Saving the planet’s all very well, but it’s not always the most fun thing in the world. Games, however, are fun. Why not combine the two?
Luckily, AMEE can support both! My favourite game at the moment is Minecraft, which (amongst other things) involves using resources to make things, and quite often burning them to do so. Seems like it might be a good fit…
So, at the Stockholm Green Hackathon last weekend, I hacked up a mod for Minecraft that adds carbon emissions, but instead of just putting in some random numbers for it, I used AMEEconnect to get real scientific data from the IPCC in there.
When you burn some wood in a furnace, the mod calls out to AMEEconnect to do a calculation, and adds the result to a tracker in-game. As the carbon ticks up, the environment gets more and more polluted as the skies go dark and the clouds come down. OK, not entirely accurate, but an effective visual indicator!
Of course, it’s not just wood. Loads of things burn, and not just in furnaces. The hack supports combustion of almost anything in minecraft; wood, planks, coal, tree saplings, and so on. I even put in some calculations for setting fire to cows (as any Minecraft player knows, an effective way to quickly get cooked beef). Even the hostile mobs like creepers have their emissions mapped (mostly to generic biomass calculations). I also added redstone (like electricity) emissions using AMEE’s realtime UK national grid data.
Of course, there are also ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Plant a tree, and AMEEconnect will work out how much carbon was taken up by the tree growing and reduce the tracker by that amount. After a long day of mining and smelting, you’ll have to go plant a few trees to keep the weather nice.
UPDATE: Take a look at the Climatecraft page in our Labs section for more details and a link to the source code! Warning: may contain burning cows!
Very nice.
When will we be able to download this mod? I would love to try it out.
I’m working on getting it working with SMP and modloader, so hopefully before too long there will be a downloadable version. Keep an eye on @ameehq or @ameedev for announcements!
The source code is now released on Github, so you can build and try it yourself if you’re that way inclined.
Thanks for making this public
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loving this hack, how about an equivalent for Angry Birds?! We have data on poultry combustion right?! http://discover.amee.com/categories/Poultry_manure_nitrous_oxide_emissions/data
You could have a leaders scoreboard for those players advancing their scores with the lowest environmental impact?
That’s not quite combustion, but I’m sure we have something that would work. The Minecraft mod now uses the food item in domestic waste combustion for burning chickens…
Wow this is by far the strangest idea for a mod i have ever seen. Pretty cool though
Very nice idea; I’ve been looking for a consequence which could be applied as our children randomly burn stuff in-game; this would be the perfect option.
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Has this mod been abandoned?
Hi, the source is on https://github.com/AMEE/climatecraft – please feel free to contribute. We are not maintaining it to any schedule right now but happy to help/answer questions/etc.