It turns out that A+ has a license for Minecraft Education using her school account. We installed it on W-'s old laptop since it still had a Windows partition, and she went through some tutorials. She likes to switch between survival mode and adventure mode, and she enjoys experimenting with some of the features that haven't made their way into MineClone 2 yet. We haven't decided to buy enough Minecraft Education or Minecraft Bedrock accounts for all of us to play together, though, since MineClone 2 has been enough for W- and me, and we like being able to fly in survival mode. A+ sometimes explores Minecraft independently, but she's more likely to join our MineClone world when we play together in the evenings. I like the way MineClone lets you fly around while still being in survival mode, and my damage prevention mod has been holding up well.

After flying around in our original world, I noticed there was very little water. It turns out that the tutorial set the water level to -31000 in the server configuration, so I stopped the server, deleted that line, and started a new world. That one looked more realistic, with rivers and lakes. A+ picked a spot near the water for us to settle down in and we made a pretty good base, but it was a little annoying to deal with slimes at surface level all the time. So we started yet another new world, and this time I challenged myself to do the starting segment as regular MineClone, no flying around to find a good spot. One of the tunnels I dug ended up close to a village, and we moved our base there.

I set up underground farms for wood, wheat, potatoes, and sugarcane, and an automated furnace and a composter to get through the excess stacks of cobblestone and wheat seeds. The MCL Quick Harvest & Replant mod with cora's fix_seed_dupe patch is handy for farming quickly, since I can hold down the right mouse button and just move around to harvest and replant. Since the villagers kept getting lost and killed, I gave in and created a trading hall, spawning the villagers into their stalls. A+ thought that was a great idea and made herself a stall. She's our village witch and she sells potions for emeralds. She likes going into creative mode to get the ingredients and then brewing the potions herself.

We decided flying around was pretty fun, so we usually keep that turned on. Teleporting saves a lot of time, too. Travelnet boxes make it easy for A+ to go to different places independently. When we come across something interesting, like diamonds or another village, A+ asks us to teleport her to our position so that she can join in. I'm thinking about adding custom commands like /mom or /dad so that she can teleport herself automatically. The Home Point mod lets us go back home easily or bookmark places for later exploration, and I granted everyone the home_point_unlimited privilege so that we can teleport quickly.

I've been really liking the ability to go into MineClone's source code and see if something's been implemented and how. I haven't needed to dig into Minetest yet, but it's nice that it's there in case I want to go deeper into the engine. A+ likes exploring villages, so I tweaked them to generate slightly more often (going from 1/77 to 1/40 probability per chunk, before the height difference check). I also use /findbiome to jump around. The maps from minetest-mapserver were helpful for noticing structures, since I sometimes missed them when just looking around. About the only thing I couldn't find normally was some sugarcane, so I looked in the source code for the item string and used the /giveme command to give myself one piece of sugarcane so that I could start our farm.

Today A+ was curious about the Ender dragon and the wither. She fetched some ender pearls from creative mode and we followed them to the stronghold, where she filled in the portal. We went through it and fought the Ender dragon, which was easy because we had my damage-negating chicken feet on and we could fly around. When we killed the Ender dragon, we went back to the overworld. A+ used creative mode to build a box out of bedrock some distance from our base. She put together the blocks needed to summon the wither, which we then defeated (yay chicken feet). Now that she's tried out both, she's back to figuring out interesting crafts and potions.

I'm glad we're all getting into it together, and that we have this digital sandbox where A+ can try out ideas in a way that's easy to clean up. In a recent session, W- teleported back into the house and was surprised to find water flowing everywhere. A+ yelled, "Everybody, get to higher ground!" Apparently she had been trying to figure out how to make mud, and the water got a bit away from her. After we helped her clean up, I looked in the source code to find out how to make mud (use a water bottle on dirt, I think). Me, I'm continuing to learn more about saying yes. ("Yes, you can go ahead and use the iron to make golems." "Yes, I'll enchant some pickaxes for you. Please give the pickaxes to Daddy so that he can wear them down before you combine them in the anvil.")

Next, I'd like to learn more about redstone contraptions, since MineClone 2 has some support for them and A+ likes playing with them in Minecraft. The NOR latch we tried for the front door was fun to make, and it seems to be working. Many of the automated farm ideas from Minecraft don't work because water doesn't move dropped objects in MineClone (because of the Minetest engine it's built on), but maybe there are other forms of semi-automation that might do. We'll see!