Climate Hope City: how Minecraft can tell the story of climate change

by Stone Marshall | Jun 14, 2015 | Minecraft News | 0 comments

On the rooftops, there are endless luscious gardens, so that the skyline of the city looks almost like the tree tops of a vast rain forest. Beneath them, lining the roads, are multi-storey farms, producing fruit and vegetables for the local populace. There are strange sail-shaped constructions that suck CO2 out of the air, and along the canals, hydrogen powered boats glide silently through crystal clear waters. This is Climate Hope City – and for now, it exists only in Minecraft.

When the Guardian launched its Keep it in the Ground campaign in March, editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, and other senior staff, spoke about the challenge of finding new ways to discuss and report on climate change – to break out of traditional journalism and explore fresh ideas.

“We carry on flogging a load of dead horses, in exactly the same way, with exactly the same whip,” wrote columnist and environmentalist George Monbiot. “We have to constantly be reinventing our storytelling capacity.”

One answer to that challenge is to envisage a future zero carbon city in Minecraft. The hugely successful block-building game allows players to construct complex and fascinating models of everything from medieval castles to giant space cruisers. Climate Hope City is not a fantasy world but a vision of a green urban environment which uses technologies that either already exist around the world or are at the prototype stage.

Take a video tour around Climate Hope city:

The project was overseen by expert Minecraft modeller Adam Clarke, who makes his own YouTube videos about the game, as Wizard Keen. Clarke recently worked with the Tate Modern gallery to produce the Tate Worlds project, a series of Minecraft maps based around art works such as André Derain’s The Pool of London. Recently, he has started Wonder Quest, a new educational series of YouTube videos co-written with Minecraft superstar Stampy Cat.

Together with James Delaney and his BlockworksMC team of builders, as well as experienced map maker and designer Dragnoz, Clarke took various real-life urban climate technologies and spent a week constructing them into a Minecraft environment. Features include vertical farms, kinetic pavements that convert footsteps into electricity, driverless cars and green roofs.

“James and his team had recently built a Minecraft map called Tomorrowland,” says Clarke. “We wanted Climate Hope City to feel positive and futuristic yet at the same time rooted in what is going on in architecture and climate change science today. Our research led us to the very latest in building design, featuring radical shapes and forms.

“We also wanted to see some older buildings so that the city felt realistic and built upon. We added the spiral walkway to help players explore the various features as quickly as possible, but its also became a very beautiful design motif too.”

Delaney and his team of five builders, started out by sketching a rough layout, based on emerging technologies and architectural models, before spending over 100 hours building the model itself. “We needed to use existing green technologies and prototypes to create a positive image for sustainable living, which also seemed achievable and not too far off reality,” says Delaney.

“We decided to form the city around natural looking curves and spirals rather than the grid layout of many of the world’s modern cities: Zaha Hadid’s architecture was one inspiration, the new biodome concept for Amazon’s new Seattle headquarters was another. We then proceeded to lay it out in Minecraft and slowly build upwards, adapting and accommodating that plan to the city as it developed.”

The result is a rather beautiful and elegant Minecraft city, filled with intriguing buildings, and criss-crossed with canals and kinetic walkways. Guardian readers will also be able to spot the newspaper’s own office.

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The map is now ready to download and is available for free to anyone who has the PC, Linux or Mac version of Minecraft installed on their computer. It can be found at the Climate Hope City Planet Minecraft page. You can freely explore the city, read signposts and listen to audio recordings that tell you more about what each building and feature represents.

“Despite climate change being the biggest story of our age, journalism has largely failed to get to grips with it,” says the Guardian’s assistant national news editor, James Randerson. “In our mission to tell this story differently and reach new audiences, we have enlisted the help of artists, poets, comedians and composers to name a few. Now we’re harnessing the creativity of some talented Minecraft designers to imagine a future low carbon city – and crucially one that is not far out of reach.”

The Guardian’s Keep it in the Ground campaign is highlighting the global fossil fuel divestment movement. In particular it is calling on the world’s two largest health charities – the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust – to move their endowments out of those firms.

Climate Hope City: how Minecraft can tell the story of climate change

Watch Me Play Lego Worlds, Minecraft’s New Challenger [Over!]

by Stone Marshall | Jun 13, 2015 | Minecraft News | 0 comments

Even in its unfinished state, Lego Worlds is a game that inspires wonder. What sorts of marvelous things might we find in its universe today?

