Project X Minecraft
Onfroi Baird
March 2020 would be a turning point for both the world and our own lives. That month, a guest joined our world looking for a way to experience Disneyland while the parks were closed. They were an annual passholder at the resort and were overjoyed to find so much of the theme park recreate virtually to visit. They asked for permission to make a video of it, and we happily obliged. That video would end up on Tik Tok and within twenty-four hours had surged past eight million views! Our Minecraft project exploded overnight, so much so that the creators of Minecraft at Microsoft reached out to us via email to ask if we were suffering from a DDOS network attack due to the amount of network traffic we were receiving! By the next month, we had hit a major milestone of over 100,000 unique guests having visited since the lockdowns began. In 2023, we crossed over half a million unique guests having entered the gates of our virtual theme park, with more taking virtual vacations there every day since.
The 3D modeling part of the process is the most time consuming. Each model takes between 1 hour and 8 hours to create, painstakingly refining the proportions to fit the landscape and surroundings properly. The largest 3D models to create were typically the attraction vehicles due to the amount of detail that went into them inside and out. Unlike a prop that is only viewed from the outside, the inside of attraction vehicles were expected to always be in view by guests. Therefore, they tended to have detailed interiors, down to the safety plaque on each one.
At the opening event we would bring out costumed characters themed to the attraction. For Toontown, we paraded around Mickey and his friends. For Indiana Jones, we brought out the titular character as well as his accomplices such as Sallah. The guests get a kick out of these experiences. We were eventually able to add autograph books as a collectible item, which characters were able to add their signatures to alongside a randomly chosen quote from the franchise they came from. Speaking of merchandise, the project contained plenty of it. From Mickey ear hats to lightsabers, guests are able to collect and interact with countless items, both inspired by the real theme park and originally created by our team! Guests absolutely loved the ability to customize their player avatars, and this also gave guests a reason to return to play more frequently. Every few weeks, new items would be available to collect. Below are some pictures of items that I created.
If you would like to join the Virtual Disneyland project on your own, it is available for anyone who has Minecraft: Java Edition! Simply open Minecraft, enter the multiplayer tab, and add a server to your list with the IP: mc.imaginefun.net to join and explore the resort on your own.
WHIMC is a National Science Foundation-funded research project and interdisciplinary collaboration between several organizations dedicated to cutting-edge and impactful informal learning.
Our student Arunima Suri presented her work helping us to do user research and curricular design at the University of Illinois Undergraduate Research Showcase this past week. She helped us to create a content guide for the new Barrelbot.
One poster, Threads of Interest: Case Studies of Interest Development in a Game-Based STEM Summer Camp (Link to poster: Threads of Interest),focused on how the WHIMC Minecraft environment can be a useful for building on pre-existing interests in science for young learners, and generate new interests in science for learners who may not currently see themselves as interested.
Our other poster, Conducting a Video-Game Based Camp Intervention During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Link to poster: Camp Intervention) offers best practices for conducting a hybrid camp using a digital game, such as identifying novice players early in the camp and providing needed scaffolding and training. Using the hybrid in-person/online model for the camp resulted in more instances of interest development than previous years in-person only.
The Quilt project is an open-source, community-driven modding toolchain designed primarily for Minecraft. By focusing on speed, ease of use and modularity, Quilt aims to provide a sleek and modern modding toolchain with an open ecosystem.
Quilt is a project that was born out of a need for change in the Minecraft modding ecosystem. Our teams contain many experienced members of the modding community, providing a level of familiarity that helps us to avoid the mistakes of the past -- whether those mistakes relate to community management, diversity and inclusivity, project governance or transparency. For more information on how we hope to do this, please see our "about" pages.
Quilt is community-driven, and couldn't exist without its users and contributors. We care about our community; whether you're a member of our community spaces, an occasional contributor to one of our projects or simply a user: Quilt exists for your needs -- not in spite of them.
