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