If you haven’t heard of Minecraft before, it is a game developed by Mojang and originally created by Markus “Notch” Persson. Quite simply, it is a game about placing different types of blocks. Although it may sound a bit dull, Minecraft is one of the most popular games on PC (and has since come to consoles) because of the creativity involved of making anything from complex contraptions (using something called “Redstone“) to massive buildings and even whole countries. Sadly, the Raspberry Pi version has to be limited as the Raspberry Pi itself is limited and therefore uses a C rendition of the originally Java based, mobile version of the game. All of the Minecraft: Pi Edition information from this guide is sourced from pi.minecraft.net
First things first, this is for the Raspbian (wheezy) Operating System on the Raspberry Pi. Also note that XWindows must be running (type startx into the LXTerminal to do this). XWindows may be already start by default with your Pi and if not you can change this by typing sudo raspi-config . The first task is to actually download Minecraft for the Raspberry Pi. So, to start off, type wget http://tinyurl.com/rasp-pi-minecraft into LXTerminal and your download should begin.
Now that you have the file on your Raspberry Pi, and you have made sure that XWindows is running (see above) you need to type the following command into LXTerminal to unpack the tar.gz file- tar -zxvf rasp-pi-minecraft Lots of file/file paths should show up in your window (see picture below). If it does not, make sure you have spelt everything correctly.
That’s everything that has to be downloaded! All that’s left now is to run Minecraft. To do this, first we need to change our current working directory in LXTerminal to mcpi- simply type cd mcpi The final step is to start the Minecraft program by typing ./minecraft-pi Make sure you put the ./ at the start! If everything went well, you should now have an instance of Minecraft running on your Raspberry Pi.
Written By Mathew Monk MinecraftMastery | @minecraftmasterybook