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Comment by lukan | Hacker News Reader

"I started playing Minecraft, man, when my kids were young,” Tomlin said. “I have a Minecraft city in creative that I’ve been working on for like 12 years."

Yeah, it is fun exploring dungeons with my kids. But it seems he clicked the city together? That part always bothered me with minecraft to build anything big, or repetitive.

Well, I love automation, and AI is awesome for that. So now my kids can add details to castles or railwails build by algorithm (But using commands is a big temptation to destroy game balance in survival mode).

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The surprising thing about Minecraft is it's less fun when you make building easier. My friends and I played on a survival mode server from middle school until college. Any of us could sit for hours building on that, but trying to do the same in creative mode would get boring after a few minutes.

Some people are fine with creative mode. The coach wanted a modern city, which is prohibitively difficult in survival mode because of how the ingame materials work. But in that case, it's not fun to use WorldEdit.

This is definitely a personal preference, I think I'd be bored just tweaking something generated by an AI or anyone else, to me a long term construction of something from the ground up sounds much more fun.

I've built a couple replicas of IRL buildings in survival over the years, for an hour or two after work, and found it very relaxing. It did take a lot of repetitive clicking, but the result was (almost) always worth it. And all the things like planning, finding the right place on the map and gathering the materials building materials made it feel like an actual construction, which I enjoyed.

Well, we have fun exploring scenic rides I would have not build by hand and the algorithm is simple enough to explain it to them (they are still learning to read) - the AI takes mostly care of all the messy parts. How to deal with minecraft's various hacks and protocolls and microsoft restrictions to make it do, what I want it to do. Also you can do the construction from the ground up. (just a time issue for me). Be the (coding) architect of a big castle. And I am preparing it - showing to them. There is a UI for setting how wide the water or lava moat is and bring them to think about how to exactly express what they want - in numbers ideally - anything is possible. Including staffing the castle with AI bots (via MineFlyer) and controlling their exact behavior. (not LLM, classic algorithms, do this, then do that). All of that is great for learning to how the system works - what algorithms are.

So yes, personal preference. For relaxation and repetive tasks I rather go away from the screen.

yep, he has stated he placed every block one by one

If you watch the video you can really tell - all these tiny details from the various builds are still etched into his mind.

It makes sense that someone like an NFL head coach would be good at this... the sheer amount of detail in the playbooks (we're talking 500-1000 plays) is nauseating and changes significantly from year to year as NFL play styles evolve, esp. as coordinators come and go.

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