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Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

What bothers me here is that people claim to program "Minecraft in X lines", when in fact all they create is a block (voxel) game engine. Minecraft is much more than that, it has redstone circuits, farming, mobs, structures, biomes, potion brewing, netherworld, fire, etc... Mind you, I don't want to belittle anyone's efforts. I think this is an awesome programming project. But its description is misleading.

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Don't forget that Minecraft was originally just a game where you could walk around and place or destroy blocks. None of the fancy stuff you're talking about was added until the game started taking off.

Your logic simply disallow any meaningful discussion. After all, everything starts small.

Right. Many of these clones are basically Minecraft Classic, which I would call just Minecraft, I very much like it.

Though Minecraft Classic had multiplayer, which this does not.

No, that was Infiniminer. Minecraft was, from the start, "Infiniminer but with action-RPG elements."

And if I cloned myself right now, my clone wouldn't have all my experiences or learning or history, so the description of cloning must be misleading.

Line count is always misleading.

I think scales of magnitude are informative. The difference between 100 and 200 lines or 10,000 and 20,000 are probably not useful, but you can get an idea of the scale of a project when you compare orders of magnitude. At the smallest scale, the recent ray caster was an example where the amount of code mattered a great deal.

I implemented Minecraft in Bash in 2 lines.

  yaourt -S minecraft
  minecraft

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