An Unconventional Means of Storing Genealogical Data
This isn’t really a question, but I’m not sure where else to post this. I’m not gonna lie; this is going to be a weird and unconventional concept. I never thought this would actually work. It’s pretty crazy. Before you click away, hear me out.
When I was younger, before I ever knew about family history work, I played a lot of Minecraft. Minecraft is a sandbox video game where you can survive and thrive in a world where you build stuff, mine, and craft things. I’m sure you’re wondering the same thing I was; how in the world would Minecraft and family history ever go together? Believe it or not, I found a way to store research on your survival or creative worlds.
There was a recent update to the game that added an item called a chiseled bookshelf. You can store up to six books in each of these, including an item called a book and quill. You can actually write whatever you want in a book/quill, up to 50 pages worth, and give it a title either after publishing it or in an anvil.
As a family history consultant, I’ve been helping a young man at the family history center who loves Minecraft, and I figured out how to make research interesting for him. On my free time, I’m a member of his family’s Minecraft server, so I built a library with chiseled bookshelves in it. Each book and quill I made had the name of an ancestor and in each one, I can put in a life sketch, vital information, and even source citations. That’s right; you can use Minecraft as a way to keep up with your sources for each individual. Just remember to back up your world.
You can also get shulker boxes, fill them with your books, and put them in chests where you can store essentially as much data as you want on a world in creative mode (preferably superflat). Using NBT edits, you can stack chests on top of chests this way but it lags the game. Since Minecraft worlds are 60 million blocks long and wide, there is a virtually infinite amount of space to store your genealogy in. I’m not saying this method is the best or should be preferable to hand written records but the amount of information you can store without using much computer data is immense. I’m not sure if anyone would care about this or want to use it, but I figured I’d post this in case someone was interested. Thank you!
P.S: If you are a moderator or admin and this is the wrong thread to post something like this in, please let me know or move it to the correct thread. I’m not really sure where to put this, since this was such an unusual concept, but here we go.
Answers
-
It's a neat idea. It sounds like book writing has gotten better since 1.5.2 (when I was hosting), because books were too tedious for me to work with - way back then. The payers were fine with it, just not me.
I've done NBT item editing but nothing like you've described.
0
