Minting Minecraft Blueprints As NFTs
DEVELOPERS
December 9, 2021
Most of the time, when you hear people talking about non-fungible tokens (NFTs), your first thoughts may turn to media files such as images or music. But, actually, NFTs are not limited to such file types. In this article, you’ll discover how the DevRel team created non-fungible tokens based on Minecraft buildings designed inside the game.

Blockheads
Creative possibilities are endless thanks to the new developments and technologies rising in the crypto space. For example, Dorian (a member of Near Inc. DevRel team) runs a YouTube series called Blockheads, where he creates fun examples of things you can build on NEAR. He’s also fond of the world of Minecraft, especially during quarantine. 

After learning about NFTs, Dorian thought it would be fun to give Minecraft artists and builders the ability to mint their buildings and creations as NFTs and sell them on the open web. So, using the Mineflayer JavaScript library, he created a bot that could monitor the in-game chat and pull information about the game’s environment. Then, using that bot, he created blueprints that a user could then mint onto the NEAR blockchain. The following video shows the bot named Jerry in action:


Minting Minecraft with NEAR
The app grew and took shape. Finally, Ben Kurrek from Near Inc. DevRel had the great idea of using the popular World Edit mod to get the building data and store it in a .schem file. This file then gets uploaded to IPFS for storage, and the content identifier (CID) is saved to the NEAR blockchain itself. The flow is smooth, and .schem files capture the building designs more accurately than Jerry could on his own.

If you’re interested in seeing how the complete flow works in minting a Minecraft building, check out the NFTs tutorial Ben created. It’s simple, fun, and very straightforward (of course, if you have questions, you can ask us during Office Hours).

As it currently stands, getting Jerry to read .schem files has been tricky since they aren’t a conventional file type that JavaScript (Jerry’s preferred language of choice) can understand right out of the box. But progress is still being made. So if you would like to join Dorian on this endeavor to make Minecraft NFTs on NEAR, you can contact him on Discord.