Erik Andersen had never been interested in architecture, but playing Minecraft – a popular 3D video game where users build and navigate their own digital environments – he found himself constructing a brick-by-brick scale model of a temple he’d once seen in Bangkok.

“Suddenly I was actually starting to look at buildings and think about their design features,” said Andersen, assistant professor of computer science. “I’m generally interested in education in games, and I was impressed by how this game got me interested in architecture.”

Seeking to harness that educational potential, Andersen and three other Cornell computer scientists developed a Minecraft modification that uses artificial intelligence to tell players whether their buildings fit into certain architectural styles, and offers ideas for how the structures could be improved. Their modification – which is not yet publicly available – also helped advance the researchers’ work in computer vision and human-robot communication.

The authors will present their paper, “Design Mining for Minecraft Architecture,” at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, Nov. 13-17, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

“Minecraft, without intending to be an educational tool, has been pulled in so many different directions, where originally it was just for fighting monsters,” said senior author Ross Knepper, assistant professor of computer science. “One of the things that’s important to learn when you’re a kid and throughout life is creativity, abstraction – how to envision what you want and then create it. That’s not an easy skill for anyone. So this is a tool that helps people not get discouraged, maybe if they’re beginning at Minecraft and don’t know how to use their imagination right off the bat.”

“When you’re working with images, it’s really hard to actually get at the essence of what something is. A machine observing how people build can actually learn quite a bit about about what shape is, what structure is, what buildings are.”

Bharath Hariharan, assistant professor of computer science
Based on buildings that Minecraft players created and uploaded for others to use, the researchers created a deep neural network – a kind of machine learning trained to predict whether data belongs in a certain category. Through that network, players could learn whether their building is medieval, modern, Asian or classical – four especially popular tags used by Minecraft players. Once the building is classified, another algorithm can show the users similar buildings to inspire them to make improvements to their own.

The program also allows users to import similar buildings into their Minecraft worlds, creating a neighborhood of like styles.

“It’s a way for the users to learn more about the thing they built,” said Irene (Euisun) Yoon ’19, first author on the paper. “People are really interested in having more design spaces in Minecraft, and being able to build certain types of architecture, but there weren’t any design tools as far as we were aware that can teach them.”

Yoon personally curated the data set to make sure the buildings were labeled correctly, since their algorithm was less accurate than they would have liked because it was trained with fewer than 1,000 player-created buildings. Ideally, such an algorithm would be trained with tens or hundreds of thousands of pieces of data.

“If you ask an architect to tell you what a building’s style is, the architect will say, ‘OK, it’s one-and-a-half stories, it has dormers, it’s a Cape Cod.’ Deep learning is doing that but it’s doing it in a black box way (hidden from view). It learns patterns, but not necessarily the same patterns an architect would say are the key things,” Knepper said. For example, if all the modern-style houses in a data set have pools on the roof, the computer could assume that rooftop pools are a requirement for modern houses.

For Knepper, a roboticist by training, the Minecraft project helped answer questions about how a robot might follow a human’s instructions.

“If I say, ‘Build a house,’ today a robot is going to say, ‘I don’t know what that means.’ ‘Which brick should I put where?’ is the level at which robots need instruction,” Knepper said. “We’d like humans to be able to interface with robots more like we interface with each other. So if I tell it to build a medieval house or an ancient house and give some of the high-level details, it would know at that point how to turn it into a plausible thing that does everything you want. We’re not there yet, but this is the first step towards that goal.”

Co-author Bharath Hariharan, assistant professor of computer science, approached the research from the perspective of his own work in computer vision. In trying to interpret an image, a computer can be trained to pick up cues such as shape and solidity, but may have trouble processing perspective or scale. Using people’s intelligence through their Minecraft structures and tags can help computers learn to solve those problems.

“When you’re working with images, it’s really hard to actually get at the essence of what something is,” Hariharan said. “A machine observing how people build can actually learn quite a bit about about what shape is, what structure is, what buildings are.”

The paper is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation.

Think that the headline-grabbing Fortnite is the world’s most popular video game right now? Think again. Publisher Microsoft has revealed that Minecraft, the voxel-based building and survival game, has over 91 million active monthly players.

That’s a significant 13 million advance on the record 78.3 million players that Fortnite posted in August this year. Minecraft is the second highest selling video game of all time, behind classic puzzler Tetris, with 154 million copies sold worldwide.

