, learn more about programming in Python and
create even more awesome Minecraft programs based on what you have learnt
throughout this book.
In Appendix B (“Quick Reference”) we have included a comprehensive reference guide
to the programming features used throughout the book, along with a reference to the
programming statements that are specific to Minecraft, and a table of block types that
you can build with. You’ll find this is an invaluable reference section to help with all
your own projects and inventions as well!
introduced throughout the book, and is a collection of all definitions from each adventure.
