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Mike Tomlin spent 12 years building a Minecraft city

670 points · 170 comments · CoryOndrejka

  1. lukan · · focus · HN ↗
    "I started playing Minecraft, man, when my kids were young,” Tomlin said. “I have a Minecraft city in creative that I’ve been working on for like 12 years."

    Yeah, it is fun exploring dungeons with my kids. But it seems he clicked the city together? That part always bothered me with minecraft to build anything big, or repetitive.

    Well, I love automation, and AI is awesome for that. So now my kids can add details to castles or railwails build by algorithm (But using commands is a big temptation to destroy game balance in survival mode).

    1. ntoskrnl_exe · · focus · HN ↗
      This is definitely a personal preference, I think I'd be bored just tweaking something generated by an AI or anyone else, to me a long term construction of something from the ground up sounds much more fun.

      I've built a couple replicas of IRL buildings in survival over the years, for an hour or two after work, and found it very relaxing. It did take a lot of repetitive clicking, but the result was (almost) always worth it. And all the things like planning, finding the right place on the map and gathering the materials building materials made it feel like an actual construction, which I enjoyed.

      1. lukan · · focus · HN ↗
        Well, we have fun exploring scenic rides I would have not build by hand and the algorithm is simple enough to explain it to them (they are still learning to read) - the AI takes mostly care of all the messy parts. How to deal with minecraft's various hacks and protocolls and microsoft restrictions to make it do, what I want it to do. Also you can do the construction from the ground up. (just a time issue for me). Be the (coding) architect of a big castle. And I am preparing it - showing to them. There is a UI for setting how wide the water or lava moat is and bring them to think about how to exactly express what they want - in numbers ideally - anything is possible. Including staffing the castle with AI bots (via MineFlyer) and controlling their exact behavior. (not LLM, classic algorithms, do this, then do that). All of that is great for learning to how the system works - what algorithms are.

        So yes, personal preference. For relaxation and repetive tasks I rather go away from the screen.

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