Modding Minecraft for 3d Automata: First Attempt

I like messing around with Minecraft. I went through a phase of actually playing it, but I now mostly just enjoy looking at what other people make. I love the mutability of the world. What bores me about it, however, is the lack of dynamics. In the basic game there is essentially no way to move blocks in an automated way. The in-game redstone wiring mechanic is interesting, but limited. Adding such functionality doesn't seem to be a priority for the developers, which is their right, of course. However, the game has a thriving community around engine modifications.

So, I thought I would implement 3d cellular automata (CA) in the game and see where that goes. Interestingly, although a huge amount of research has been done on 2d CA, e.g., Conway's Game of Life and that book by Stephen Wolfram, fewer things seem to be known about 3d automata. To get started, I implemented a couple of the rules in this paper by Carter Bays in the journal Complex Systems. The paper discusses totalistic CA, where the state of one cell depends on how many of the adjacent 26 cells are occupied. Bays uses a notation E1, E2, ... / F1, F2, ... where the En indicate the sums which lead to an extant cell continuing to be occupied, and the Fn indicate which sums cause an empty cell to become occupied. I tried out the 6,7,8/5 and 2,3/5 rules.

The video below shows the result of the 2,3/5 rule. Note that this isn't really "proper" because I'm not stepping everything forward at once. I am depending on the block-wise updates that Minecraft already implemented. I've appropriated the mossy cobblestone block. I've also set it up so that it cannot evict any cell other than air. So it cannot grow into the ground and other objects in the world. It basically takes over the game to such an extent that it becomes unplayable.



Here's a rendering of another 2,3/5 run:


Next up: 1) making the CA update in lockstep to allow gliders, 2) enabling interaction with other blocks in the environment.

Game Development as Hobby

I like to play games. Sometimes it is for the escapism, but it is often for the artistic and intellectual aspect. In a game, one is participating in art. This can take the form of amazing visual design, as in a Mirror's Edge, Borderlands, or Bioshock. It can also take the form of innovative gameplay, as in the amazing mutable world of Minecraft. Minecraft is amazing, not because of the game itself as a creative endeavour, but because of what it enables for the players. I go through phases of playing the game, but I actually spend more time browsing the amazing things that other people make and post on reddit.

What inspires me to want to create games is not that I can impose my vision on other people, but that one can use a game to create a shared world in which people can express their own creative visions. This blog is about my periodic spare-time explorations in creating such a game.