I remember when parkour was too frustrating for us to do. In the beginning, I felt my stomach flip every time I fell. I kept having to tell myself that I wasn't the one actually falling. When we first played through Path of the Jedi, we spent a long, long time on the stage with the parkour challenge until we found out that we could bounce on the leaves to reset the timers. That was too hard for her before, so I ended up moving her character through that stage.

Now, she enjoys the challenge. She zips ahead through the different levels. Whenever she falls, she just gets back up and does it again. "It's frustration practice," she tells me cheerfully, my words echoing from her mouth. I'm getting slightly better at it too. My stomach no longer flip-flops, and I can sometimes get those double-slime jumps on the first try. It still takes me multiple tries to get through a puzzle that she does in one go, though. Still, I have the most patient tour guide and teacher. She often stays a step or two ahead of me so that she can point out where to go. Sometimes I'm the one who spots the thing we need to do to progress. If there's a particularly tricky jump that I'm having a hard time with and she's already far ahead, she lets her character AFK while she stands beside me and cheers me on. I still tend to yelp when I fall down, which she finds amusing.

We started playing with Parkour Spiral 2, and we've been slowly working our way through other ones released by Hielke Maps. I liked the multiple paths in Parkour Town, the small, self-contained puzzles of Parkour Paradise, and the colours of Parkour Egg. We might not play Parkour Volcano though. We're not yet good at timed parkour, and we ended up cheating our way past the lava-is-rising stage in Parkour Pyramid. Anyway, once we get through those puzzles, there are tons of other maps.

I like how she works hard on figuring out puzzles and is so satisfied when she makes a hard jump. I'm glad I can semi-sort-of keep up with her, or at least trail along behind her at a pace that isn't too frustrating for her. It's fun figuring out tougher levels together.

I'm glad that she talks about the cycle of trying and failing and trying and learning, and how feelings play into it: building that frustration tolerance, trying hard things, feeling the satisfaction of accomplishment. She still gets frustrated in other contexts, but I'm confident it'll transfer. I'm learning, too.

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

I think she used copycat blocks and vertical slabs from the modpack in order to get it to look so round. "I'm excellent at creating things that are not supposed to exist in Minecraft, in Minecraft," she says. The rope ladder is from me, as I needed a non-creative-mode way to get up there.

The smart chute is set to drop only full stacks (64 items) so that the extra saplings will stay in the chest and feed the deployer. The brass funnels have the different items in their filter slots. She has them feeding into netherite backpacks.

I've got a couple of librarians. I'll probably set up some more eventually, maybe in a large wing focused on trading. I've also been upgrading the wheat farm with organic compost that's broken down into rich soil. I started some flax plants for string.

Just toodling along…

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

We couldn't get Underdog to work under GDLauncher on her computer even when I changed the Java interpreter and memory settings as suggested in the Underdog installation instructions. I installed PrismLauncher on her computer and that worked fine.

As usual, when we started the world, we set it to peaceful and turned the day/night cycle off. The early progression quests went all right, except for the one about obtaining 32 balls of clay. We found a few, but I'm not sure if there were enough clay blocks near our spawn or maybe they were just hard to see under the water. I liked how the process of making charcoal involved making a pit and burning the stacked firewood blocks under a nonflammable material (I used dirt).

A+ wasn't a fan of how much work was involved in everything, though, so I'm not sure we'll return to this world. I think when she says "realistic", she's looking for something more like Total Animation than TerraFirmaCraft. Here's what Total Animation looks like:

(You can tell I built the house because it's a boring box-like thing made with whatever wood was handy.)

We last checked out Total Animation in October. It's a little too laggy on my Lenovo P52 laptop, so I usually play without the shaders and visual effects that make it special. A+ has more patience for that, and since she plays in Windows, her P52's (small) Nvidia GPU can accelerate it enough to be tolerable.

There are a ton of modpacks that focus on more realistic textures/shaders/etc., so she'll probably flip through a few of them. I might as well practise my journaling along the way.

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Once that's in place, I can start making more elaborate things.

I used to have the encased fans just blowing horizontally. After I learned that I can use encased fans to blow upwards through a depot, I switched to setting up my blasting/smoking/washing stations vertically so that I didn't burn myself as often.

The most recent thing I added to this world is this cobblestone-gravel-iron nugget machine.

I needed to upgrade to a large waterwheel to drive the two millstones along with the fans.

