Have you ever thought about learning to program? Where would you begin? How much would it cost? What would you need to get things moving?

The Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized computer that’s a great starting point. It’s cheap, capable, and approachable for newbie programmers. And we’ve made a FREE version of Minecraft just for it!

It comes with a revised feature set and support for multiple programming languages. You can start by building structures in the traditional Minecraft way, but once you’ve got to grips with the in-game features, there’s opportunity to break open the code and use programming language to manipulate things in the game world. You’ll be learning new skills through Minecraft! Wow!

HOW DO I GET STARTED?

If this is your first time running your Raspberry Pi, the official site has all the info you need packed into it’s super-handy Quick Start guide. There’s more info on their wiki, too.

Minecraft: Pi Edition runs on Raspbian Wheezy with XWindows. Get it here and follow the detailed instructions within.

Boot up your Raspberry Pi with Raspbian. If you haven’t set XWindows to start automatically upon boot, type in “startx”.

Use a browser to download Minecraft: Pi Edition from this page!

Next click the icon for LXTerminal to open a new terminal window. Use the following commands (in bold):

• Navigate to the download folder: cd [download folder location]
• Decompress the file: tar -zxvf minecraft-pi-0.1.1.tar.gz
• Navigate to the installation folder: cd mcpi
• Run Minecraft: Pi Edition: ./minecraft-pi