Minecraft players are always coming up with new ways to amaze us. The latest example comes from ItsJustJumby, who built a functioning 3D printer within the game.
The printer is set in an enormous room. A patch of grey floor titles in the middle is where printed objects will spawn. ItsJustJumby's virtual gadget can make objects up to 6x9x10 in size.
The interface for the 3D printer is along the room's wall. You grab colors from a collection of 16 wools. You place these wools in a nearby line of chests to design the object's appearance. For example, if you wanted an object with a completely black layer, you would fill a chest with black wool.
"Any place that we want an air block, we place glass," says ItsJustJumby in his video. "There are 10 chests, 1 for each layer of the object."
After the chests have been filled, the player pushes the "print" button on the wall. This begins the creation process. After a long wait, the object - in this case, a giant creeper replica - is built.
The printer takes a minute to create the objects, during which time there's considerable lag. Deleting the object - accomplished by pushing the "clear" button - takes another 45 seconds.
It takes a lot of work to build this printer. ItsJustJumby says that his virtual machine is composed of 846 repeaters, 1124 hoppers, 9181 comparators, 10539 pieces of redstone dust, and 20103 command blocks. Deleting printed objects is a bit simpler; the "clear" button spawns a mass of creepers that blow up immediately. If you're curious about how it exactly works, watch the full video. He begins talking about all of its inner workings at around 1:57.
I'd imagine many of you don't really care how it works. You just want the printer itself. If that's the case, you can find the download link here. The ZIP file for the 3D printer is a mere 1.56MB.
The next step of this mod is clear: a 3D printer that creates a working copy of Minecraft. Then, once that's operational, someone has to use that 3D-printed version of Minecraft to create another 3D printer. Make it happen, Internet!
The PC and Mac version of Minecraft passed the 13 million mark in sales earlier this month. As of October, the game has sold over 33 million copies across all platforms. That total should climb even higher now that the game has launched on PS3.