I encourage you to join me as I stream a playthrough of a new Lego Worlds seed—judging from my time with the game, I have a feeling that it won’t be long before we find some really cool unexpected things.

Spoilers: I won’t be spending time building things, because I’m not very good at that sort of stuff. We will be doing a whole lot of exploring, though! The stream below starts at 5:30PM PST/8:30PM EST, which should be ~5 minutes from publication.

Image credit: geedubya

The Monday stream is a weekly variety show that plays everything from the latest and greatest, to the stuff you’ve probably never heard of—all in an effort to make Mondays suck a little less. Follow us on Twitch here.

Watch Me Play Lego Worlds, Minecraft’s New Challenger [Over!]

Five Cool ‘Minecraft PE’ Seed Worlds to Get Ahead Quickly

by Stone Marshall | Jun 13, 2015 | Minecraft News | 1 comment

One of the coolest things about Minecraft is the ability to experiment with generating the world you play in through the use of world seeds. While there’s nothing cooler than discovering a new world through experimentation, there’s a lot of value in being able to check out the worlds discovered by others through whatever methods available to them. Minecraft PE [$6.99] had a pretty decent collection of seeds available online but with the addition of infinite world types back in version 0.9.0 the seed collection has been split in two. We thought we’d focus on the infinite worlds and provide a short list of seeds with some pretty cool starting areas.

In case you’re new to Minecraft PE and don’t know how to launch a seed world, simply tap the ‘Advanced’ button in the upper right corner after getting to the Create a World window and put in the seed number in its text box.

Great Starter World (Seed -495809461)

This is a pretty cool seed that starts out between a desert and plains biome. However, start exploring the plains side and you’ll quickly see a pretty neat giant village that’s a pretty neat place to start out. A few forests, lakes and caves round up the starting area and offer a good opportunity to build up the village even more or take advantage of the flat area nearby to start your own construction.

Mesa With Shafts  (Seed 2431673)

At the start point you’re at the edge of three different zones. Plains to one side, a forest to the other, and a giant mesa at the other. It’s the mesa you might be interested in, as there’s a bunch of open cave entrances that jump straight down into mineshafts. In fact, one of closest openings to the start zone has a few gold ore right off the bat. As far as starts go, this one isn’t as inviting as the giant village but it’s a good one if you want to go straight into mining.

Mountain Village (Seed 1408106526)

As you might guess, a lot of the seeds that get attention are those with really cool villages or really cool natural landmarks. This seed has both which makes it especially appealing. You start out near a river that goes into a giant mountain. Make your way to the top of the mountain (which should be easy if you’re in Creative mode) and you end up at a pretty cool village perfectly situated at the top. Even more interesting, on the other side of the steep mountain is *another* village situated way at the bottom. As far as worlds with interesting landscapes situated right at the spawn point, you can’t do much better than this seed.

Ocean Village (Seed 1413755523)

No list of seed starts is complete without one that has an ocean village as the restart point. That’s what you get with this seed, which puts you in the middle of the ocean with a handful of buildings connected by wooden walkway. Once you get your bearings, you’ll eventually find a sizable body of land nearby complete with animals, mountains and various biomes. It’s a cool seed if you want to use the start zone as a base of operations while you explore the lands across the water.

Easy Stronghold (Seed 1074879716)

The last seed for this edition puts you near a couple of villages with some cool loot. That’s all well and good but what’s really neat is the stronghold that can be found down the wall in the second village (the one without a blacksmith). Dig straight down and you should eventually hit some stone bricks, signifying an actual structure. Once you see that, digging around on that level will eventually reveal a Stronghold, complete with an end portal. Missing the eyes, of course. It’s a pretty cool seed in that you can get a host of cool items as well as a stronghold within seconds of the start zone.

Five Cool ‘Minecraft PE’ Seed Worlds to Get Ahead Quickly

Researchers Are Training Robots Using Minecraft

by Stone Marshall | Jun 12, 2015 | Minecraft News | 1 comment

Humans are really good at deciding what to do next. Robots not so much. That’s changing, though, and scientists at Brown University are using the virtual world of Minecraft to help train robots to “think” in real-world environments.

New research by computer scientists at Brown’s Humans to Robots Laboratory is focusing on how to help robots better plan complex actions, even in a quickly-changing environment. That can be tough, the authors write, because of the “exponential number of ways a robot can affect the world.”

