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Minecraft: Pi Edition is a version of Minecraft developed for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It is based on an old Pocket Edition version (Alpha 0.6.1) but is slightly cut down, containing a revised feature set and support for multiple programming languages. The Pi Edition is intended as an educational tool for novice programmers. Although it has been officially discontinued, it is still available to download for free, from the official downloads page and users are encouraged to open and change the game's code using its API.[2]

It was developed by Aron Nieminen - one of the developers of Minecraft: Pocket Edition, as well as Daniel Frisk.[3]

Pi Edition never received any subsequent updates and is no longer supported.

Release[]

Minecraft: Pi Edition was originally announced on the Mojang website on November 24, 2012.[4]

There was a compiled build labelled 0.1 on the Mojang repository, albeit encrypted until the game's launch in February 2013, making it inaccessible. When it was first uploaded, however, it was unprotected for a short amount of time, allowing for the download of the game before its true release. On December 20, 2012, Mojang released a post on their official site announcing the release of the Pi Edition. However, it was promptly removed and no game release was made.

Minecraft: Pi Edition was publicly released on February 11, 2013, and the previous release announcement post was restored.[5] However, the Pi Edition website still lists its post date as December 20, 2012.[6]

On September 15, 2014, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced that the Pi Edition would be installed by default with new versions of the Raspbian operating system.[7]

Discontinuation[]

Pi Edition never received any subsequent updates, and its developers gave no further insights as to whether they were still developing the version. When the subject was brought up to Tommasso Checchi, he stated the following:

The original team has stopped supporting it and starting with 0.9 MCPE became a lot more ambitious technically, which also means that it became a lot harder to strip down to run on a Raspberry Pi. Actually, we finished removing all Pi related code to reduce complexity in 2015. Maybe someday we'll revisit it but I wouldn't hold my breath. On the other hand, Win10 runs on the Pi so you can run the Win10 version there! ... I guess it's something.
~ Tomasso Checchi on Pi Edition's discontinuation[8]


Gameplay[]

Minecraft Pi Edition was very similar to Pocket Edition in many ways. Like older versions of Pocket Edition, there were barrier walls, a player skin was always the default "Steve" skin, only 256×256×128-block worlds could be generated, and the title screen and the world selection screen were the same until Minecraft Pocket Edition updated to 0.7.0. There were also cyan flowers like in Pocket Edition. Creative Mode was the only game mode available, and there was no crafting or smelting. A player had various blocks and items only seen in earlier updates of Pocket Edition, like the Nether Reactor Core and the Stonecutter. The player's name was always "StevePi".

A player had the ability to sneak, but they could not sprint. There was no mob spawning, even though a player started with an iron sword in hand. The bow was also available, but when it was used a player would hold the bow back infinitely until a player selects another item or logs off of the game.

One could also interact with the game using APIs in some programming languages, such as Python.

References[]

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