For those of you that don’t know, Minecraft is kinda awesome. What is Minecraft you ask? Well it’s almost like Legos, but with so much more. You start in a world with rolling hills, towering mountains and animals of all kind around you and you have one goal survive.

It sounds easy, but as night falls you start to see roaming zombies, skeletons with bows, and many other creatures of the night. You need to make a house that will protect you, which honestly is pretty easy, its HOW you make the house that is important. Make it all pretty with all the different types of resources in the world. If you would like to see some of what you can do in Minecraft (because surviving is just the beginning) take a look at CaptainSparklez‘s channel on YouTube. (I don’t get paid by him or anything, he’s just good.)

I have been playing Minecraft very heavily since Beta and over that time I have amassed TONS of world saves. No, seriously, look. Here is my .minecraft/saves folder.

…and this isn’t even everything…

That is even after I have split up some worlds into different MultiMC instances. Now this isn’t too bad when you look at them in an Explorer window but here they are in Minecraft.

Much more chaotic

As you can see it is much more difficult to find a world in this view. Now I don’t use all of the worlds actively, but there is a rule in minecraft that I like to follow:

Never delete your minecraft worlds!

This mostly applies to your first world because if you keep it you can go back to it later on an look at what you built and reminisce, but I want to keep all of the worlds. I am a bit of a digital hoarder like that. And besides, I like to try out adventure worlds every now and then.

So being an aspiring coder like I am, I thought I should create a fix for this. Minecraft is incredibly moddable and anyone who has bought a copy can decompile the source code and mess around. So, I decided that I should open up the source code and look around. I figure I’ll be able to make the Minecraft loader understand a folder structure and display different folders in the loading screen that I can save my worlds in.

I am nowhere near done with the mod. Actually to be honest I have barely started. I ran into a bit of a snag. I expected the source to look something like this:

    for each Folder in the saves folder
        if it contains a level.dat file
            display it as a world

So then I could change it to look like:

    for each Folder in the saves folder
        if it contains a level.dat file
            display it as a world
        else
            if it contains Folders
                for each Folder in this Folder
                    if it contains level.dat
                        add the folder as a worldFolder
                        place the world inside of it

Obviously the code is not great, but I wanted something simple.

However I was very wrong about how the source was written, but then again it is written in Java so it can get a little complex. I’ll post another update when I get back to that project but honestly at the moment I am more focused on working with my Raspberry Pi. Check out my updates on that project in the Raspberry Pi category of this site.