Although it started out as a glitchy alpha with a whole lot of potential, Minecraft has grown into a very big deal. Originally created by Markus “Notch” Persson, Mojang Studios soon picked up the game and worked with Notch to develop it from a buggy bud on PC into a fully grown flower on PC, consoles and mobile with Minecraft soon becoming the third best selling game of all time.
Its gameplay is simple. Your character must craft…and mine and use the tools and materials available to create so much more than just slow burning wood fires. You can build homes with which to shield yourself from the chilly night, weapons to defend yourself against Minecraft’s enemies and, as two incredibly ambitious Minecraft players have shown, you can even create computer hard drives.
Created by users smellystring and The0JJ the hard drives work just like the hard drive on your computer. They can hold data – not much, though – and have things saved to their memory just like you’d expect from a tangible hard drive rather than one you can’t pick up.
How the users were able to do this is by taking advantage of Minecraft’s physics. Materials in the game each have physical properties with one material in particular called ‘redstone’ being able to power circuitry and appliances.
From bridges to transistors, from diodes to staircases, redstone’s power is huge. As long as you use it within its realms of logic. For example, redstone can be conducted through solid blocks but not transparent ones made of glasses which is similar to real world thinking. You wouldn’t expect to put a shard of glass in an electrical circuit, would you?
smellystring had a technical explanation for their hard drive, which can store 1KB of data,
“To store data on a computer, you must use binary code. Binary code is basically a way of storing data using only 1s and 0s. On my hard drive I use solid blocks to store a 1 and clear blocks to store a 0.”
Redstone powers the pistons to move the blocks and thus you have a system with which to build a computer on.
While it makes for a good headline, the hard drives also have practical uses. Although somewhat limited due to size (even The0JJ’s slightly bigger hard drive only stores 4KB), theoretically, data could be stored within the game. As smellystring went on to explain,
“Data can be anything. It could be some text or a picture. You could, in theory, store the schematics for something. Internally, Minecraft stores the contents of your inventory with a little bit of data. Any time you download a file from the Internet, you probably notice that there is a size in kilobytes or megabytes or gigabytes. This is data. Chose any file from the internet, as long as it is 1KB or smaller, and you could store it on this hard drive.”
With smellystring being a a PhD student (in computer science no less) building a working Minecraft hard drive isn’t going to be a walk in the park for everybody but it’s not hard to see why Microsoft trumped up billions to own the game and its developer. Minecraft isn’t just a game, it’s a platform.
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft furthers this creativity and whether or not they provide players with new tools either as DLC or as a sequel, but we’ll keep you posted once we know more.
Source: Cnet
