PMC Interviews Bertiecrafter

2022-12-18

He's submitted more than 80 creations during his time here. He is currently working on a detailed tutorial series called "Functional Data Packs for Dummies", which was highlighted above. He is also active on the forums and seems to be always willing to help anyone with Data Pack problems.

Bertie played an important role in our 10th anniversary. He created party balloons and fireworks bombs, animated the gold globe and assisted with various tasks around the museum. He wrote some behind-the-scenes blogs that detail the process of completing these tasks.

How did you get started with Minecraft?

I was around 1.5.2 when I visited a friend's home and he showed my Minecraft. He had a magic wand that could do all sorts of cool things, which I later discovered was a blazerod. It was disappointing to discover that the magic wand was not in the game, but a mod. I did some survival and skyblock, but the idea of creating mechanics rather than just placing blocks kept me occupied.

Are you still playing Minecraft?

It's not what I would call "playing" anymore. I launch Minecraft to create technical content, mess with servers/mechanics, fly aimlessly in circles, or scroll through the creative inventory and command tab-autocomplete to see if there are any interesting mechanics I can use to make data packs.

You are most well-known as a data pack creator. Tell us about your interest in data packs and why it is important to you.

So, back to the beginning of my Minecraft adventure. Although blocks were becoming tedious, I eventually discovered commands. Simple commands such as /gamemode or /time, with the written out player names and coordinates. Nothing fancy. Soon after, I discovered command blocks. I wanted to sequence a few commands together. It's similar to a note block. You hear one note and immediately think of how you can connect them in a redstone repeater link to create a song. I was composing small mechanics, not songs.

There was only one type of command block back then. Redstone was required to run multiple commands. I was able to display my creations on a home-run server because there were no structure blocks (vanilla schemas).

This is an illustration, but I have an old server trailer that allows you to see the structure in action. Later, chained command block technology was introduced. These blocks allowed self-firing commands to trigger other commands in a sequence. It was almost like scripting at this point. Structure blocks were also added, which made it so much easier to share my creations without the need for schematics or convert everything into a One Command Creation.