Hi gang! Now, before I continue: MCEdit is not a tool which can help you with your plays on the Empire. Its main purpose is to edit Minecraft world saves, and you obviously don't have direct access to those used on the Empire. So please keep this in mind: MCEdit is at its best when used with your own (local) world saves. Figured I'd start with this because the last time I reviewed a Minecraft tool people started wondering how to use it on the Empire. I'm actually a little hesitant to post guides here which aren't directly related to EMC, but the reason I'm still writing this is because MCEdit can be(come) a very important tool. Especially when something goes wrong in your Minecraft world... What is MCEdit? Minecraft, MCEdit & AMIDST As its name implies MCEdit is a program which can help you to edit your Minecraft worlds. At first thought this could seem a bit useless to you. After all: why would you want to edit something in a 3rd party program when you can easily fire up Minecraft, optionally hop into Creative and then start editing and/or building away? Well... Although it is true that you can easily edit things in-game that editing does have its limitations. First a more popular example: ever wanted a pickaxe (or other tool) which had a cool colored name, just like a promo on the Empire? You can rename a tool in Minecraft, but adding colors to a name? Not so much... Or... you have this cool Infinity bow which you've been using ever since you started playing in 1.7. But now, 1.12, you can no longer apply mending to it. You could re-create your bow, but that seems a bit like cheating. Now what? And what about this... You're trying to limit the amount of mobs in your world and because you're getting quite good with command blocks you set up a nice anti-lag routine yourself. First you test for the amount of mobs in the area you're in (/testfor), and when there are too many you kill them. But, uh oh.... Instead of using: 'kill @e[type=!player]' (this would kill all entities except the player) you cooked up something else: 'kill @e[type=player]' And because you were quite sure of your 'command block-fu' you didn't set up a test case but went for a continuously working repeating command block In other words: the moment you open your game you'll be immediately killed over and over and over and over again. And to make matters worse you had just finished a draft of a new design for your residence in that same world save. Now what? Do you have to start all over again? And finally, also a very legit issue: you spend hours building a draft design. But when you open Minecraft and try to load your world all Minecraft does is crash. No matter what you do or which version you try: Minecraft can't load your world anymore. Bye bye hours worth of building? Maybe not... These examples above are exactly where MCedit can shine.. So how does this work? As you probably know: Minecraft is a game where you can pretty much change anything in the world. Because everything is a block of some sort you basically have full control over everything. But because of that flexibility Minecraft also needs to store all this data somewhere. And that happens in the world save files; these contain everything that exists in the world. From the blocks in the world, the mobs, the items which you keep in your Enderchest right down to the armor you're wearing and the stuff you keep in your inventory. And you probably guessed it: MCEdit can, well, duh: edit all that So here I created a nasty (simulated) problem in my "RedStone builds" world. Every time I come near this area I can't help stop pressing the button, effectively killing me (I have an excuse: I didn't had my coffee yet ). So lets fix this! Using MCEdit When you start MCEdit for the first time you'll probably notice 2 things: a command box which shows all sorts of different information, which is soon followed by the screenshot above: a clear list of all your world saves, and the moment you click on one it'll provide you with a preview. There are a few things to look out for here... You can select the Minecraft version which you want to use. This should be obvious: newer versions support newer blocks. Next you can also select a resource pack. This may seem odd at first but keep in mind that some resource packs actually re-texture certain blocks so that they represent something completely different. And if you don't know what the original block actually was then all you have to go on is the looks... And finally: you can chose to view or edit your world. This is important: editing a world can be destructive. So always make sure you have backups, and when in doubt: first view the world so that you'll be sure that nothing will get edited. In my case I do want to edit the world, so I'm clicking 'Edit': There's that nasty command block! Just like Minecraft itself MCEdit starts at the player position. In my case that's quite useful because I'm right next to the command block I need to fix. But if you need to move around then that's no problem at all: you can use W,S,A,D just like in the regular game. Next you have C and the spacebar which can move you up or down. And finally keeping the right mouse button pressed will enable you to 'pan' around. Also noteworthy: all these controls can be edited: Here I clicked on 'Controls' in the upper right corner, this shows me the current controls to move around. As you can see I customized some myself: I don't like using C but instead I'm using Q to lower the camera. Simply click 'Edit controls' to make your own changes. So... let's go over those example problems which I mentioned above.... Editing an item in your inventory It doesn't really matter if you want to rename an item (to add cool colors) or add some enchantments to it. Both examples boil down to you editing your inventory. And you can do that by editing the player details. Click the button "Edit player" in the toolbar (top right corner) and you'll see something like this: There are 3 sections which you can edit. First, the one you see here, gives you an overview of all your properties. So.. here