That’s where Minecraft comes in. The game, which has been purchased (by humans) nearly 20 million times and gained over 100 million users since its release in 2009, uses sandbox-style play that lets users build their own worlds to explore. “Minecraft is a really good model of a lot of these robot problems,” computer scientist Stefanie Tellex said in a release about the research. She notes that since it’s cheap and open-ended, the game was the perfect way for her team to test problem-solving algorithms and collect plenty of data in the process.

To put their robots’ algorithms to the test, Tellex and her team created small Minecraft domains and gave characters simple tasks to solve. When the robot algorithms played the game, they had to figure out how to do things like build a bridge or find buried gold — activities that helped the algorithms learn enough to move on to new domains to try out their new skills.

Next, the team tested the Minecraft-honed robot brains in the real world, asking robots to help people make brownies. They found that once they had trained in Minecraft, robots were able to anticipate human needs and do things like hand them whisks so they could beat eggs. In their paper, the team reported that robots showed “improvements in planning.”

In the future, the team hopes to expand Minecraft worlds to help robots develop even more real-world skills. If the robot “minds” are able to master the entire game, says Tellex, they could learn to “do anything.” Hey, maybe they’ll learn to help humans vanquish zombies along the way.

Researchers Are Training Robots Using Minecraft

Of Course Someone Recreated Splatoon in Minecraft

by Stone Marshall | Jun 12, 2015 | Minecraft News | 0 comments

Nintendo’s ink-splashing hoedown Splatoon reimagined in Minecraft? As inevitable as death by ink-wielding cephalopod. A YouTuber named SethBling just made it so. Round of pixelated PC paintball, anyone?

The Wii U game, which challenges teams to cover more of the map in ink than their rivals can, launched in late May to critical acclaim. But if you don’t have a Wii U, now you can halfway pretend that you’re playing Nintendo’s subversive team-shooter on a PC. It’s not precisely Splatoon, mind you, but SethBling’s take manages to hit several key notes.

In Splatoon, two teams of four players square off as ink-gun toting bipeds, each group working to saturate as much ground surface area as possible with their team’s color before a timer runs out. As each player’s ink supply dwindles, they can flatten into a zippy little squid, jetting around surfaces (as well as up or down vertical ones) they’ve painted.

Likewise, in SethBling’s Splatoon/Minecraft mashup, two teams of four (or more, if you like) square off in familiar orthogonal levels wielding any of three Splatoon-inspired weapons.

The goals (paint everything!) and timescales (three minutes per match) and transformable wall-climbing squid-thingies are basically identical. Unlike Splatoon, you can play in first- or third-person mode.

What’s missing? Splatoon‘s zany unlockable weapons, and the option to quick-launch across the map to any allied position. But that’s just a matter of time, right?

Of Course Someone Recreated Splatoon in Minecraft

The government is helping fund a Minecraft-style game for teaching kids about the environment

by Stone Marshall | Jun 11, 2015 | Minecraft News | 0 comments

(Strange Loop Games)

Minecraft is a cultural phenomenon. The block-based exploration and crafting game was snapped up by Microsoft for $2.5 billion last year and has helped inspire competitors from giant toy companies like Lego.

Even the government is interested in building on Minecraft’s success: The Department of Education is helping fund a project known as “Eco” that looks a lot like Minecraft, except with a few added twists: There’s a looming ecological disaster and players must band together to make a community — agreeing on laws and living in harmony with the environment.

If they fail, the world dies forever. Strange Loop Games, the company behind the game, describes it a “global survival game” and says failure results in “server-wide perma death.”

Eco is designed to help teach middle school students about environmental science and was awarded a nearly $900,000 grant from the Department of Education last month. It has completed a test phase where 60 students in five classes tried it out, according to the grant contract. The prototype for that test run also received a DOE grant of around $150,000.

Here’s what the game prototype looks like in action:

The latest grant will help build out new features, including a teacher dashboard, and let researchers figure out how effective the game is by collecting data on 150 students in 10 classrooms. Half of the classes will use the normal environmental teaching plan, while the other half will supplement the curriculum with Eco — letting the developers see if the game actually helps boost students’ understanding of ecology.

Minecraft itself is already used by some educators for things like building replicas of ancient Roman apartment buildings and teaching problem-solving.

The government is helping fund a Minecraft-style game for teaching kids about the environment