2D grid to draw with some Minecraft materials, to plan complex structures.

In Minecraft, I mainly enjoyed building things, but it was sometimes hard to keep an overview of what I was doing. To help with that I built a simple design tool to sketch ideas out on a 2D grid with some of the available materials in the game.

Being a simple webpage tool without a server back-end, I had it export designs in JSON, allowing people to share designs that way. I later wrote a simple back-end for it in PHP / MySQL, but kept the text import/export for backward compatibility.

In 2017, as I was retiring the server it ran on, I rewrote that backend as a simple Ruby Sinatra application, and ported over the database.

Links

• Try “MCDesign” here
• Browse the source code on GitHub

Please note this was largely written in 2011. I would not necessarily structure my code like I did back then today.