Tiny Minecraft Wrapper

As an avid Minecraft player, I want to play on the most recent versions, including snapshots. Things like Bukkit/Sponge/whatever it’s called right now are nice, but not compatible with snapshots. tinyMCW is a wrapper around Minecraft that can be extended to do some, but not all of the things Bukkit can do.

The project is of course inspired by wurstminebot, a bot that (when it worked) was able to sync Minecraft chat to IRC, announce the time every hour, and more. The bot hasn’t worked properly for over a year, and when it did, it required a complicated setup that can’t really be done in a few minutes.

In contrast, tinyMCW is not as powerful out-of-the-box, but can be extended through a plugin interface to do many things wurstminebot never could. Setup is simple:

1. Install pexcept using pip, if you haven’t already.
2. Execute python3 tinyMCW.py in the same directory as minecraft_server.jar.

The plugin interface works by putting a python file in the plugins/ directory, and defining a dictionary called _hooks that maps predefined hook strings to callables which are executed when certain events occur.

For instance, one of the plugins included is a simple ping-pong plugin: It hooks into the command event, which gets called whenever a player writes a string starting with an exclamation mark in the chat. When the string that follows is "ping", the plugin instructs the server to respond with "pong". This way you know the system is working.

A more complex plugin can be used to strike a player with a lighting bolt: This command takes an argument, and as you can see in the source, it isn’t much more complicated either.

The full list of currently supported events is:

• “all” — gets called on every line in the log
• “command” — gets called when a chat entry begins with “!”
• “chat” — gets called on any other chat message
• “say” — gets called when /say is used (can be used to communicate with command blocks)
• “join” — gets called when a player joins the game
• “leave” — gets called when a player leaves the game
• “shutdown” — gets called when the server shuts down

As far as I know, noone except for me has ever used this. I exclusively used it for a test server, and on it it worked very well.

This approach has certain limitations: At the moment it can only react to lines in the log file (although it could be extended to call some plugins every n seconds). It cannot ever get to the extensibility of bukkitesque software (not to mention Forge). But as a drop-in solution nothing I know beats its setup speed.

As always, I’m open to comments and pull requests.