Gaming, News, Quantum Physics

Playing with Quantum Physics in Minecraft

by simon
Meet Spinsphere’s own Schrödinger’s cat, Minecraft Melmo.

We’ve opened up a preview release of our Minecraft Java server running @ melmo.minecraft.spinsphere.xyz (default Minecraft port of 25565). It’s running the qCraft mod to allow you to experience some basic quantum physical principles like the observer effect, entanglement and superposition.

What’s the Objective?

One day I imagine developing a quantum physics game engine (code-named Quagmire) but before then I figured Minecraft would be the ideal environment for playing around and testing out ideas. Thankfully some wonderful people have already spent a lot of effort to provide a quantum experience in Minecraft via the mod qCraft. Credits to the original TeacherGaming guys who first made this mod about 10 years ago, and the team who reimagined (updated to work with 1.19) it.

Technical Stuff

I’ve just spent my Sunday learning some of the basics of client/server modding in Minecraft as I tried to get the qCraft mod running. As of writing this article, 1.20.4 is the latest version of Minecraft Java but the latest qCraft mod only seems to work with 1.19 (I spent a while playing around but decided not to continue with trying to debug 30 different compile errors in Java to get it to build with 1.20.4 – TODO: for another day!).

To connect to our server you’ll need a Minecraft Java Forge enabled client v1.19.

  1. Assumption is you already have the vanilla Java edition of Minecraft installed on your computer with the Minecraft Launcher openable, thus it’s assumed also you have Java installed (v17 as of this article).
  2. Download the Fabric Minecraft Launcher named fabric-installer-1.0.0.jar from here.
    – Once you’ve saved the file, right-click it and open it in your environment’s Java Launcher.

    – Click Install.
    (*Path will differ depending on your username and if you’re on Windows or Mac or something else cooler like Linux).
  3. Download fabric-api-0.58.0+1.19.jar and save it in your Minecraft installation’s mods folder (Google how to find that – (hint; if OS X, /Users/simon/Library/Application\ Support/minecraft/mods (create it if it doesn’t exist))
  4. Same as 3. for qcraft-1.2.0.jar.
  5. Open your Minecraft Launcher and select the 1.19 fabric-loader version:
  6. Click Play, goto Multiplayer and Add Server melmo.minecraft.spinsphere.xyz as the server’s hostname and then connect to it.
  7. Learn more about what you can do with qCraft at the Wiki.

Bonus

It’d be cool if we could get a web client working with our server one day. As it stands, it seems like it’s pre-alpha and far from even thinking about supporting mods and the like.