Hello! dan200 here, with an update on the state of ComputerCraft. It’s been a long time since the last major update, 1.31, featuring Turtles and Monitors, and people have been understandably asking “What’s next?”

Well, I’m glad to announce two things: 1) That Cloudy, the original developer of the Monitors peripheral from ComputerCraft 1.31, has joined me in developing the mod, and 2) That we’ve been hard at work developing ComputerCraft 1.4, and it’s nearly complete! Look, here’s a picture of it:

The focus of ComputerCraft 1.4 is on expanding the capabilities of the humble Turtle, so that with the right programming, full automation of your worlds is possible using only their tiny robotic brains. To this end, we’ve enabled turtles to be crafted using all types of tools, not just the pickaxe (see above), allowing turtles to do things like kill zombies, shear sheep, and farm crops. We’ve also given them the ability to interact with chests and furnaces, and to place down every single block and item that the player can, including things like redstone, minecarts, and buckets of lava.

The plan is to release ComputerCraft 1.4 with these new features in the next couple of weeks, before the release of Minecraft 1.3, and then to port it to the new version after it comes out, with a couple of more new features for good measure. It’s going to be awesome.

While you wait for that, check out this video from NitrogenFingers on YouTube, of an online ComputerCraft programming workshop he ran to teach programming to novice MineCraft players.

This workshop was a trial run that will hopefully lead to more, and has even been replicated in a real classroom! Be sure to look at the rest of his channel for lots of absolutely fantastic programming tutorials and demonstrations of the things that can be done with CC.

Happy hacking!