Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

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As a parent who's kid is into both, if there's a choice, I'm pretty sure I'd recommend Minecraft; In Minecraft, the default vanilla gameplay itself is quite intelligent and creative. No such guarantee with Roblox, where, depending on the game, there's a decent chance the kid will get sucked into endless mindlessness.

That being said, I'll be taking a look into Roblox for scripting/programming, I haven't done so yet and I'm all about teaching her how to "cheat" -- and actually, this is a place where Minecraft feels like it has faltered a bit, or I'm looking in the wrong places -- I had a great deal of success teaching other kids (I run a nonprofit) Python with the "MCPI" api, and I can't seem to see if that's been updated or if there is a modern equivalent?

I have prepared for my kids smooth gradual "helpers" in Minecraft - I did place command blocks for them first, later I created server mod with custom commands and teach them to write commands. They learnt to try and combine stuff in "command line" and they loved it. It worked great for them, I believe they acquire basic procedural knowledge sofar but they don't reach "java" level yet. I'll see.

me, a 28 year old, just started playing Minecraft and I feel so bad for sleeping on it for so long. It's surprisngly such an incredible deep and complicated game (in a good way) - I was so wrong for thinking for so long that it's "just a kids game"

100%. I first looked into it only for the mcpi thing because it intuitively reminded me of when I was a kid doing plot graphics in BASIC. The rest looked like silly laboriousness, like no thanks, I don't want to punch trees.

Fast forward to massive sprawling cities and worlds me and the kids have created, and also me insisting that sometimes we avoid "creative" because working for what you build and having there be danger and difficulty getting it built is more fun.

(me, a 44 year old :)

Minecraft mods are made in Java. I saw something about work on a full modding system for the Windows/mobile version, beyond the limited cosmetic stuff available now, but I don't know how that's progressed.

There is a JSON/JS API for "behaviour packs", but I havent looked too much into it.

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