You can now create Minecraft mods using Java in Visual Studio

By Williams Pelegrin April 30, 2015

minecraft modding visual studio java add in minecraftmoddingbuild — Image used with permission by copyright holder

During its BUILD developer conference, Microsoft announced that you can now create Minecraft mods in Visual Studio using Java, thanks to a new add-in.

The new add-in was demoed by 17-year-old Aidan Brady, a high school student best known for his popular Mekanism mod for Minecraft. With tweaks of a few lines of code, Brady was able to create bigger explosions for TNT items in the game. The modding tools are included in the Intellisense tool within Visual Studio, though the tool won’t replace the already-available Eclipse tool.

Since schools already use Minecraft as a programming teaching tool for students, the goal is for students to learn how to use Visual Studio and, as a side effect, learn how to create Minecraft mods. Because there is now a path between Visual Studio and Minecraft, Microsoft’s larger goal seems to be for young programmers to get interested in and comfortable with programming, especially when Microsoft is actively looking for new developers for Windows 10.

According to Microsoft’s Briana Roberts, this new tool will not only let you create your own Minecraft mods, but it will also allow you to use templates created by other modders and add onto them. If you’re one of those students, or you just like messing around with Minecraft, the Visual Studio add-in is currently available as a free download.

Today’s announcement goes in tandem with yesterday’s announcement of Visual Studio Code, a free tool for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that allows developers to more easily work on modern Web applications built in JavaScript, TypeScript, ASP.NET 5, and other modern computer languages. Also announced during BUILD 2015, Visual Studio Code lets you work on these applications without the need to jump head-first into the full Visual Studio suite, which remains exclusive to Windows.

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Williams Pelegrin

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Williams is an avid New York Yankees fan, speaks Spanish, resides in Colorado, and has an affinity for Frosted Flakes. Send…

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A town in a valley in Manor Lords.

It feels a little bit like cheating in Manor Lords, but the development upgrades you can get can do some powerful things to improve your settlement. However, to balance things out, the development points you need to unlock these enhancements are given out very sparingly. In fact, you won't get even close to the amount needed to unlock everything on the sphere grid. To make matters even more stressful, there's no way to undo a choice you make, so any point spent in error is locked in until you start a new game. There's none that can make your game harder, but if you pick one that offers no benefit to your current settlement or goals, it might as well be a negative in terms of the opportunity cost. For the best experience, here are the developments you should invest in first.
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The development tree is broken down into four segments: farming, trade, gathering, and industry. Here are some of the best ones you can unlock early.
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No settlement can survive only on hunting and foraging for food. Farming is the only way to make sure your storehouses are well stocked with food, but even a fully staffed farm is painfully slow to harvest. The Heavy Plow upgrade adds a plowing station to your farms so you can make use of an ox to not only make plowing your fields far faster, but also tospeed up transporting your crops to the storehouse.
Charcoal Burning
Preparing for winter is your primary concern for your first year, if not the first two, in Manor Lords. Lack of food is one thing, but if you run out of fuel to keep your population warm, they won't last long. Firewood is your basic form of fuel, but it is very inefficient. This development lets you build a charcoal kiln that gives you two charcoal for every one firewood you feed into it. That will double your potential fuel reserves in a snap.
Deep Mining
All natural resources will eventually run dry. While you can regrow trees and let berries regrow, ore deposits only have so much material for you to mine before they're tapped out. You can break the laws of nature with the Deep Mining development that lets you upgrade any mine into a deep mine that somehow never runs out of ore. This only works on the slightly rare rich deposits, but is still incredibly powerful to have an unending source of ore to build or sell.
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