Working through a book on modding Minecraft with the kiddo. It knows its target audience: the first few lessons are all about explosions!

It’s written for 1.8, which is a problem because a lot of the structure has changed between then and 1.12, but a decent IDE with auto complete and a sense of common naming schemes has made it relatively easy to adapt the simple lessons so far. We’ll see how well that works as they get more complicated.

Kiddo’s been wanting to learn programming, with the ultimate goal of modding Minecraft. We’ve done some Ruby, but he’s impatient, so last night I we started Java with a simple program that repeats a println X times.

He wanted to pass it the integer limit.

After a few minutes, I suggested we watch a movie and check back later.

After dinner, he decided to stop it and we timed some shorter runs.

I think he has a better understanding of scale now!

The first time I played mobile Minecraft, I ended up stuck in a tree all night, trying not to move so the skeletons wouldn’t shoot me down. Every time I ventured down to try to finish my shelter, I got killed and re spawned in that tree, so I finally just set the phone down and waited for daylight.