Quilt's modularity won't just exist to help with organising its code -- it will extend to its users and modders too. If you're a modder, our build tools will keep track of the Quilt libraries your mod uses. If you're a user, Quilt will be able to automatically download the Quilt libraries needed to run your mods.
Quilt has the extra features and tools your mods need to succeed. From a rich library of modules that help you to write more compatible mods with less effort, to one of the most accurate decompilers provided by any Minecraft modding toolchain, you can be sure that your mod is in good hands.
Please feel free to join us on one of our official community spaces by clicking the buttons below. Please note that all users of our community (and development) spaces are expected to abide by our Code of Conduct and our rules. We recommend that you read and become familiar with them before joining or interacting with us.
QFAPI is out now for 1.20.6 and 1.21. However, the version of QSL (the Quilt-only tools we provide developers) bundled in these versions is much smaller than before, and currently only contains the qsl_base and crash_info modules. More APIs will be reintroduced to QSL as time goes on. This means that mods written using Quilt Standard Libraries may need extra work to be ported to 1.20.6 and beyond, while Fabric mods for these versions will work fine. Additionally, delays on updating to new versions should be significantly shorter in the future.
More importantly, however, you may have noticed that this is the second blog post in two days! That's not even enough time for Eminem to write another song. This is because rai (your usual blog post correspondent) now has competition! If she doesn't turn in the next monthly blog post on time, I'm replacing her with an AI trained on speeches given by members of the Canadian Parliament. What could go wrong?
Welcome back to the blog, quilters. It's been three months since the last time I wrote up one of these big update posts, three months since you skipped to the parts you cared about without reading my whole post, and one month since Eminem released a new Slim Shady song and took away my chance to start this post with a "guess who's back" joke. Which is fine. I'm not mad. Not even a little. Let's see what happened with Quilt in the last few months!
In my journeys through the many QuiltMC codebases, I've learned many things. One of those teachings is that I should keep this intro short and sweet. This month saw tons of work on QSL, a big release of Quilt Loader, and a ton of new mappings. Simply delightful. Grab your machete, and I'll show you the path to enlightenment via learning about updates to our block game modding toolchain.
Fast-forward a year and a half into that effort: the coronavirus pandemic began its spread across the U.S. this March and forced hundreds of colleges and universities, including Brown, to shutter their classrooms and most residence halls for the rest of spring. And the BEST project found itself with a new level of urgency.
This is why the project for Lesson 5 is a bit different from previous projects. This independent project is an opportunity for you to show what you know. In this lesson, you learned about how loops:LOOPS can reduce the size of your code by repeating certain tasks for you. Now, your challenge is to come up with a MakeCode project that uses iteration in some way to create a stairway to diamonds.
One of the most valuable resources in Minecraft are diamonds. You can find diamonds deep underground in Survival mode. Getting from the surface down to where diamonds are found is challenging. Luckily, you can program your agent to do this for you! For this project, come up with a way to teach your agent to dig a tunnel down to around layer 10-13 underground, where diamonds are usually found. After you are at that level, you can dig parallel tunnels in search of diamonds, or even program the agent to do it for you. Mining with the agent is actually covered in Lesson 6: Conditionals, so you might even look ahead at that.
By default, the agent places stairs facing backwards. This works well if you are building a staircase up, but if you are building a staircase down, think about how you could modify your code to make sure the stairs come out right.
After you have the agent building a straight set of stairs, consider how you might modify your code to create a staircase three blocks wide and with enough headroom to allow you to ride a horse down the stairs!
After that, at each turn, remove a column of three blocks. You remove the block directly in front of the Agent (block 2 in picture) and the blocks directly above and below that (blocks 1 and 3 in the pictures).
A spiral staircase involves much of the same code that you would use to create a straight one-block-wide staircase. Think about where you might have to turn. And, as in all the staircases, you will probably need to follow the agent to place torches and clean up falling granite.
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