Next things I'll probably try:

• The lava farm is filling up nicely, so I can put some pipes underneath it and have a pump move lava into a basin for making andesite. That'll give me something to do with the flint from the iron nugget farm. I'll need to mine some copper first, though.
• I can start mining for diamonds so that I can get obsidian and go to the Nether. I made a rope pulley + drills mining contraption, but (a) I think it got stuck after going past some lava and water, and (b) the shaft it made uncovered a deep dark biome, so… that's a little scary. Maybe I'll do some branch mining, or cave mining when the world is set to peaceful.

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Creating my own datapack was pretty straightforward once I figured out the directory structure. I needed to put functions in <world-name>/datapacks/sachac/data/sachac/functions. Inside <world-name>/datapacks/sachac, I created pack.mcmeta with the following contents:

{
    "pack": {
        "pack_format": 10,
        "description": "sachac's tweaks"
    }
}

Inside <world-name>/datapacks/sachac/data/sachac/functions, I created a command_book.mcfunction file with the command to give me the book. I updated my command book function to remove the / from the beginning.

I used /reload to reload my Minecraft configuration and /datapack list to confirm that my datapack was loaded. Then /function sachac:command_book ran the function to give me the command book, so that all worked out. I replaced the command in the command block with the function call.

The next step was to update it directly from Emacs, including reloading. First, I needed a function to give me the filename of a function file.

(defun my-minecraft-datapack-function-file-name (world datapack-name function-name)
  "Return the filename for a mcfunction file given WORLD, DATAPACK-NAME, and FUNCTION-NAME."
  (seq-reduce
   (lambda (path subdir) (expand-file-name subdir path))
   (list "datapacks"
         datapack-name
         "data"
         datapack-name
         "functions"
         (concat function-name ".mcfunction"))
   world))

I used C-c C-x p (org-set-property) to add a WORLD property to my Org subtree. For example, my snapshot world is at /ssh:desktop:~/.minecraft/saves/Snapshot. Then I can get the correct value within the subtree by using org-entry-get-with-inheritance. This is how I wrote the command book function for my snapshot world:

#+begin_src emacs-lisp :var body=mc-snapshot :var team=mc-team :var quick=mc-quick :var effects=mc-effects :var items=mc-items :results silent
(with-temp-file
    (my-minecraft-datapack-function-file-name
     (org-entry-get-with-inheritance "WORLD")
     "sachac"
     "command_book")
  (insert (my-minecraft-book "Commands 8.5" "Mom" (append team quick body effects items))))
(mcf-eval "reload")
#+end_src

So now I can use C-c C-c to execute the Emacs Lisp block and have my Minecraft world updated. Then I just need to right-click on my command block's button or run the function in order to get the new version.

I'm looking forward to learning more about mcfunctions so that I can write a function that automatically replaces the book in everyone's inventories. Could be fun.

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

• [2023-04-12 Wed]: Remove / from the beginning so that I can use this in a function. Split book function into JSON and command. Updated effects to hide particles.
• [2023-04-10 Mon]: Separated trident into channeling and riptide.

A+ likes playing recent Minecraft snapshots because of the new features. The modding systems haven't been updated for the snaphots yet, so we couldn't use mods like JourneyMap to teleport around. I didn't want to be the keeper of coordinates and be in charge of teleporting people to various places.

It turns out that you can make clickable books using JSON. I used the Minecraft book editor to make a prototype book and figure out the syntax. Then I used a command block to give it to myself in order to work around the length limits on commands in chat. A+ loved being able to carry around a book that could teleport her to either of us or to specified places, change the time of day, clear the weather, and change game mode. That also meant that I no longer had to type all the commands to give her water breathing, night vision, or slow falling, or give her whatever tools she forgot to pack before she headed out. It was so handy, W- and I got our own copies too.

Manually creating the clickable targets was annoying, especially since we wanted the book to have slightly different content depending on the instance we were in. I wanted to be able to specify the contents using Org Mode tables and generate the JSON for the book using Emacs.

Here's a screenshot:

This is the code to make it:

(defun my-minecraft-remove-markup (s)
  (if (string-match "^[=~]\\(.+?\\)[=~]$" s)
      (match-string 1 s)
    s))

(defun my-minecraft-book-json (title author book)
  "Generate the JSON for TITLE AUTHOR BOOK.
BOOK should be a list of lists of the form (text click-command color)."
  (json-encode
   `((pages . 
            ,(apply 'vector
                    (mapcar
                     (lambda (page)
                       (json-encode
                        (apply 'vector 
                               (seq-mapcat
                                (lambda (command)
                                  (let ((text (my-minecraft-remove-markup (or (elt command 0) "")))
                                        (click (my-minecraft-remove-markup (or (elt command 1) "")))
                                        (color (or (elt command 2) "")))
                                    (unless (or (string-match "^<.*>$" text)
                                                (string-match "^<.*>$" click)
                                                (string-match "^<.*>$" color))
                                      (list
                                       (append
                                        (list (cons 'text text))
                                        (unless (string= click "")
                                          `((clickEvent 
                                             (action . "run_command")
                                             (value . ,(concat "/" click)))))                                    
                                        (unless (string= color "")
                                          (list (cons 'color
                                                      color))))
                                       (if (string= color "")
                                           '((text . "\n"))
                                         '((text . "\n")
                                           (color . "reset")))))))
                                page))))
                     (seq-partition book 14)
                     )))
     (author . ,author)
     (title . ,title))))

