Optimization lessons from a Minecraft structure locator
purplesyringa.moe59 points by ftk_ 6 days ago
59 points by ftk_ 6 days ago
A few friends and me use bedrock in a similar manner to push the rules on a faction PvP (player-vs-player) server 10 years ago: Basically a faction was a group of players working together on their base. You could claim land and a base on it was then protected from modification by outside players as long as players from your faction didn't die too often. We didn't really participate in PvP (we sucked :-} ), basically never died but did other interesting redstone stuff like vending machines, etc. But other factions did and they were always at risk of becoming raidable as a result of dying too often. Once a base was raidable is was almost always immediately completely destroyed and stripped of anything remotely valuable.
So we figured we might host one of those faction within our claimed land. As long as they store all valuable within our secure base, the fact that their claimed land becomes raidable doesn't really matter. Claimed land had to be at least one block apart from each other. So we had to find a bedrock tunnel: On their claimed land there needed to be free space within the bedrock level to get down to z=-63. Then on the single unclaimable block between our bases we needed bedrock on z=-61 and bedrock on -62/-63 on both sides. Then on our claimed land we again needed a way to get up from z=-63. Basically a single block long fully bedrock-enclosed tunnel. Took a while to find that, but we managed to set it up and caused quite a stir with other players and the server admins once our hosted faction got raidable without consequences :-)
If anyone's interested in this sort of puzzle, the game Noita is filled with them. A large chunk of the code's in lua and you can inspect it!
The final puzzle for the game is a cryptographic puzzle that's been unsolved for five years now. Folk have done just about everything imaginable to solve the puzzle.
I could never grok Noita, I spent many hours, but I can't get past the first part.
There's definitely something about it that I'm not getting.
In my experience getting healing is super rare and I end up dying eventually.
More important than healing is avoiding damage entirely.
The keys to getting through noita are getting a fast wand to repel enemies and a wand that can dig through stone quickly. There are spell components with negative mana cost and cast time, stack as many of those with a single projectile type spell and you'll make a blaster that can kill enemies safely. The digging wand will let you skip tough sections, tunnel to areas with good loot, let you return to the "sanctuary" zones to edit your wands (if you haven't gotten the "edit anywhere" perk), and such.
Once you have those, you can make more utility wands that let you fly via recoil and whatever else you need.
Adding onto this, the Noita Eye messages are a great read for someone who has some spare time:
The wand building community is also a fun dive. The reddit and discord is filled with people doing things like animating the rickroll music video to exploiting int overflows to kill all loaded enemies.
This is a great real world example of where leetcode is useful.
One of the nice features of one of the mods I've used is making bedrock one level thick, and flat everywhere. Feels nice to me.
Interesting problem.