There seems to a common narrative amongst Minecraft players. You first play the game in single player survival mode, and it’s great fun. You discover amazing landscape and learn to build a base that is completely safe from invading monsters. You build everything your character could ever need into your base and become self-sufficient, but then the game isn’t challenging anymore, so you think of a few large-scale projects to build. After finishing those, you think to yourself, “Who am I building this for? What’s the point?” So, you eventually find a multiplayer server and can explore anew and rebuild your base, but you remember what happened the first time, so you build a much bigger, prettier base, and keep the rest of the players on the server in mind and give each of them their own room within the base. You explore some more, build a few new large-scale projects, then think “Everyone else builds crazy things too, so who am I building this for? What’s the point?”

Well, Cody Sumter and Jason Boggess might’ve finally provided an answer to that question with Minecraft.Print(), a project that outputs a standard model file of a Minecraft creation which can be read and printed by a 3D printer. To avoid printing the entire Minecraft map, the player simply places a combination of an obisidian, diamond, gold and iron block (the blocks were chosen because, if a player isn’t invoking objects at will, these blocks are difficult to come by and rarely used for much) at two points to designate the area of the desired object to be printed, then Minecraft.Print() outputs the aforementioned standard model file which can be read by a 3D printer. From punching wood, to creating tools, to gathering materials, to building structures, to being displayed on your desk at work. Head on past the break to check out a video tutorial of Minecraft.Print().

(Minecraft.print() via Hacker News)

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