(defun my-minecraft-book (title author book)
  "Generate a command to put into a command block in order to get a book.
Label it with TITLE and AUTHOR.
BOOK should be a list of lists of the form (text click-command color).
Copy the command text to the kill ring for pasting into a command block."
  (let ((s (concat "item replace entity @p weapon.mainhand with written_book"
                   (my-minecraft-book-json title author book))))
    (kill-new s)
    s))

With this code, I can generate a simple book like this:

(my-minecraft-book "Simple book" "sachac"
                   '(("Daytime" "set time 0800")
                     ("Creative" "gamemode creative" "#0000cd")))

item replace entity @p weapon.mainhand with written_book{"pages":["[{\"text\":\"Daytime\",\"clickEvent\":{\"action\":\"run_command\",\"value\":\"/set time 0800\"}},{\"text\":\"\\n\"},{\"text\":\"Creative\",\"clickEvent\":{\"action\":\"run_command\",\"value\":\"/gamemode creative\"},\"color\":\"#0000cd\"},{\"text\":\"\\n\",\"color\":\"reset\"}]"],"author":"sachac","title":"Simple book"}

To place it in the world:

1. I changed my server.properties to set enable-command-block=true.
2. In the game, I used /gamemode creative to switch to creative mode.
3. I used /give @p minecraft:command_block to give myself a command block.
4. I right-clicked an empty place to set the block there.
5. I right-clicked on the command block and pasted in the command.
6. I added a button.

Then I clicked on the button and it replaced whatever I was holding with the book. I used item replace instead of give so that it's easy to replace old versions.

On the Org Mode side, it's much nicer to specify commands in a named table. For example, if I name the following table with #+name: mc-quick, I can refer to it with :var quick=mc-quick in the Emacs Lisp source block. (You can check the Org source for this post if that makes it easier to understand.)

(my-minecraft-book "Book from table" "sachac" quick)

item replace entity @p weapon.mainhand with written_book{"pages":["[{\"text\":\"Daytime\",\"clickEvent\":{\"action\":\"run_command\",\"value\":\"/time set 0800\"}},{\"text\":\"\\n\"},{\"text\":\"Clear weather\",\"clickEvent\":{\"action\":\"run_command\",\"value\":\"/weather clear\"}},{\"text\":\"\\n\"},{\"text\":\"Creative\",\"clickEvent\":{\"action\":\"run_command\",\"value\":\"/gamemode creative\"},\"color\":\"#0000cd\"},{\"text\":\"\\n\",\"color\":\"reset\"},{\"text\":\"Survival\",\"clickEvent\":{\"action\":\"run_command\",\"value\":\"/gamemode survival\"},\"color\":\"#ff4500\"},{\"text\":\"\\n\",\"color\":\"reset\"},{\"text\":\"Spectator\",\"clickEvent\":{\"action\":\"run_command\",\"value\":\"/gamemode spectator\"},\"color\":\"#228b22\"},{\"text\":\"\\n\",\"color\":\"reset\"}]"],"author":"sachac","title":"Book from table"}

Then I can define several named tables and append them together. Here's one for different effects:

Some commands are pretty long. Specifying a width like <20> in the first row lets me use C-c TAB to toggle width.

Here's what that table looks like in Org Mode:

Here's how to combine multiple tables:

#+begin_src emacs-lisp :results silent :var quick=mc-quick :var effects=mc-effects :var items=mc-items :exports code
(my-minecraft-book "Book from multiple tables" "sachac" (append quick effects items))
#+end_src

Now producing instance-specific books is just a matter of including the sections I want, like a table that has coordinates for different bases in that particular instance.

I thought about making an Org link type for click commands and some way of exporting that will convert to JSON and keep the whitespace. That way, I might be able to write longer notes and export them to Minecraft book JSON for in-game references, such as notes on villager blocks or potion ingredients. The table + Emacs Lisp approach is already quite useful for quick shortcuts, though, and it was easy to write. We'll see if we need more fanciness!

You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.