ORONO — A team with researchers in Maine and Illinois is working on a project to use the video game Minecraft to get students interested in science and space.
The project is led by University of Illinois educational psychology professor H. Chad Lane, and University of Maine astrophysicist Neil F. Comins is a collaborator.
UMaine says the team will facilitate the ability of children to ask questions about space using Minecraft as a platform.
The project has received a $2.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
UMaine says children will be able to ask “space-related what-if questions to explore hypothetical exoplanets and see how their worlds differ from Earth.”
Comins and UMaine graduate student Zach Smith are developing conditions for “alternative Earths” that will be a part of the project.
Lydia Winters, at podium, shows off Microsoft’s “Minecraft” built specifically for HoloLens during a live demo at the Xbox E3 2015 briefing ahead of the Electronic Entertainment Expo at the University of Southern California’s Galen Center on Monday, June 15, 2015 in Los Angeles. Microsoft is promoting the next installment in its popular sci-fi franchise, “Halo 5: Guardians,” at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
A new creature heading to Minecraft are bees. These cute little creatures are fluttering around forests, eagerly looking for pollen to bring back to their nest to turn into honey. How can you use them for your advantage to start cultivating them? What use do they have to you? Well, if you’re willing to do a little work, you can move them a little bit closer to start pollinating your plants and collecting honey from their homes. To do so, you’re going to need to create a beehive.
How to Make a Beehive in Minecraft
Collecting the Honeycombs
You’re going to need two ingredients to create a beehive. You’re going to need six planks of any variety and three honeycombs. The planks are not going to take long to gather up. The honeycombs, however, take a bit more time. You need to use a specialized tool to harvest the honeycombs from a bee’s nest. You need to use a tool with a silk touch enhancement. With it, you can freely chip away at the bee’s hive to destroy it and have it drop the honeycombs.
You’re going to get attacked by the bees as soon as you start hitting it, though, because you’re attacking their home. To turn them passive, you can start a campfire underneath the hive to have the smoke shoot up into the nest. You won’t get attacked by the bees, freeing you to do whatever you need while you’re there.
Creating and Using the Bee’s Hive
After you collect the honeycomb from the bee’s nest and you have all of your planks, you can create the bee’s hive at any time to keep in your inventory. You have a few options available you’ll want to want to think about when considering where to place your new item. You can choose to have a massive pile of them nearby your house or put them in the middle of your garden. You may want to consider placing them in the middle of your garden because when bees collect pollen and return to the hive, they drop some of it on your plants. The fallen pollen increases its growth rate over time.
With the hive in place, bees can choose to live there. They might take a little time to get there, but if you have flowers and other plants about it, they should gather into it. Additionally, you can reach into it and collect the honey without needing an empty bottle, like you would if you were receiving it from a bee’s nest.
Disney’s DuckTales is one of the most beloved cartoon series of all times, following the adventures of Uncle Scrooge McDuck and his three nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Considering that the original series only ran for three years between September 1987 and November 1990, it’s a testament to the show that people still remember it fondly even to this day,
Fans of the show can rejoice as you can now get some DuckTales DLC for Minecraft. The new DLC features the family in Minecraft form, along with several locations based off of iconic places in the show.
How Much Duck Do You Get For Your Buck?
According to the Minecraft site, you get quite a lot for your cash. The DLC includes all the iconic locations from the show, such as the City of Duckburg, Duck Manor, and Mount Neverrest too name just three.
You’ll also receive over 30 characters, including Scrooge and his nephews, two brand new storylines, a lot of new quests, and 50 unique collectibles. You can display your collectibles in the McDuck Trophy Room, too. You can get all of this Disney goodness for the princely sum of $6.50/£5.30 from the Minecraft Marketplace. If you fancy reliving your childhood inside one of the most popular games of all time, then I suggest you head on over there, right now.
Minecraft is a game with virtually limitless possibilities. You can build anything you want out of whatever you want. You can kill a dragon in the land of darkness. You can fight pig zombies in the underworld. You can even grow vegetables! But sometimes it’s nice to take a break and experience things other people have made for a change.
Where there’s an infinite possibility, there’s an endless number of people willing to say “challenge accepted.” Minecraft map creators go to extreme lengths to entertain, baffle, frustrate, or in the case of this article, stump. In no particular order, here are the best Minecraft puzzle maps to play if you’re looking for a blocky brainteaser.
10 Best Minecraft Puzzle Maps
The Shadowmaker
One of the unique puzzle maps of them all, The Shadowmaker boasts 17 levels (plus nine bonus levels) to solve, voice acting, custom music, two different endings, and a brand-new mechanic all its own.
This new mechanic involves the ability to create and place shadows – little helpers that you can summon at the push of a button to weigh down switches, get to hard-to-reach places, and in general help, you get through the levels. You can also wield light to “scare” them, and chase them into spots you otherwise wouldn’t be able to reach.
The Shadowmaker tackles these unique mechanics in a variety of exciting ways, and the story is worth delving into if you like a good narrative with your puzzles. The map is only compatible with Minecraft version 1.11.2, at time of writing, and it’s had some issues with shaders, but other than that, it’s a solid puzzle map that’s bound to keep you entertained.
The Useless Button
Following a trend of its time, The Useless Button is a puzzle map that involves you and a button that rather wouldn’t get pressed. Unfortunately for it, the goal of the game to is press the button as much as possible. Why? Because it’s a button. And what kind of button exists not to get pressed?
The more you press the button, the harder it tries to make your quest. It makes you do parkour, punch a cow to death, and even perform strange rituals with stained clay, all in the name of making sure you don’t press the button. Are you up to the challenge? Will you be the one to press the button?
At the time of writing, The Useless Button is only available for Minecraft version 1.8, so keep that in mind if you want to play!