In addition to these sales, the game is available for free in China, published by Chinese tech giant NetEase in collaboration with Microsoft, and has over 100 million registered users, giving Minecraft a pool of over 250 million potential players that continues to grow. The amount of monthly players has increased by 20 million in 2018 alone.

This vast player count means that Microsoft, who bought Minecraft and its development studio Mojang for $2.5bn in 2014, are unlikely to develop a Minecraft 2 any time soon as they do not want to split the enormous, active user base.

“I don’t think that makes sense for Minecraft, given the community,” Minecraft Head Helen Chiang told Business Insider. “It’s something that always fractures the community.”

“We don’t want to ask players to move from ‘Minecraft 1’ to ‘Minecraft 2.’ We want them to just enjoy ‘Minecraft,” said Chiang. “And there’s other ways that we can expand that are more meaningful and authentic to what we want to be, rather than just releasing another iteration in the way that most other franchises do.””

Instead, Microsoft are looking to expand Minecraft’s popularity with spin-offs such as the recently announced Minecraft: Dungeons. This is a combat-based dungeon-crawler crafted in the style of Minecraft and will not feature the traditional building and survival elements.

This isn’t the first time that Minecraft has expanded beyond its core conceit, which has groups of players building incredibly detailed worlds, with Telltale Games’ narrative game Minecraft: Story Mode proving such a success it was commissioned as an interactive show for Netflix before Telltale faced a majority studio closure last month.

While Minecraft hit the heights of its mainstream media attention just ahead of the 2014 sale, Microsoft have continued to grow the franchise to its current high. Often dubbed ‘digital Lego’ the main Minecraft game has expanded across multiple platforms, including Nintendo Switch, while continuous free updates has kept the game thriving.

On Nov. 1, Microsoft will be releasing its newest Minecraft Hour of Code tutorial, which, according to a recent announcement, could be “possibly the most adventurous tutorial yet.” The company has teamed up with Code.org for the release of “Voyage Aquatic,” in which students “explore aquatic worlds and uncover hidden treasure” by writing code to instruct agents to execute commands. The lesson specifically covers two programming concepts: loops and conditional statements.

Code.org runs the annual “Hour of Code” campaign, a global effort to help students learn how to code in an hour with free tutorials.

The Minecraft tutorials are interactive and use the same characters and concepts from the Minecraft video game, but it’s not the game itself. For Hour of Code, Minecraft developers work with educators and Code.org to create a Minecraft game-inspired lesson that introduces players to basic coding concepts. (Minecraft Education Edition is a separate game that schools need to purchase to play.)

Typically, the Minecraft tutorials come with free teacher resources, such as facilitator “quick start guides” and PowerPoint presentations for use in presenting the unit to students.

The new tutorial will be available through Code.org’s website starting next month.

The big news from Minecon Earth 2018 was that of spin-off co-op game Minecraft: Dungeons, but it wasn’t the only announcement to come out of the convention. Mojang also detailed the next Minecraft update, Village and Pillage, which adds new NPCs like the librarian and the butcher, as well as new enemies called Pillagers and Beasts. Pillagers carry crossbows, and players will be able to craft their own to use against them.

Big changes to the way add-ons work have been announced too: “Previously, add-ons only allowed you to modify existing mobs in the game, but with New Entities you can add more mobs. You can use Data Driven Spawning to control which mobs spawn in your worlds. Animations will give you more customisation options, so you’ll be able to craft the horrifying eight-legged mob of your dreams/our nightmares. Particles will let you pretty up your mobs with cool effects. All of these features are on the way and you can try them in the Minecraft beta on October 3rd.”

Scripting API is also close, and when it arrives it will be another step in Mojang embracing mods. As their blog post puts it, “We’ve never officially supported modding in Minecraft, but the Add-Ons system combined with the Scripting API is the beginning of the era where we do.”

Panda bears are coming too, as are more cats, a floating theme park called Inspiration Island, and biome updates beginning with Taiga.

A new live action trailer for Fallout 76 aired during the “Saints vs. Vikings” game earlier today which, for the benefit of anyone living outside of the United States, was some kind of football match. The official Fallout Twitter account tweeted as much, and you can see the trailer itself above.

