author: Miriam Moszczynska
Month of Work and a Lot of Redstone Needed For This Graphing Calculator in Minecraft
One of Reddit users created a working TI-MC graphing calculator in Minecraft, based only on redstone mechanics. The result is amazing and the process took over a month.
Minecraft content creator mattbatwings presented a map on Reddit, on which he created a working graphing calculator. In his words, he worked on the calculator for over a month and building it was the most difficult challenge he'd ever taken on.. He didn't work alone - he enlisted the help of other developers to help him design the counting mechanism, among other things. Matt called the final product TI-MC, similar to a series of real graphing calculators.
This is not his first design but it'is definitely the most impressive one. The graphing calculator is 250 blocks tall and its "display" has a resolution of 101x101 pixels (each pixel consists of four blocks). As we learn from the video on which mattbatwings presents the design, it was created without command blocks and is able to solve equations of up to 38 characters long. If you are curious how the calculator looks like behind the scenes we recommend to check out the video on the creator's YouTube channel, where mattbatwings explains in details the mechanisms and how they work.
Additionally on his channel you can also find a tutorial on how to build such a device yourself.
The only drawback of the calculator is its speed.. As mattbatwings says drawing a skewed ellipse, which looks amazing in acceleration on the video, took 30 hours and drawing a simple straight line took 2.5 hours. More than a day drawing an ellipse is, according to the creator, still a good result.. Mattbatwings achieved it by installing Carpet Mod, which allows to speed up the game up to 20 times. If not, drawing a skewed ellipse could take weeks.
The drawing process takes so long because of the mechanism that checks whether each command - entered via a special panel on the map - is real and can be drawn on the calculator screen. This process is repeated 10,000 times each time because the size of the display is 101x101 pixels, for which the TI-MC has to check the correctness of the equation.
As mentioned, this is not the creator's first design. He has worked on Tetris, a simple word processor, a tic-tac-toe game, a simple calculator and even the iconic Donkey Kong - all this, of course, in Minecraft. It is worth mentioning that mattbatwings is a 19-year-old, which makes the whole thing even more astonishing.
If you want to try out the calculator yourself, you can download it from Planet Minecraft, available here. Also remember to install the Carpet Mod, as advised by the creator, so that the drawing process does not take forever.
