Installing Minecraft on my Pi!

Wow, nothing is easy in Linux, is it???  Today, I tried to install Minecraft on my Pi and the directions sounded easy enough.  But, it took me way over an hour to complete.  First, my wifi wouldn’t connect.  I tried 50 times, rebooted 10 times, typed the password in 100 times and it wouldn’t work, just kept saying something about a four-way handshake and a supplicant* (whatever that is) and then started over again in an endless loop.  Finally, just as I was typing in a request for help on the raspberrypi.org forum, it just started working!

So, then, I followed the directions exactly to install Minecraft and guess what . . . it didn’t work!  I kept getting EOF errors that were “unrecoverable.”  I tried again and again and again and it just wouldn’t work.  So, I read online about a guy who had to download and delete the file four or five times before it finally worked.  It took me seven times, but finally when I typed “tar -zxvf minecraft-pi-0.1.1.tar.gz” the screen lit up with text and I squeaked a little bit with excitement.  I typed “cd mcpi” and then “./minecraft-pi” and it worked!!!  My dad was sitting with me and heard me get excited about everything that it said on the screen.  I yelled out “It’s building terrain!” and “It’s saving chunks” as the words popped up.

Here’s a picture of my screen:

I got really excited when I realized that it’s the full version of Minecraft, not the lite version that I have on my iPod.  I quickly realized how the controls work: “w” to walk forward, “a” to walk to the left, “s” to walk backwards, “d” to walk to the right, and spacebar to jump.  Pressing “e” takes you to the inventory of all of your supplies.  Also, the left click on the mouse breaks blocks, the right click places things, and the scroll wheel moves through your on-screen inventory.  It scared my parents to see how excited I was about having dynamite in my inventory!  This is sooooooooo much fun!

Here is where I got the instructions for installing minecraft on my Pi: http://pi.minecraft.net/

* “Failed to enable network in wpa_supplicant configuration”

Here are instructions how to install Minecraft for Pi even if your Pi is not connected to the internet:

 

Update______________________

Since this post, I’ve had trouble with Minecraft on my Pi.  I plugged in my Pi to play one day and the whole program was gone.  So, I reinstalled it and played for 5 seconds before the Pi crashed.  When I restarted, the program was gone again.  There was no mcpi folder.  The tar.gz was not in the tmp folder.  It was gone.  So, I went through this same process about 8 more times with the same result.  I tried it on another memory card and it didn’t work there either.  It seems that version 0.1.1 isn’t working for me anymore 😦  I’m sad and don’t know how to fix this.  Any ideas?  Please post in the comments.