There’s a woman standing in a lush green field, slowly and blissfully rotating as she fires off indiscriminate rounds from dual-wielded pistols. Later, two heavily-armed fellows in Power Armor are also enjoying the shooting of their weapons. The only time people look serious – ie, the only time they are not smiling – is when they’re not shooting their weapons (though being in the presence of a reason to shoot their weapons – such as the arrival of a deathclaw – seems to make them happy too).

Fallout 76 releases November 14. Chris played the recent Xbox-exclusive beta, but there’s a PC equivalent coming soon.

Welcome to our roundup of Minecraft commands. Whether it’s to copy an existing build, change the gamemode, or flat out cheat your way to glory, Minecraft console commands are an important part of playing the game day-to-day. While there are a lot of different commands out there, all varying in complexity, we’ve got a run down of the ones you need to know, and, of course, the ones you can use to troll your friends. Because what’s Minecraft without a bit of friendly griefing?

If you’re wondering how to enter the Minecraft console commands listed below, all you need to do is hit the forward-slash key (/) and that’ll bring up a small window. Input the code and hit enter and your command will activate.

If you need more Minecraft advice from us, check out our best Minecraft seeds and best Minecraft mods.

Shorthand Codes

Below are the shorthand codes to save you from typing in different player names. These are worth memorising so you don’t have to type in names like “Sniper_Kitty_Bruv_91” every time some jobber joins your game.

@p – the player nearest to you
@r – a random player
@a – all players
@e – all entities in the world.
@s – yourself
The clone command

/clone

Clones a selection of blocks to another location. Very helpful if you’re building a city space and want to duplicate multiple buildings to different areas. “ ” is your start point. “ ” is the end point. And “ ” is where you want the cloned blocks to spawn.

Example: /clone 100 234 -10 200 100 0 300 200 100

How to change the difficulty

/difficulty

Changes the in-game difficulty. Replace the latter section of the code with one of the following:

peaceful
easy
normal
hard
Example: /difficulty peaceful

Add an effect to yourself or someone else

/effect [seconds] [amplifier] [hideParticles]

Adds a status effect to the targeted player. “[seconds]”, “[amplifier]”, and “[hideParticles]” are all optional conditions, so feel free to ignore them unless you want to change the length, how strong the effect is, or whether the effect shows as particles or not. If you want to remove an effect from a player, type “/effect clear”.

Example: /effect PCGamer water_breathing 30

Enchant an item

/enchant [level]

Adds an enchantment to the item the player is holding. So that’s smite, bane of the arthropods, sharpness—any enchantment you’d pull from a book or enchant table. Here’s a list of Enchantment IDs.

Example: /enchant PCGamer minecraft:smite 1

Exp modifier

/xp [player]

Gives the targeted player an amount of experience points. If you just want to add levels instead, which is easier for enchanting, try “/xp L [player]”.

Example: /xp 100L PCGamer

Change the gamemode

/gamemode

Changes the gamemode for everyone in the session. Add a player’s name to the end of the code to alter the mode for different players. Replace “” with one of the following options:

Survival
Creative
Adventure
Spectator
Example: /gamemode Survival

Give an item or items

/give [amount]

Drops an item into the player’s inventory. Perfect for if you want to start a run with a full set of diamond gear. Just keep in mind the amount section only works for stackable items. You can’t give yourself 100 diamond swords in one go, as cool as that’d be. For a full list of item IDs, head here.

Example: /give PCGamer diamond_sword 1

Help if a command isn’t working

/help [command name]

Offers additional information about any console command. If you’re trying a command and it isn’t working as it should, type the above command before the name of the command that isn’t working and you’ll be treated to more details about how it works.

Example: /help kill

Turn keep inventory on

/gamerule keepInventory true

Changes the game rules so should you die, you keep all the items in your inventory. Replace “true” with “false” to turn it off again.

Kill everyone or everything

/kill

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Kills everything, including the player. But should you want to kill another player, use “/kill ”. And to kill a certain type of mob, “/kill @e[type=mobType]”.

The play sound command

/playsound

Plays a specific sound file. Great for if you want to use a command block to play a sound when someone opens a door. Who doesn’t love a good doorbell? Take a look at all the sound file names here.

Example: /playsound minecraft:entity.elder_guardian.ambient voice @a

How to check the world seed

/Seed

Displays the seed for their current world should you wish to replay the seed again from scratch or pass it along to a mate.

Set the world spawn

/setworldspawn

Changes the world spawn to wherever the player is standing. If you don’t want to do that, you can also set it to a predetermined location with “/setworldspawn ”

Stop time from changing

/gamerule doDaylightCycle false

This completely turns the daylight cycle off so it’ll always be the current time of day. To reenable the cycle, replace “false” with “true.”

