Top 12 Things I wish I knew about Minecraft Earlier
There are many amazing things I've learned about Minecraft over the years: useful settings or options, in-game functionality, game design philosophies and techniques, or amazing community open-source tools!
This knowledge has been provided by students, other educators/experts/enthusiasts/content builders, or simply through experimentation and often sifting through hours upon hours of YouTube content, and it has levelled up my own skills. To those that share, I am eternally grateful!
So, for your benefit, in no particular order are 12 of the top tips I wish I'd known earlier (I could probably list a lot more, but... future blog content!):
- Codebuilder can be disabled. That's right! As much as I love codebuilder, there are times I don't want students exploiting the codebuilder to work around challenges I've created.
That said, I've been no less impressed when they do. Like Captain Kirk reprogramming the Kobyashi Maru simulator to change the conditions so he could defeat the "no win-scenario", I award points for creative problem solving and original thinking.
That of course doesn't help you when students are skipping the experience to bulldoze their way to the end, and in the words of Kirk, "I don't like to lose" either.
In the settings for your world, go to: Settings>Classroom>
Look for the Codebuilder item, and toggle to off. - F1 will hide the HUD (heads-up display). This removes the hotbar and other on screen displays allowing for really nice screen captures.
- Crouching hides the gamertag above your avatar in multiplayer. Press shift to crouch, and in a survival game of hide and seek, provided you've hidden yourself in a great place, your location will be really hard to find. Until your fingers get sore from holding the button down.
- The /clear command. This command, targeting a specific item (say for example potions: /clear @a potions), used with an always active, repeat command block will prevent students from putting any potion in their inventory and using it (provided the block is placed in a ticking area). This setup is handy for preventing students from using items that can be used to grief or distract from your custom Minecraft experiences. Just remember to hide the command blocks (placing deny blocks under them and allow blocks above them will help too).
- There are always multiple ways of doing things, whether we're talking about building, or creating some sort of functionality using command blocks or redstone. There's no "wrong way", just different approaches (some of which can be more efficient, or less complicated). In any event, if it works, suits your purposes, and you learned something, then it's a win. Be open to trying or learning new or different methods along your Minecraft journey.
- Sharing is at the heart of the Minecraft experience. Learn something new? Have a bunch of skills or techniques others are asking about? Have a cool way of creating lessons for Minecraft? Share, share, share! We all benefit when we have an open dialogue and share knowledge and ideas freely, and that is one of the great things about the Minecraft Education community! We all share this philosophy and by doing so, it inspires and empowers us all to craft amazing things and experiences, which ultimately benefits all of our students!
- You can make your very own custom Minecraft entities, items and blocks, all for free using Blockbench. Blockbench is a powerful modelling, texturing and animation tool, and once you've learned the basics, it's as much fun and just as rewarding as building in Minecraft. I'm doing a series of "Getting started in Blockbench" tutorials for Toolbox Tuesday, so be sure to check them out!
One of my recent vehicle builds in Blockbench - Create your own Minecraft Encyclopedia world. Any mechanism or technique you discover, throw it into a flat world. I often create all sorts of unique redstone or command block mechanics and while I can remember making them, I often forget some of the process or critical elements. A library of these discoveries can provide you with virtual how-to textbook that you can revisit and remind you of all the finer points for the next time you want to use something you've created previously.
- Any entity can be an NPC in Minecraft. It's literally one line of code you need to add in an entities behaviour file in the components section. Need an animal to drive a narrative? Or even an inanimate object (say a post box)... add the line of code! Now, you can add dialogue, URLs and commands, to your creation, just like a regular NPC. This is the line of code:
"minecraft:npc": {}
- The NEW and improved Chunker App. Chunker was originally a open source web tool made by Hive Games for converting Minecraft between Java and Bedrock versions. It's now a downloadable .exe application and it does SO many more amazing things. I could do a whole blog or Toolbox Tuesday video just on Chunker (and I will!) Do yourself a favour and check it out, but here's a couple of screenshots demonstrating some of the coolness!
Editable World Settings in Chunker Top-down map view of your world in Chunker - You can glide faster with your elytra if you right-click a firework rocket while holding it in your hotbar.
- No Minecraft experience is ever finished... it's just waiting for your next inspiration. :)
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