NFTs in Minecraft with NEAR

Dorian Kinoo Crutcher
2 min readOct 25, 2021

--

There are a lot of possibilities with all the new developments and technologies that are arising in the crypto space. I run a youtube series called Blockheads where I build fun examples of the kinds of applications you can build on NEAR. I am also quite fond of the world of Minecraft, from my youth well into my adulthood haha especially through the quarantine.

After learning about NFTs, I thought how exciting would it be to give Minecraft artists/builders the ability to mint their buildings and creations as NFTs and sell them on the open web! Using the Mineflayer Javascript Library I created a bot that had the ability to montior the ingame chat and pull information about it’s environment in the game. With that I was able to create blueprints that a user could then mint onto the near blockchain. This video shows the bot named Jerry in action!

Blockcraft video showing the development of Jerry

The app grew and took shape. And my colleague Ben Kurrek from NEAR Inc Dev Rel had the great idea of using the popular world edit mod as a means of getting the building data and storing them in a .schem file.

This file would then get uploaded ipfs for storage and the CID would get saved onto the NEAR blockchain itself. The flow is great and .schem files definitely capture the building designs more accurately than Jerry can on his own haha. If you’re interested in seeing how this flow works in terms of minting a Minecraft building check out this tutorial that Ben created!. It’s very fun and very straightforward (of course if you have Q’s you can ask me)

As it currently stands working getting Jerry to read .schem files for me has been tricky since they aren’t your conventional file type that Javascript (Jerry’s preferred language of choice) can understand right out of the box. But progress is still being made. If you would like to join me on this endeavor with making Minecraft NFTs on NEAR then you can reach out to me (Dorian Crutcher btw) on Discord!

Check out Near Protocol here!

Thank you for reading!

Dorian Crutcher
NEAR Dev Rel

https://docs-pr-881.onrender.com/docs/tutorials/contracts/nfts/blockcraft-nfts

--

--