Major Lasers

Ricky here has made all the components of a Portal-style laser puzzle game within Minecraft - just one of his weekly experiments with modding mobs to create new game mechanics. Yes - the laser emitters are actually mobs, with their properties tweaked, not least to make them invisible. You can see a gif of it in action here!

“What I used for the laser system is the projectile skill,” explains Ricky. “It allows you to create sort-of-fake entities, which are then used by the mob to cause effects. You can make it so that when the projectile impacts something it runs a command or creates a particle effect - or, in this case, transmits power through scoreboards. So with my laser set up, basically, each part of the laser system is an independent mob and it passes on information through scoreboard values. They pass on two main values: colour, which is the beam, and the direction.”

Ricky makes the magic happen with the use of the MythicMobs plug-in by Xicage. “I really want to see it become more popular,” Ricky says. “You can do some really quite impressive and different stuff than what you’d expect with just mobs. The crux of it is that it modifies mobs’ behaviour and give them abilities - some of which you can already modify using commands, but wrapped up in a nicer package. But there’s some there stuff in there that give you tools to modify other stuff that you normally can’t with commands.”

Ricky’s been using these tools to do brilliant, leftfield things with mobs on a weekly basis, or as he says, “not just making bosses and special mobs, but little things with mechanics that would add to your experience”.

Smart dude. Keep an eye on his weekly experiments over on Reddit!