Mar 25th: More Minecraft - the article on Quasi-Connectivity is a great illustration of the knock-on effect that accidental bugs can have on complex interacting gameplay mechanics.
Mar 25th: I had been wondering for a while about what was special about the dead coral fan in Minecraft that allowed it to be used for TNT duping. The answer is enlightening:
The coral is unique in that it behaves like a block that breaks when slime it's attached to is pushed (like buttons, torches, and so on) playing the breaking animation and sending updates like any broken block, but does not actually break - continues to be affixed to the slime, pushed by it so it can pretend to break in the next cycle.
I've been playing Minecraft again lately, and one of the more complex mechanics is around enchanting tools and armor. The order in which you apply and combine enchanting books can be the different between costing 20 levels, and being too expensive to even complete. There's a hidden formula (the prior work penalty) that goes into it. I was looking to see if anyone had built a tool to solve it for you, but I just found other people asking the same question. So I created one.
It's called Minecraft Enchantment Ordering Tool and the source is on GitHub.
Halfblock is a very neat sort-of-minecraft-clone written in JavaScript using WebGL. The source code is unfortunately on bitbucket instead of github, but cloning it shouldn't be too hard.
moved my minecraft skin to the skindex since the old archive lost it
the minecraft note cube is kinda cool, but where are the other blocks?
i have made an awesome skin for minecraft. go and vote for it!