Minecraft-Style Mining Comes to Second Life (Kinda Sorta)!

The inevitable has happened: You can now mine rock in Second Life like you would in Minecraft. That's thanks to Jezebel Madzuko's Minecraft Mining Kit. The kit comes with several varieties of Minecraft pick, and TNT, so you can expedite your mining with fricking explosions. Since you can't actually mine Second Life's mountains, Ms. Madzuko's kit also comes with a giant block of destructible rock. So once you go into first-person mouselook, aim at a block and start clicking -- it starts fracturing with every blow (which also comes with a Minecraft-style "carving" sound effect), then finally dissolves into a harvestable resource. It pretty closely captures the Minecraft experience. I rezzed my copy of Jezebel's kit into a Second Life sandbox, carved a tunnel on one side of the cube, and made a staircase that took me to the top.

“[I]t comes in chunks of 252 prims,” Jezebel tells me. “One prim equals one cube.” She’s created a very clever script which effectively turns each block into a “killable” object, or mob:

“The blocks use a health script similar to the mob in my mob spawner,” she explains, “so when you ‘attack’ them with the pickaxe it starts to degrade their health. Once their health reaches zero, the blocks break. There's also a timer so that if you stop attacking the blocks will return to full health.” She’s even thinking of adding different minerals to future versions, so you have a chance to mine iron, diamond, etc. “But I'm not sure what value it would add to the product,” she says. “I think people just like carving the stone into houses/monuments.” So far, she’s sold over 75 copies.

As you might guess, Jezebel Madzuko is an avid Minecraft player herself, and sometimes plays on on the Pixel Hills server. She actually learned how to script in Second Life in order to make her Minecraft mining kit:

“One day I got the idea to do the bow from Minecraft, and someone who saw it said I should script it. I didn't know too much about scripting at the time, but I blundered through it and got it working, and that made me want to try my hand at some more complicated stuff... It took a lot of reading on the LSL wiki and a lot of trial and error, but it was tons of fun, and people seem to be enjoying them, so that's cool.”

Using TNT to mine in Minecraft Second Life -- from the SL Marketplace listing

 

It is so enjoyable, I wondered if it would be possible to add several dozen of her kits to a single Second Life sim, effectively turning it into Minecraft island. She’s skeptical there:

“Even in an empty simulator it would take a LOT of prims to create a standard, interactive Minecraft environment. Too many, I suspect. That and the lighting engine doesn't really support the thrill of exploring dark caves.” However, she plans to add other Minecraft-style Second Life objects to her growing collection, including more Minecraft mobs. And so the influence of Minecraft, a game which bears an eerie resemblance to Second Life as it was originally conceived, will continue seeping into Second Life itself.

Hat tip: Tenebrous Pau.

Comments

[Metacam Oh]

Do they have Minecrafts permission to sell this?

[Adeon Writer]

Yeah I feel a little uncomfortable not knowing how Notch would feel about this.

It is really cool though.

[Jezbel Madzuko]

Hi, Hamlet told me there was some discussion about whether or not I had Notch's permission to sell these. This is a question I've been asked before, and the answer is no. If someone from Mojang were to ask me to stop, as a fan of the game I'd be happy to oblige.

[Nelson Jenkins]

Oooh, an advertisement.

I was going to purchase this then found that it's just a block of stone.

Built a bunch of Minecraft blocks and created a similar system (but with a full inventory, ores, limited crafting, etc) then realized that I can't sell it due to copyright.

Minecraft itself is more fun anyways.

[Nelson Jenkins]

Also, fun fact: it would take over 16,000 prims to generate a totally flat layer of blocks on 1/4th of a full region (never mind trees, mountains, underground, et cetera).

So no, it would not be possible to create a Minecraft sim, nor would it be script-friendly.