IN THIS BOOK you are going to learn how to write programs that interact with your Minecraft world, allowing you to do some very exciting things. You will be using a programming language called Python to do it. This way of controlling the Minecraft world from a Python program was first created for Minecraft: Pi Edition on the Raspberry Pi. If you don’t have a Raspberry Pi but have Minecraft for Windows or Apple Mac instead, that’s ok—you will just need to do some extra work on the set-up before you get started, which you’ll be shown how to do.
This book is full of adventures that teach you how to write programs for the Minecraft game. It’s packed with all sorts of things you can do with Minecraft to entertain your friends and make the game even more fun to play. You will discover some pretty flashy ways to move your player around and before long you’ll be finding it easy to build whole cities and Minecraft creations that have never been seen before. The Python programming language comes with a code editor called IDLE, and you will be using this to create, edit and run the programs created in these adventures.
When computer programmers learn a new programming language or a new way of doing something, they always start by writing a “hello world” program. This is a really simple program that displays “hello world” on the screen, to make sure everything is installed and working properly. In this first adventure, you will set up your computer to allow you to write a program that displays the text “Hello Minecraft World” on the Minecraft chat (see Figure).
To do the Minecraft programming in this book, you need one of these three types of computer: a PC running Microsoft Windows; an Apple Mac running MacOS X; or a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian. The way you set up your computer will be different depending on which sort you have but, once you have set it up, you program Minecraft in exactly the same way on all of them. To make it easier for you to set up your computer, you can download a starter kit from the book’s companion website (www.wiley. com/go/adventuresinminecraft). The starter kits have been tested to make sure all the Adventures in this book work properly. You’ll see that your starter kit contains a README file, which you should have a look at. It describes what the kit contains and
