Coding with Minecraft: Build Taller, Farm Faster, Mine Deeper, and Automate the Boring Stuff

Coding with Minecraft: Build Taller, Farm Faster, Mine Deeper, and Automate the Boring Stuff — page 5
In this book you’ll use the ComputerCraft mod also known as CC to turn your addiction to building into an addiction to coding But what exactly is ComputerCraft or a mod for that matter what Are Minecraft Mods Minecraft by itself called vanilla Minecraft is just the beginning Minecraft can be modified and extended by third-party software called mods short for modifications to provide additional features such as blocks environments items monsters and even worlds that are not included with the vanilla ver sion of the game Due to its popularity Minecraft has attracted one of the largest modding communities of any video game These fan-made mods are free to download Some mods add space exploration and rockets Others add sorcery and spells You can even find Minecraft mods for creating your own dinosaur zoos high-speed train net works and bee-breeding apiaries In this book we’ll use the ComputerCraft mod to learn how to program what is ComputerCraft ComputerCraft is a Minecraft mod that adds programmable turtles to Minecraft These turtles can do almost anything the player can do dig mines chop down trees construct buildings craft items plant seeds milk cows bake cakes and more see Figure 1 An army of these box-shaped turtles can automatically perform all the time-intensive chores the player usually must do manually Figure 1 Turtles chopping trees left and mining right The catch is that you have to learn to program first These turtles understand code written in Lua moon in Portuguese which is a pro gramming language used by professional software developers in fields such as embedded computing systems and video game development The interpreter software that runs Lua scripts is just 100KB which means that it can be easily embedded inside other pieces of software such as a Minecraft mod Lua is often used within video game code for example in World of Warcraft Dark Souls Portal 2 Factorio and many others xviii introduction