you'll see the gamemode you're in, your current health, your score, your XP level and even the (hotbar) slot which you have currently active. This could be useful if you're stuck in a level which doesn't allow you to change your mode from survival (or adventure) to creative. The other two sections give you more control over editing your inventory. But this is also where things become a little more tricky... Everything in a Minecraft world is saved in the so-called NBT format. It's basically one huge folder structure with many entries and sub-folders which all contain information about the world and the things in it, such as your player character. Basically, all MCEdit does is providing you a way to edit all these NBT entries. The good news is that in doing so it gives you full control: you can change pretty much anything. The bad news is that because you can change anything you could end up adding invalid information, and that will definitely cause problems with your Minecraft game: Want to change the name? Just provide the right NBT entry... Fortunately for us this entire structure is fully explained on the Minecraft wiki. For example, the page which describes the Players.dat format also fully describes the NBT structure. However.. despite all that information it's still not exactly easy to use, especially not if you're new to all this... I am planning on diving more into the NBT structure in a later (different) thread, so for now we're going to do this the easy way Adding colors to your item(s)? Fortunately it doesn't have to be very hard. Simply prepare yourself by first renaming the item. Even if you only want to add color to the default name: always rename the item. Then find your inventory items using MCEdit and you'll soon come across the name: So how to add color? By using color codes. It's just like adding color to a written book (using a book & quill): you need the paragraph sign (§), easily made by pressing alt and while keeping it pressed hit 21 (or sometimes 167) on your numeric keyboard. Here is an overview of all the color codes available in Minecraft. I'm going to change the name into this: "§6§lMy §ospecial§r§6§l bow". What that will result in? I'll demonstrate that later in this post And that enchant? That will have to wait. But... If you want to get hold of a bow which has both Mending (ID70) and Infinity (ID51) then... /give @p bow 1 0 {ench:[{id:51,lvl:1},{id:70,lvl:1}]} is all you need.
(Part II; yups, I did it again ) Editing (command) blocks It's really easy... If you look at the left side of the screen you'll see an option "Inspect block", enable the option, then click on the (command?) block you wish to edit and you'll soon see something like this: As you can see this provides you with just about everything you might want to know about this block. First of all the command is obviously visible but this also shows us other things: the command block isn't automatically run, it hasn't even ran at all yet (conditionMet is 0), it has no custom name and so on. So all we have to do here is to simply edit this command into something more harmless. Or, also possible, change some of the other settings. If auto was 1 you could set it to 0 to prevent the block from constantly executing the command. And of course it's also perfectly possible to simply delete the entire block after you selected it. Which brings me to my last item: So what about saving a structure you build? Sometimes it can happen that a Minecraft level is so damaged that Minecraft itself won't be able to load it. But... MCEdit often can! If that happens then the first thing you want to do is to export your buildings, and it's really very easy (much easier than editing inventories ). Just left click somewhere and then drag the mouse, this will select multiple blocks. Move the camera until you're in a good position and then hover the mouse over your selection. The moment one of its sides turns blue you can left click and keep it pressed while dragging your mouse. This allows you to resize the selection, and it works from every side. Expanding or contracting: just watch the side to turn blue, press the button and while keeping it pressed drag your mouse along. Here I selected my EMC promotional build In the screenshot above you can see that the left side of the selection has turned blue. So if I were to left click and drag I could move that side of the selection, effectively resizing the whole selection. And when you got everything selected you can press control-shift-e (or click on the import/export menu and select the option there). That way you can save your selection in a schematic format. That will allow you to re-add it later using either WorldEdit or Schematica (or MCEdit of course). And there you have it! I realize that this is probably some very dry theory and some of it may not be easy to understand just yet (like that whole NBT structure thing). MCEdit can be overwhelming at first. But if you experiment a little bit with it (do make sure to make backups) and also check the Minecraft wiki for specific information on NBT properties then you may very well get to appreciate MCEdit just as much as I do. There is a reason why it sits directly next to my Minecraft icon Oh, and that bow I edited above? Yeah, about that.... Looks nice, doesn't it? All it takes is giving it a customized name, firing up MCEdit and then editing in the right color codes. If you want to try MCEdit out for yourself then here is the website. Just be careful that you either keep solid (recent!) backups, or that you start by viewing your worlds instead of editing them. It is a powerful tool, but because of that misuse can also lead to powerful problems.
Shell, Are you a mind reader? I literally just installed MCEdit yesterday!!! Seriously though, Nice post...
Ha, ha, ha, I'd like to take credit for that but I can't You did pick a great time to step in though; they're in beta stage right now and most bugs seem to have been ironed out. Thanks for your comment, appreciate it! No promises but I may do a small follow-up on some tips and tricks, but.. we'll see