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Spawn a mob

/summon [x] [y] [z]

Summons a mob to a specific location. Remove the “[x] [y] [z]” section at the end to have the mob spawn right on top of you. Just remember if you’re spawning the Wither you’ll need to leg it as fast as possible.

Example: /summon creeper

Teleport

/tp [target player]

Teleports the targeted player to a designated location. And yes, you can indeed teleport a friend into the sky and laugh as their body flails back down to earth.

Example: /tp PCGamer 100 0 10

Alter the in-game time

/time set

Sets the in-game time. Add one of the following numbers onto the end to change the time of day to something else:

0 – Dawn
1000 – Morning
6000 – Midday
12000 – Dusk
18000 – Nightist
Change the weather to something nicer, or worse

/weather

Changes the in-game weather to a different type. I.e. “/weather thunder” would start a thunderstorm. This one’s a must if you’re going after charged creepers. Nobody’s got time to sit around waiting for it to thunder.

When I first walked through the double doors of Great Ormond Street Hospital, it was a little before midnight. The cavernous reception stood before me, with people bustling back and forth. There was a bizarre ambiance: sombre yet fuelled with adrenaline. Parents and guardians shuffled from foot to foot outside, chain-smoking or making calls. My daughter had been rushed in after a car accident and standing within the famous hospital for kids was daunting for me at the age of 24. Even during the day, the hospital can look imposing: a blue-and-white NHS awning sandwiched between monumental architecture, ambulances coming and going, dropping off precious cargo.

My daughter never recovered, but we were there for five days before she died. I watched as kids came and went through inpatient and outpatient wards, being treated for everything from broken bones to life-threatening cancers. Beyond the reception, the wards are decorated with colourful murals to relax the children, and a trip to the roof reveals a wonderful 3D diorama of Pixar’s Finding Nemo for kids to explore between treatments. For a child, the idea of going to hospital for any reason is scary, and companies across the world are doing all they can to help children in this situation.

Teams at GOSH are constantly attempting to break down the fear that can overcome children who will be receiving treatment on-site. After recently introducing an inflatable MRI scanner to help kids adjust to the cramped conditions of the real thing, they’ve gone a step further and built the entire hospital within Minecraft. Now children and parents can tour the hospital virtually, exploring the wards and the different departments they may have to attend. This sounds at first like another story of a vast DIY building project within the Mojang game, but in this case the hospital struck a partnership with Minecraft owner Microsoft to ensure high-quality work and parity with the building.

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The walkway to the main entrance of Great Ormond Street Hospital, in Minecraft.
“The project took around two months to complete,” says Lee Stott, senior software engineer for Microsoft UK. “As you’d expect, lots of research went into building Great Ormond Street Hospital in Minecraft.” But it wasn’t an easy project to manage. Minecraft blocks are one meter thick, which skews the dimensions of the hospital. “To work around this, each floor is separate and the buttons at the elevators simply teleport the player from the elevator on one floor to another.” Microsoft and a crew from professional Minecraft build team Shapescape were provided with hundreds of images and video clips – and, crucially, they were able to study floor plans which have been constantly updated since before the turn of the 20th century.

“Throughout the project, we worked with Shapescape, a company steeped in heritage amongst Minecraft Content Creators, who have previously recreated places such as Trafalgar Square, Chicago and Florence. We trusted them to build the most realistic experience possible using their team of more than 30 people from 11 different countries,” explains Stott. The project will allow children to explore the hospital on computers and soon also in VR. No section of the hospital is off limits, from Paediatric Intensive Care to the café or the golden chapel. The possibilities this generates are seemingly endless; community staff on-site could set challenges for the kids within the game, or use it as a tool for them to meet others their age in similar situations.

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The hospital’s main reception.
Academic studies are increasingly showing the benefits that video games and the supporting technology can bring to the healing process. Away from Minecraft, companies are using emerging technology in exciting ways. “Today, hospitals are using games to encourage socialising, create a distraction and even aid in therapy. We’ve seen cases where gaming or virtual reality have enabled patients to focus on those activities while nurses have swapped out bandages covering a severe burn or taken a blood sample,” explains Stott.