The Prismarine Lab
A two-player co-op map, The Prismarine Lab is a series of 30 levels built entirely underwater. The lab itself promises treasure beyond your wildest dreams – if you have the skills to find it. The map promises an ample supply of challenges, including puzzles, parkour, mazes, and halls lines with traps and skill testers designed to kill you before you reach your goal.
The Prismarine Lab is only available on Minecraft version 1.8.9, at time of writing.
Confusing Cubes
As the name implies, Confusing Cubes is full of cubes. And, as promised, they are confusing. You find yourself trapped in a white room with only one way forward – and that way is full of puzzles.
This map will have you searching all over every wall for something you might have missed, demanding your full attention and an eye for detail. Everything you see is something to take note of – it could be important later, whether it be the next room or five rooms ahead. With an hour’s worth of clever puzzles to solve and 800 command blocks to show for it, Confusing Cubes is worth checking out.
This map is only available with Minecraft version 1.14.2 at time of writing.
The Hypercube
The Hypercube is a short and sweet puzzle/parkour map, inspired by Miegakure, a game that requires you to solve puzzles in four dimensions. While 4D may be beyond Minecraft’s capabilities (for now), The Hypercube does an impressive job of emulating its inspiration.
In every level, there are four different sides, none visible at all at once. You switch between them, using their connected pieces to find your way to the aforementioned “hypercube” – a glowing yellow cube that allows you to advance to the next level. All is said and done in 20 minutes, and you’ll feel like a genius when it’s over.
If you’re going to play The Hypercube, make sure you’re using Minecraft version 1.14.
The Tiny Box
Another puzzle map with inspiration from another source, The Tiny Box is a Portal-inspired game with two endings, custom textures, and even a bit of parkour to spice things up.
You start the map in a white room with nothing in your inventory but – you guessed it – a tiny box. This tiny box is now your best friend, a la the companion cube, in that it will help you through the map. It acts as a stepping stool for places too high to reach and all-purpose activator for various parts of the levels. Everything’s dandy until a mysterious voice starts to suggest that the tiny box that’s been helping you doesn’t care about you. But that’s not true. Is it?
Lazer Together
As the name implies, Lazer Together is another two-player co-op map, with more the 20 stages, hidden pixel art, and a final boss waiting to test you and a friend’s teamwork and puzzle-solving skills. It makes great use of the concept of co-op lasers, constantly putting your teamwork skills to the test with simultaneous parkouring, being separated to solve a puzzle, and much more.
At time of writing, Lazer Together must be played in Minecraft version 1.12.2
The Ice Lab
From the same builders who brought us The Prismarine Lab, The Ice Lab is yet another two-player co-op, with an icy theme to its 30 rooms this time. It also promises treasure hidden behind layers of puzzles and parkour. With two and a half hours’ worth of puzzles to solve, this map will challenge you and your friend with logic puzzles, memory testers, seek-and-find, and more still.
If you want to try out The Ice Lab, make sure you’re playing in Minecraft version 1.8.
p.13
Created as a love letter for Minecraft version 1.13, p.13 is positively using the unluckiest number. With 13 rooms and 13 puzzles – Redstone, logic, parkour, and more – p.13 was built to show off the mechanics that 1.13 added to the game.
You probably could have guessed, but p.13 must be played in Minecraft version 1.13.
Escape Prison
Who doesn’t love a good, old fashioned escape puzzle? Escape Prison brings us back to the formula in an exciting way by giving you multiple prisons to escape from. With ten different prisons, parkour elements, glasses that let you see nearby guards, and full voice acting, this map puts a new spin on an old favorite.
At the time of writing, Escape Prison must be played in Minecraft version 1.12
Everyone’s favorite blocky game from 2009 is suddenly making a resurgence, but not many returning players understand why.
When I first created a Minecraft account of my own, I was in my awkward middle school stage. Ten years later, I am a young adult in college booting up the same video game on my laptop. For anyone who is not aware, Minecraft is making a significant comeback, as verified by trends and statistics.
According to Google Trends, online searches for Minecraft peaked in 2012 and 2013. They have been on a steady decline since then — until 2019. This month, Google searches for the game boosted to 76 percent of their all-time high. It surpassed even Fortnite, arguably the most popular game in the world in the past year.
But what happened to resurrect an old favorite?
Well, it might have never died at all. While there is an influx of returning players, Minecraft has always had a steady player base. Mojang, Minecraft’s creator, cited a monthly player base of 91 million in 2018. The game’s claim to fame is validated by its whopping 176 million copies sold as of May, sturdily placing it in the slot for the second-highest selling game ever. The first? Tetris.
The number of players never truly diminished, allowing Minecraft’s dominance to sail under the radar. But various factors are revitalizing attention.
The family-friendly survival sandbox is a safe bet for content creators on video platforms. Minecraft was the king of YouTube in its heyday, so it is no surprise that it is reclaiming its crown. Advertisers are more keen to sponsor videos of a pix- elated character building a dirt hut than they are to endorse a gory M-rated shooter. Increased chances of monetization on platforms such as Twitch and YouTube means higher video output, which means more viewers and more players. Especially at a time when politicians blame violence on video games — an argument proven to have no justification — advertisers are cautious.
Another explanation is, of course, nostalgia. Like me, there are millions of people who played in middle school who are now in college. We can temporarily forget our responsibilities and the pressures of adulthood by visiting our favorite childhood game. I was curious as to whether the game lived up to the expectations of my sentimental memories, so I redownloaded it and hopped onto a server.
Even in my twenties, a game I played as a kid is still fun. Continual updates throughout the years sparked new interest. What became stale years ago is suddenly fresh again. Whether the hype lasts or starts to fade, I plan to indulge in the nostalgia Minecraft provides.
