Microcontroller Minecraft: the Arduino Remake

Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time and there are many reasons for that success, such as creativity-focused gameplay, frequent updates with new content, and social features. But one of the biggest reasons for the game’s popularity is its versatility. There are several versions of the game and the modest processing requirements make it possible to run on almost any modern hardware. But even so, the idea of running Minecraft on a microcontroller is pretty farfetched. That’s why we’re intrigued by Dylan Brophy’s quest to make that happen with his Arduino Minecraft project.

Before we go any further, we have to make it clear that this is not actually Minecraft, but rather a simplified clone optimized for the hardware. As lightweight as Minecraft is, microcontrollers simply don’t have the RAM or graphics hardware (GPU and video RAM) necessary to pull that off at anything close to a usable resolution or framerate.

Brophy needs as much help as he can get, so he chose a Teensy 4.1 development board for this project. That has an extremely powerful (by microcontroller standards) NXP i.MX RT1060 MCU with a 600MHz Arm Cortex-M7 and 1024kB of SRAM. Brophy is programming the Teensy 4.1 within the Arduino IDE.

This is a very ambitious project that is much more difficult than programming a Minecraft clone to run on a PC and Brophy’s posts do get into the weeds a bit, but they should interest the coders. For example, Brophy had to come up with a way to produce randomized height maps for generating the worlds.

Minecraft uses Perlin noise and that works well, but Brophy noticed that the resulting map doesn’t really adhere to real-world geological norms. For instance, it might produce an ocean filled with a relatively uniform distribution of small islands — something we never see in real life. Brophy’s solution was to introduce simulated plate tectonics and fault lines, resulting in landscapes that feel more natural.

Rendering, however, is proving to be a bigger challenge. Brophy has successfully rendered simple terrain: just dirt and grass at a few elevations. But this is just the first step of many and it isn’t yet clear if Brophy’s goal is even possible with the limited resources of a microcontroller.

If you’re as interested as we are in seeing where this goes, be sure to follow Brophy’s Arduino Minecraft project for updates.