In fact, Hermes Pardini Labs in Brazil has been using VR to distract children while being vaccinated. The nurse will fit a VR headset onto the child and follow along with a story on a second monitor, ensuring that their movements and actions mirror those of the magical fairy the child can see. When the time comes to inject the vaccine, the child is being given a ‘powerful shield stone’ which will protect them in life. The study accompanying this form of treatment has seen great success and a decrease in upset children.

Back in the UK, Microsoft is hoping that it will see a similar effect from its work at GOSH, thanks to the accessibility of Minecraft. “Kids at different levels of experience and ability can play together in the same world, and whole families can join each other on adventures or work on collaborative projects,” says Stott.

The possibilities don’t end with recreating Great Ormond Street Hospital, as Naomi Owen, PR for the hospital’s charity, explains: “We see this as a big project and one that can be explored with other hospitals across the world and bring new ways to interact.” Another way Microsoft is helping GOSH is with the Cystic Fibrosis team. Cystic Fibrosis is a progressive, genetic disease that causes persistent lung infections and limits the ability to breathe over time. A defective gene causes mucus to build up within the lungs and other organs, meaning the child has to engage in a ‘clearance exercise’ for 40 minutes per day.

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An exterior view of GOSH.
Stott talks about how the Microsoft team is helping to alleviate the boredom and mundanity of this daily routine with Minecraft. “In order to help with this aspect of the disease we have been working on a project that we call project Fizzyo, which gamifies the Cystic Fibrosis exercise through custom hardware that turns standard airway clearance devices into a game controller. To further boost participation, we have created a Minecraft mod with custom blocks that allows children to construct their own Fizzyo games inside of Minecraft itself. To do this we’ve introduced two new types of block to Minecraft. The Fizzyo block glows and emits red stone power as the participant carries out their airway clearance exercise.” There is also an ‘exercise tracker block’ which provides an interface to configure and track the exercise’s needs into the game.

“This is all about helping patients and their families at the most challenging time of their lives,” says Owen, “and we hope that this technology leads to more ground-breaking uses to be rolled out across the NHS.”

So how does it feel to walk through this version of Great Ormond Street Hospital? I decided I would walk the route that is burned into my brain from my time there. While many years have passed, and the hospital has evolved, I was able to begin from the entrance, next to the statue of Peter Pan, wander through the brightly lit foyer and ‘ride the elevator’ up to the Seahorse ward. I walked the corridors to PICU, saw the beds lined up under the windows, passed the room where my daughter spent her final moments. And even in the blocky, pixelated view before me, my memories unravelled. I’m not a child who needs treatment, but I am a bereaved parent who finds comfort in those hallways and sees how special this project can be for those who need it.

Theatre Replacement is exploring mothers and sons through the lens of Minecraft.

MINE, the theatre company’s new production, is onstage at Shadbolt Centre for the Arts Nov. 17 through 20.

Using the computer construction game Minecraft as a kind of theatre, a group of gamer-performers from ages 10 to 45 enact different narratives live.

In a rocky and mountainous landscape they tell the story of Grendel’s mother’s brutal act of revenge from the Beowulf saga. They travel to a clearing in the woods to reveal the brief but powerful lessons that Bambi’s mother taught him before that horrible day in the meadow. Somewhere in a nearby city, a cyborg assassin travels back from the year 2029 to 1984 to destroy a woman named Sarah Connor and her son John Connor, who hasn’t been born yet but who will one day save the human race from machines.

“As the performance unfolds, personal stories begin to emerge from the landscape and weave themselves into the narrative,” a press release notes. “Grendel becomes a tweenage kid who just wants to stay in his room and play videogames; Bambi’s mother’s instinct to protect her son becomes a metaphor for a failed family trip to the Grand Canyon; the Terminator story evolves to reveal all the misplaced prophecies a mother places on her son – it’s a lot of pressure, and Mom worries way too much.”

The press release notes that the stories mingle and mash up as MINE both interrogates and recognizes the role technology plays in modern parent-child relationships.

MINE is created and performed by Maiko Yamamoto and her son Hokuto MacDuff, with Conor Wylie, Remy Siu and a group of four local gamer-performers aged 10 to 14.

Dramaturgy is by Carmen Aguirre and design by Leah Weinstein.

(The company also notes that MINE is not an official Minecraft product, nor is it affiliated with Mojang.)

Showtimes are 8 p.m. Tickets range from $15 to $36, available through tickets.shadboltcentre.com or 604-205-3000.